Fictioneering

Frank Kermode

• BuySummertime by J.M. Coetzee
  Harvill Secker, 266 pp, £17.99, August 2009, ISBN 978 1 84655 318 9

Subtitled ‘Scenes from Provincial Life’, Summertime is described as the final volume of a trilogy, the others being Boyhood and Youth. These books are instalments of a sort of autobiography. The first two volumes could pass as memoirs, though only Boyhood is actually given that description. Each of these earlier books is a portrait of the artist at the relevant age. This new volume is different: it records a series of interviews, by a prospective biographer, of people who knew Coetzee, along with some notes by the biographer himself about possible additions and developments. By the time of the interviews the novelist, who emigrated to Australia, has not only won the Nobel Prize for literature but died. The chronological sequence of the ‘memoir’ has obviously taken several impatient forward leaps.