Summertime

J. M. Coetzee

2009

August, 2025

6/10

The book starts off well, but each succeeding interview felt more and more the same. What bothered me the most were the characters' voices: they all felt like essentially the same person.

As a whole, the book felt like a way for Coetzee to express his self-judgments. I appreciated the raw vulnerability, but I felt that it often passed the line into self-degradation. My favorite parts were the notebook fragments — that was the type of writing I enjoy from Coetzee. For example, his thoughts on the bad student becoming "successful" while he, a good student, ended up with nothing. I always enjoy Coetzee's takes on society:

"So David Truscott, who did not understand x and y, is a flourishing marketer or marketeer, while he, who had no trouble understanding x and y and much else besides, is an unemployed intellectual. What does that suggest about the workings of the world? What it seems most obviously to suggest is that the path that leads through Latin and algebra is not the path to material success. But it may suggest more besides: that understanding things is a waste of time; that if you want to succeed in the world and have a happy family and a nice home and a BMW you should not try to understand things but just add up the numbers or press the buttons or do whatever else it is that marketers are so richly rewarded for doing."

I can't say it was a bad book, however, I can't say it was anything special. If nothing else, it was an interesting character study.