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A great writer's portrait of himself

J.M. Coetzee has produced a clever, if unflattering, fiction.

From the book jacket
From the book jacketRead more

Fiction

By J.M. Coetzee

Viking. 266 pp. $25.95

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Reviewed by Susan Balée

John Coetzee is a great writer. His fictional biographer, Mr. Vincent, thinks so, and so do we - we being all the readers and critics who helped him win

two

Booker Prizes and ultimately the Nobel Prize in literature.

He's such a great writer that if he wants to write something as narcissistic as a fictionalized biography, detailing everything from his lack of sexual presence to his failure as a son, then we will acquiesce and read it. After all, there's always so much more going on; for the cognoscenti, so many literary references, so much "intertextuality."

Besides, the man can turn a good sentence and can do it not just for a few paragraphs, but for hundreds of pages in a row. I'm in.

Now, for readers who know anything about the real life of South African writer Coetzee, you will note immediately that the John Coetzee in this book is an alternative self. But a believable alternative, one who wrote the same novels, lived in the same places, had the same political beliefs, and so forth.

However, the real John is not yet dead, and, more important, he married soon after college and fathered two children. In fact, he was married from 1963 until his divorce in 1980.

In Summertime, however, alter John is unmarried, barely employed, and living with his father in a crummy old farm cottage in Cape Town. It's the mid-1970s and he's no stud muffin: scrawny, bearded, with bad teeth and uncut toenails. One ex-lover observes: "He looked out of place, like a bird, one of those flightless birds; or like an abstracted scientist who had wandered by mistake out of his laboratory. There was an air of seediness about him too, an air of failure."

Gee, what an attractive guy. And when he's not tutoring teenage students in English after school, he's building a concrete apron around his house to try to suck the damp out of the original mud bricks. His back hurts from shoveling sand and stone, from mixing and pouring concrete, but he's happy: "What he finds himself doing is what people like him should have been doing ever since 1652, namely, his own dirty work."

That's the jab at apartheid we expect from Coetzee, but he goes deeper and more literarily into the metaphor. John is pleased that "the slabs he is laying will outlast his tenancy of the house. . . . Immortality of a kind, a limited immortality, is not so hard to achieve after all."

Oh, Gilgamesh. You, too, longed for immortality, which, in the end, you obtained by building a wall around Uruk. You're known for that, and for the first piece of literature in the world, written in Sumerian - cuneiform - on clay tablets.

John Coetzee will soon enough be known, too, even if in the early '70s his career has only just begun. Doubt not the Gilgamesh link, for a few pages later fictional John makes a reference to Sumerians. The novel is thick with these cleverly woven literary references - Samuel Beckett, Daniel Defoe, Keats and Byron: These and many more crop up in the fields of carefully planted prose.

Metafiction is a Coetzee trait, too, but this novel-cum-(auto)biography does something we don't expect: It humiliates the author on a number of levels, but particularly as a sexual being. You won't find too many men willing to describe themselves as awkward lovers, eunuchs, or, my favorite: "in his lovemaking . . . there was an autistic quality." This combined with his dirty toilet (twice described), dodgy personal hygiene, and poor treatment of his aged pere doesn't make John a very appealing character.

And yet. John does have something: principles, morals, decency. He hates apartheid and wants black Africans to be treated fairly. He surveys the atrocities of his time with a steady gaze; he bears witness to the cruelty with which humans are capable of treating each other and other species. Most important of all, he sees the small acts of redemption performed by many people, daily.

Lastly, he loves the land and the people who shaped him: the barren landscape of the South African Karoo, the Dutch farmers, Boers, who were his ancestors. "This part of the world . . . Whose idea was it to lay down roads and railway lines, build towns, bring in people and then bind them to this place, bind them with rivets through the heart, so that they cannot get away? Better to cut yourself free and hope the wound heals, he said when they were out walking in the veld. But how do you cut through rivets like that?"

J.M. Coetzee has always played with the borders of fiction and truth, and this faux biography offers him yet another chance to do so, more creatively than before. The core of the book may be found in Mr. Vincent's interview with Sophie, a young French professor with whom John had a long affair.

In his conversation with Sophie, Vincent acknowledges that great writers are no longer oracles, but they are public property, characters we have a right to know about. Sophie says her own opinion on that is irrelevant, but when it comes to John Coetzee, "the answer is clear. He believed our life stories are ours to construct as we wish, within or even against the constraints imposed by the real world. . . ."

In the end, nothing is worth fighting for, but everything is worth writing for. Summertime did not win Coetzee a third Booker prize, but it was short-listed for it this year. It's a clever book by a man who needs to write to live, and apparently feels like writing about the lint in his navel.

Lucky for us, he's a very good writer.