Summertime (Center Point Platinum Reader's Circle (Large Print)) - Hardcover

Coetzee, J. M.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1602856818 ISBN 13: 9781602856813

Publisher: Center Point Pub, 2010

Synopsis

A young English biographer is researching a book about the late South African writer John Coetzee, focusing on Coetzee in his thirties, at a time when he was living in a rundown cottage in the Cape Town suburbs with his widowed father -- a time, the biographer is convinced, when Coetzee was finding himself as a writer.

Never having met the man, the biographer interviews five people who knew Coetzee well, including a married woman with whom he had an affair, his cousin Margot, and a Brazilian dancer whose daughter took English lessons with him. These accounts add up to an image of an awkward, reserved, and bookish young man who finds it hard to make meaningful connections with people.

About this title

Review:

"Wonderful stuff. But then, Coetzee is wonderful: edgy, black, remorselessly human, witty, and often outright funny... Summertime is offbeat and deliberate, elusive and truthful" (Irish Times)

"The cumulative effect of Coetzee's unblinking honesty and his never-wavering seriousness is an understanding of the creation of a great writer" (Sunday Telegraph)

"A subtle, allusive meditation: an intriguing map of a weak character's constricted heart struggling against the undertow of suspicion within South Africa's claustrophobic, unpoetic, overtly macho society" (Financial Times)

"A poignant, cubistic portrait...It is not essential, however, that one know anything of Boyhood, Youth, or his other works to appreciate its rich offerings as an imaginatively distorted and distorting portrait of the artist as outsider" (TLS)

"Compelling, funny, moving and full of life" (Observer)

Book Description:

A rich, funny, and deeply affecting autobiographical new novel from one of the world's greatest living writers.

About this edition

• Publisher: Center Point Pub
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 1602856818
• ISBN 13: 9781602856813
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 334