In Bed with John Coetzee ; This Year's Man Booker Judges Consider Jm Coetzee's Latest Book to Be a Novel and Have Put It On Their Longlist. The Author Himself Calls It a 'Fictionalised Memoir'. Whatever It Is, the Book Is Radical in Form and Wonderfully Goodbook of the Week

Summary

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SUMMERTIME: Scenes From Provincial Life by JM Coetzee (Harvill Secker, Pounds 17.99)

SUMMERTIME is the third volume of JM Coetzee's autobiography, or "fictionalised memoir", following Boyhood (1997) and Youth (2002). Youth described Coetzee's experiences in England in the Sixties. Summertime covers the years 1972-1977, when he had returned to South Africa and was living with his widowed father, in penury and obscurity, while working on the novels Dusklands (1974) and In the Heart of the Country (1977). There is no doubt that it is essentially factual.

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Extract

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In Bed with John Coetzee ; This Year's Man Booker Judges Consider Jm Coetzee's Latest Book to Be a Novel and Have Put It On Their Longlist. The Author Himself Calls It a 'Fictionalised Memoir'. Whatever It Is, the Book Is Radical in Form and Wonderfully Goodbook of the Week

Yet Summertime has been longlisted for this year's Man Booker Prize, which is explicitly for a "full-length novel". Some mistake? Not necessarily. Perhaps the judges have simply taken Coetzee at his word. He has always believed, quite seriously, that "all autobiography is storytelling, all writing is autobiography" -- becau...

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