Lyndall Gordon
On Home Ground
Summertime: Scenes from Provincial Life
By J M Coetzee
Harvill Secker 266pp £17.99
In J M Coetzee’s most famous novel, Disgrace (1999), the whites of post-apartheid South Africa are forced to accept the violence coming to them. Violence is the inescapable consequence of racist cruelties perpetrated by colonial ancestors like Jacobus Coetzee, who pressed into the north-western Cape in the 1760s – scene of Coetzee’s first work, Dusklands (1974). Now, in Summertime, the superb third volume of the novelist’s Scenes from Provincial Life, Jacobus reappears, his historical existence verified by the writer’s future ‘biographer’.
Summertime opens with a report of a scene in Botswana in 1972, when the Special Branch, the terrorists of the apartheid regime, kill and burn a group of South African refugees. This atrocity initiates a series of diary entries by a pained John Coetzee, then in his early
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Twitter Feed
Coleridge was fifty-four lines into ‘Kubla Khan’ before a knock on the door disturbed him. He blamed his unfinished poem on ‘a person on business from Porlock’.
Who was this arch-interrupter? Joanna Kavenna goes looking for the person from Porlock.
Joanna Kavenna - Do Not Disturb
Joanna Kavenna: Do Not Disturb
literaryreview.co.uk
Russia’s recent efforts to destabilise the Baltic states have increased enthusiasm for the EU in these places. With Euroscepticism growing in countries like France and Germany, @owenmatth wonders whether Europe’s salvation will come from its periphery.
Owen Matthews - Sea of Troubles
Owen Matthews: Sea of Troubles - Baltic: The Future of Europe by Oliver Moody
literaryreview.co.uk
Many laptop workers will find Vincenzo Latronico’s PERFECTION sends shivers of uncomfortable recognition down their spine. I wrote about why for @Lit_Review
https://literaryreview.co.uk/hashtag-living