Summertime by JM Coetzee (2009)

 This is a different beast to its two predecessors. They were conventional autobiographical narratives, although they did kick against the pricks in terms of the disavowal of hindsight in the main - they were written from a contemporaneous viewpoint. The question raised therefore was how the author had gone about avoiding hindsight, it being possibly hidden in terms of subject choice, or other (conscious or subconscious) manipulations which may have been buried in his processing of the material. This one is bracketed by sections from notebooks, where pieces of prose have been developed as inspiration hit, covering the period of the author's return to South Africa from the United States, and the publication of his first books, in 1972-1975. These endpieces contain interesting tidbits on politics, the nag of the exile's return, and poignant discussion of relationships, particularly at the end with a focus on his father's final years. But the main part of this, sandwiched between the end parts, is a series of five 'interviews' - which are imaginative recreations. Four of them are with important women in his life - two lovers, one cousin and one unattainable love aspiration. The other is with a male colleague at an academic institution. The imaginative construct is that he has died, and the interviewer is preparing a volume on this hitherto less appreciated period of his life. There are several elephants in this room - the most conspicuous being "how did these people feel about being 'interpreted' in this way?" and "how accurate is the portrait of their attitudes, and if it's inaccurate, what does this rewriting of history do to the record?" I guess. But it's not that those questions don't come up anyway in thinking about any autobiography - it's just the standard nag of representation, and they do have the right of reply if they want it. Unless they're dead, of course, and I don't know the body count there - here's hoping it's zero. I have a complicating concern, centring on the technique: sometimes the voices here are too similar. Each of these interviews has a moment or moments where the interviewee gets a bit snaky, and sends a tart 'no' to Mr Vincent, the interviewer, accusing him of overstepping the line, being a bit uninformed, and so on. These ripostes are way too similar to be convincing, and give us an insight into how the author is forming his idea of where the pressure points in the conversation would be, and not quite perhaps finding the individuality of the voices he is recreating. Of course one needs to set that against what he does achieve, which is an interesting mixture, and does evoke a strong sense of who he thinks he was in these times, warts and all. The one which hit home the most for me was the second, a talk with his cousin Margot, known as Margie, which somehow incorporates a greater sense of the visceral ache at the base of the existences of white South Africans in the Karoo in the second half of the twentieth century, and also lends that very homed-in sense of the origins which define someone, their proto-self. By contrast, the short one with the male colleague was nowhere near as impactful. The fact that this volume is non-sequential interests me, too - why has he skipped the period in America between Youth and Summertime? Is this covered in one of his novels? Or is it still too sensitive for some reason? This one's redolence of gnawing and doubt hit me a lot more than the other two, especially housed as they are in a dried up landscape and atmosphere. Its high-stakes modus, and mixed success in it, also give it a sense of teeter, which is more absorbing.