The Cover’s Off Coetzee’s Summertime (With Blurb and Video)

April 2nd, 2009 by Sophy

At BOOK SA, we’re making waves. After a brief mention of a new JM Coetzee work, Summertime (due out September 3rd), links sprouted up all over the globe thanking us for our quick-draw literary reporting.

BOOK SA would like to thank The Papierenman who was the first off the mark, picking its intelligence up straight off the BOOK SA airwaves. This was intercepted by The Literary Saloon which then shared its sources with a site called Conversational Reading. Now we’re famous! Follow the trail of links below.

But first, more news on Summertime. We’ve got a first book cover, shown here, plus the blurb, which begins, “a young English biographer is working on a book about the late writer, John Coetzee…” Apparently, it’s the third book in the Youth/Boyhood trilogy. See below.

We’ve also got a video of the author in action, courtesy Rustum by way of Africa is a Country. That wraps up this post! Enjoy:

Trail of links

“We’re very big J.M.Coetzee fans [...] and were thrilled to learn (via De Papieren Man, who pointed us to this piece at Book SA News) that a new Coetzee is due out in September, titled Summertime.” - The Literary Saloon

“De Zuidafrikaanse Nobelprijswinnaar J.M. Coetzee zou in september 2009 met een nieuwe roman komen, getiteld Summertime, volgens Book SA News.” - The Papierenman

“Moving into prolific author territory, J.M. Coetzee will be publishing his 20th book in late summer, the aptly titled Summertime. Hat tip to the Literary Saloon for the head’s-up The book doesn’t yet have a U.S. Amazon webpage, although it is listed on the Wikipedia J.M. Coetzee page, where it has been grouped with Coetzee’s previous memoirs, Boyhood and Youth. So, looks like this will be the third installment of Coetzee’s reflections on a provincial upbringing.” - Conversational Reading

About Summertime

A young English biographer is working on a book about the late writer, John Coetzee. He plans to focus on the years from 1972-1977 when Coetzee, in his thirties, is sharing a run-down cottage in the suburbs of Cape Town with his widowed father. This, the biographer senses, is the period when he was ‘finding his feet as a writer’.

Never having met Coetzee, he embarks on a series of interviews with people who were important to him - a married woman with whom he had an affair, his favourite cousin Margot, a Brazilian dancer whose daughter had English lessons with him, former friends and colleagues.

From their testimony emerges a portrait of the young Coetzee as an awkward, bookish individual with little talent for opening himself to others. Within the family he is regarded as an outsider, someone who tried to flee the tribe and has now returned, chastened. His insistence on doing manual work, his long hair and beard, rumours that he writes poetry evoke nothing but suspicion in the South Africa of the time.

Sometimes heartbreaking, often very funny, Summertime shows us a great writer as he limbers up for his task. It completes the majestic trilogy of fictionalised memoir begun with Boyhood and Youth.

Video with JM Coetzee

This video, entitled “Van de Schoonheid en de Troost”, is a bit of a pain to access, because it requires RealPlayer, but if you jump through all the hoops you’ll be semi-rewarded (the narration is in Dutch; the intro is long; etc). The original video blurb is in Dutch; here’s a quaint translation from Google Translate:

Delivery of the acclaimed series “The Beauty and Comfort” which Wim Kayzer talks with the South African writer and Nobel Prize Winner John Coetzee. Words such as beauty and solace in the pages of books Coetzees not be found. A difficult but nice conversation with a man who would rather write than talk.

(Richard, want to help out here?)