JM Coetzee: Summertime - A Reading Guide
1. Vincent tells Margot that ‘changing the form should have no effect on the content’. Is he right?
2. What do the diary fragments bring to the rest of the novel? Within them John identifies features of his character – ‘integrity’ and ‘naiveté’. Do the ensuing interviews tally with this assessment?
3. Vincent explains to Margot that ‘the she I use is like I but is not I’. J.M. Coetzee himself uses ‘he’ in the previous two books of his ‘Scenes from Provincial Life’ trilogy and has asserted that ‘all autobiography is autre-biography’, or the biography of ‘an other’. Does third person narration distance readers, or does it allow for more reflection on the self?
4. Julia decides to be frank in her answers, reasoning that ‘since he is dead, it can make no difference to him, any indiscreetness on my part’. Vincent purposely chose not to pursue John when he was alive to avoid feeling any ‘obligation’. What obligation, if any, do you think the biographer has to his subject? Is there an element of betrayal in biography?
5. In his review for the Independent, Boyd Tonkin writes ‘it matters decisively who tells an individual's story – and how they opt to tell it.’ Summertime is a playful piece of meta-fiction where it’s difficult to tell exactly whose story is being told, and by whom. What questions does Summertime raise on biographical authority? Does it offer any answers?
6. When awarding J.M. Coetzee his Nobel Prize, the Swedish Academy said, ‘in innumerable guises [he] portrays the surprising involvement of the outsider’. Julia asserts ‘I really was the main character. John really was a minor character.’ Is John an outsider in his own life story: do we learn more about the interviewees than their subject?
7. J.M. Coetzee has discussed the ‘autobiographical pact’ between writer and reader: the understanding that no ‘outright, deliberate lies’ will be told. (He goes on to question whether this notion of lying is rather crude.) In Summertime, John Coetzee is dead, and J.M. Coetzee’s then wife and his two young children are never mentioned, yet many reviewers have praised its truthfulness. In the New York Review of Books, Tim Parks describes the novel as ‘at once as elaborately elusive and determinedly confessional as ever autobiography could be’. What are the limits of the autobiographical – and biographical – genres?
8. The author Rian Malan solemnly declares: ‘[J.M.]Coetzee is a man of almost monkish self-discipline and dedication... An acquaintance has attended several dinner parties where Coetzee has uttered not a single word.’ Here’s Julia: ‘Comedy is what you get when principles bump into reality. I know he had a reputation for being dour, but John Coetzee was actually quite funny. A figure of comedy. Dour comedy.’ Discuss humour in Summertime.
