Summertime: 3 (Scenes from Provincial Life) - Softcover

Coetzee, J M

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0143118455 ISBN 13: 9780143118459

Publisher: Penguin Books, 2010

Synopsis

"Not since Disgrace, has he written with such urgency and feeling." -The New Yorker

J.M. Coetzee's latest novel, The Schooldays of Jesus, is now available from Viking. Late Essays: 2006-2016 will be available January 2018.

Nobel Prize-winning author J. M. Coetzee's new book follows a young biographer as he works on a book about the late writer, John Coetzee. The biographer embarks on a series of interviews with people who were important to Coetzee during the period when he was "finding his feet as a writer"-in his thirties and sharing a run-down cottage in the suburbs of Cape Town with his widowed father. Their testimonies create an image of an awkward, reserved, and bookish young man who finds it difficult to connect with the people around him. An innovative and inspired work of fiction-incisive, elegant, and often surprisingly funny- Summertime allows one of the most revered writers of our time to imagine his own life with a critical and unsparing eye.

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: Penguin Books
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0143118455
• ISBN 13: 9780143118459
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 272