Lyndall Gordon
On Home Ground
Summertime: Scenes from Provincial Life
By J M Coetzee
Harvill Secker 266pp £17.99 order from our bookshop
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’.
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'In their needling, selfish, dry-as-dust way, these three books are works of cumulative power and never less than consistent interest.'
@lieutenantkije weighs up the final novel in J M Coetzee's Jesus trilogy.
http://ow.ly/TuWo50xqrL0
'It remains a poem comprised of clay fragments, short and long, and though the desert delivers up occasional additional text, we are a long way from a whole poem.'
Michael Schmidt on the oldest surviving poem in the world.
http://ow.ly/7OLF50xqr91