A review by constantlymaya
Summertime by J.M. Coetzee

2.0

I found myself in a bit of a reading slump, so I decided to turn to one of my all-time favourite authors, the incomparable J.M. Coetzee. His books are always deliciously strange, challenging, and disturbing puzzles that you can endlessly reread and pull apart. This is the third part of a trilogy he did, a set of very meta, semi-autobiographical novels. I haven’t read the first two, but I’ve read enough Coetzee to be able to enjoy the references to his body of work and the exploration of similar themes and motifs that his writing grapples with. However, if I hadn’t read any of his other books or studied him previously, I don’t know if I would’ve been able to make it even halfway through. This novel is partly clever and deft, in that Coetzee isn’t afraid of self-criticism and scrutiny, and he smartly and compelling plays with the concepts the construction of the author, as well as of the self. However, it definitely got ponderous and navel-gazing at certain parts, and it’s certainly a fragmented and non-cohesive text, by the very nature of how it’s structured. An interesting read for Coetzee devotees, and subtly rich in its own understated way, but not a knockout, and not one that I’d suggest as a starter text for someone unfamiliar with his work.