Summertime: Fiction - Couverture souple

Coetzee, J. M.

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0143118455 ISBN 13 : 9780143118459

Editeur : Penguin Books, 2010

Synopsis

Book by Coetzee J M

A propos du livre

Quatrième de couverture :

'Wonderful stuff. But then, Coetzee is wonderful: edgy, black, remorselessly human, witty, and often outright funny...Summertime is offbeat and deliberate, elusive and truthful' Irish Times

A young English biographer is working on a book about the late writer, John Coetzee. He plans to focus on a period in the seventies when, the biographer senses, Coetzee was 'finding his feet as a writer'. He embarks on a series of interviews with people who were important to Coetzee - a married woman with whom he had an affair, his favourite cousin Margot, a Brazilian dancer whose daughter had English lessons with him, former friends and colleagues. Thus emerges a portrait of the young Coetzee as an awkward, bookish individual, regarded as an outsider within the family. His insistence on doing manual work, his long hair and beard, and rumours that he writes poetry evoke nothing but suspicion in the South Africa of the time.

Summertime shows us a great writer as he limbers up for his task. It completes the majestic trilogy of fictionalised memoir begun with Boyhood and Youth.

'The cumulative effect of Coetzee's unblinking honesty and his never-wavering seriousness is an understanding of the creation of a great writer' Sunday Telegraph

'A subtle, allusive meditation: an intriguing map of a constricted heart struggling within South Africa's claustrophobic, unpoetic, overtly macho society' Financial Times

'It is not essential one know anything of Boyhood, Youth, or his other works to appreciate its rich offerings as an imaginatively distorted and distorting portrait of the artist as outsider' Times Literary Supplement

'Seriously good' Guardian

Quatrième de couverture :

Boyhood

'This life is described with such skill, such exactitude and such relentlessness that I found myself gasping for air... Coetzee has achieved something universal in his work... a fine book, probably the best description of a childhood I have ever read'

The Times

'As funny, cruel and terrifying as life itself. It is also intense and elegant, clearly the product of the complex, subtle imagination which shapes Coetzee's outstanding fiction... As austerely beautiful as would be expected of Coetzee the artist... its aloof, edgy grace and seething passion ensure the narrative is both truthful and mysterious'

Irish Times

Youth

'Only a writer as great as J.M. Coetzee is capable of infusing meditation on the spoilt hope of youth with such clarity, fluency and poise... The quality of the writing and its unflinching truthfulness make it exhilarating'

Daily Mail

'A memorable picture of the harshness London can offer to incomers... Youth is a wonderful book: a Bildungsroman, or portrait of the artist as a young man, to rank with any in the canon'

Evening Standard

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Penguin Books
• Date d'édition: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0143118455
• ISBN 13: 9780143118459
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 272