2010/4

J. M. Coetzee: Summertime (266p. in the first American print)

I will forever equate John Maxwell Coetzee (the great South African Australian) with (what I call) his Karoo novels, which left an indelible impression on me, and for which he won Pulitzers (plural) and a Nobel: Disgrace – Age of Iron – Waiting for the Barbarians – In the Heart of the Country – Life & Times of Michael K.

It’s not a trilogy in design, but in the meantime Coetzee has also written three novels with a strong autobiographical bias: Boyhood (which I haven’t read), Youth (which I have read), and now thus the very recent Summertime.

The assumption is that Coetzee has died, and a writer is interviewing former acquaintances of his for a biography, the perfect set-up for a self-assessment in the He-form. We get to know how Coetzee assesses himself as a lover, as a writer, as a man.

“Once upon a time he used to think that the men who dreamed up the South African version of public order, who brought into being the vast system of labour reserves and internal passports and satellite townships, had based their vision on a tragic misreading of history. They had misread history because, born on farms or in small towns in the hinterland, and isolated within a language spoken nowhere else in the world, they had no appreciation of the forces that had since 1945 been sweeping away the old colonial world. Yet to say they had misread history was in itself misleading. For they read no history at all. On the contrary, they turned their backs on it, dismissing it as a mass of slanders put together by foreigners who held Afrikaners in contempt and would turn a blind eye if they were massacred by the blacks, down to the last woman and child. Alone and friendless at the remote tip of a hostile continent, they erected their fortress state and retreated behind its walls: there they would keep the flame of Western Christian civilization burning until finally the world came to its senses.

That was the way they spoke, more or less, the men who ran the National Party and the security state, and for a long time he thought they spoke from the heart. But not any more. Their talk of saving civilization, he now tends to think, has never been anything but a bluff. Behind a smokescreen of patriotism they are at this very moment sitting and calculating how long they can keep the show running (the mines, the factories) before they will need to pack their bags, shred any incriminating documents, and fly off to Zürich or San Diego, where under the cover of holding companies with names like Algro Trading or Handfast Securities they years ago bought themselves villas and apartments as insurance against the day of reckoning (dies irae, dies illa).”