Summertime

By J M Coetzee (Random House, RRP $49.99)

Summertime is the third instalment in the fictionalised autobiography of writer John Coetzee.

An English biographer is researching the period after Coetzee returned to South Africa and lived in Cape Town with his widowed father.

The novel is a series of interviews with people who had known Coetzee during this time – a cousin, a lover, a student's mother and two colleagues – followed by excerpts written by Coetzee before his death.

Coetzee is portrayed in the interviews as a loner, an outsider from family, society and his own country. He has studied abroad and returned under a cloud not fully explained to an apartheid-era South Africa to which he does not belong.

He does not make friends easily and he feels duty bound to care for his ageing father, with whom he has had a difficult relationship.

This novel is a challenging read. Biographies tend to focus on the positive or invoke sympathy for the subject but Summertime does not.

The reader is forced to consider the nature of memory and to decide whose recollections are the most reliable and unencumbered by personal prejudice.

Persevere; it's a rewarding read.

J M Coetzee won the 2003 Nobel Prize for Literature and was the first writer to win the Booker Prize twice. His Booker Prize-winning novel has been made into a film starring John Malkovich.

- © Fairfax NZ News