Coetzee clearly feels a certain responsibility for him but, at the same time, recognises that a father and adult son should not live together.
Indeed, we learn more about the father, namely that he had been convivial and jolly, had had various interests, particularly rugby and Italian opera, but is now a sad and unhappy recluse, a man who has lost his job as a lawyer (the reason is not too clear but the real Coetzee’s father lost his job for opposition to apartheid) and who now works as a bookkeeper for a car parts dealer. One of the things that is clear is that Coetzee is like his father, solitary and anti-social. Much of the book is about his relationship with his father, including fragments of a notebook, at the end of the book, after the interviews. The fictional Coetzee returns to South Africa and lives with his father. The fictional Coetzee (as did the real one) studied in the United States and both of them had to leave the United States for involvement in anti-Vietnam War protests. Vincent, as a couple of the interviewees address him in that way – states that his aim is to focus on a particular period of Coetzee’s life, namely the period when he returned from the United States in 1971/1972 until his first public recognition as a writer in 1977. The biographer/interviewer – we know only that he is called Mr.
the events more or less happened but names, places and details have been altered)? Is he the same but the events are only related in very broad terms to the real Coetzee? Or has the Coetzee who wrote the book we are reading merely used his own name for someone who bears no resemblance at all to him? And does it matter? Probably not. Is this dead author identical to the John Coetzee who wrote this book? Is he similar (i.e. Thirdly, the dead author is called John Coetzee. In other words, either the interviewer or the interviewee (or even both) is unreliable. In a few cases the interviewee comments that he has exaggerated. In a couple of the interviews, he has previously interviewed the subject and is now going over the interview, reading out what he has written over the phone to the interviewee. Secondly, the interviewer/biographer is clearly an unreliable narrator. Firstly, the story of the dead author is told not directly but through interviews a biographer is conducting with people who knew the author. Home » South Africa » J M Coetzee » Summertime J M Coetzee: SummertimeĬoetzee has always liked post-modern games and here we get quite a few.
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