The character of John Coetzee is not one I could warm to. But I have read a lot of Paul Auster, and it seemed to me that because Auster often has a character in his books called Paul Auster (who is usually but not invariably a writer) I wouldn't have too much trouble reading Coetzee's slant on the postmodernist novel. And the only other book by Coetzee I had read was Disgrace (which is why I was asking myself whether characters might have appeared in earlier novels). I have not read the two earlier volumes of this trilogy (I did order them but, alas, they did not arrive in time) so I came at Summertime with no relevant previous knowledge. Or were they a purely fictional character, perhaps even taken from one of Coetzee's earlier novels? And, if they were 'real', how far were they telling the 'truth' about the Coetzee character? Every time a new interviewee was introduced I found myself wondering whether this character was a 'real' person (in the sense that the fictionalised Coetzee is based, however loosely, on a real person).

This is subsequently confirmed in the next section, which is the first of a series of transcribed interviews by Vincent with characters who knew John Coetzee – lovers, relatives, colleagues. Are these fictional notes by the young 'John Coetzee' or actual extracts from J M Coetzee's journal of the time? There are italicised notes after some entries which appear to be later comments by John Coetzee himself ('To be expanded on', 'To be explored', and so on). It opens with a section called 'Notebooks 1972-75'. The book itself is a catalogue of 'evidence'. The dust jacket also has a photograph of Coetzee that seems to have been taken around 1972-1977, which is the period the biographer is focusing on because this, he senses, is the period when Coetzee was 'finding his feet as a writer'. The only introduction is the dust jacket summary, which tells us that a young English biographer is working on a book about the late writer, John Coetzee. Summertime is, intriguingly, a book without a narrator. But then, how true is an ordinary autobiography? And to what extent is it a function of the novel to use fiction to reveal truth? So many questions, and I haven't even begun. There, that sounds straightforward enough, doesn't it? Except, in this 'autobiography' (or 'autrebiography' as one critic described the earlier volumes) the subject is dead. Summertime is the third of a series of fictionalised autobiographies by J M Coetzee, following on from Boyhood and Youth.

Too clever by half, perhaps, but very readable and thought-provoking to boot. Summary: A postmodernist novel that presents research evidence gathered by a fictional biographer on the years when the deceased semi-fictional John Coetzee was finding his feet as a writer.

Summertime by jm coetzee