Coetzee's Summertime

Jonathan Dee reviews JM Coetzee's newest memoir/novel, Summertime, at The New York Time: 'Late in the book, a former faculty colleague from the University of Cape Town named Sophie, with whom Coetzee had an affair (“In all the time I was with him I never had the feeling I was with an exceptional person”), offers — or, more accurately, is made by Coetzee himself to offer — this assessment of the writer whom many, this reviewer among them, would consider the greatest living novelist in English: “I would say that his work lacks ambition. The control of the elements is too tight. Nowhere do you get a feeling of a writer deforming his medium in order to say what has never been said before, which is to me the mark of great writing.”

'That is the prism through which to read not only Summertime but most of Coetzee’s work from the last decade, certainly since the Nobel: as a series of provocative genre-deformations (the lecture series of Elizabeth Costello, the triptych-­pages of Diary of a Bad Year, the bizarre procedural fragmentation of this book) made in the interest of bringing his opinion of his own achievements in line with that of the rest of the world. “How can you be a great writer,” says Adriana, “if you are just an ordinary little man?” Coetzee may feel it is too late to amend his legacy in the second regard, but even from beyond the fictional grave he is determined to expand upon the first.'

I'm just totally fascinated, from my view in the cheap seats, by the transformation tat Coetzee seems to have made in the last decade. If I ever get the chance, I'm going to read these books all in a go and see what I can make of them.