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Lädt ... Sommer des Lebensvon J. M. Coetzee
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Melde dich bei LibraryThing an um herauszufinden, ob du dieses Buch mögen würdest. Keine aktuelle Diskussion zu diesem Buch. Un joven biógrafo ingles está trabajando en un libro sobre el escritor, John Coetzee. Planea centrarse en los años de su ida que van de 1972 a 1977, en la época en que un Coeztee de treinta años comparte una casita arruinada en las afueras de Ciudad del Cabo con su padre viudo. Según el biógrafo, es el periodo en el que Coetzee comenzaba a consolidarse como escritor. Sin conocerlo personalmente, se embarca en una serie de entrevistas con personas que fueron importantes en su vida: una mujer casada con quien tiene una aventura; Margot, su prima favorita; una bailarina brasileña, madre de una de sus alumnas de inglés; antiguos amigos y colegas. I am always drawn to interview books, either collections of interviews previously published in newspapers or magazines and books that consist on a long or collected essays with an author. In Summertime Coetzee uses interviews together with notebooks as the main narrative mode, which I think constitutes and interesting innovation in writing a novel. The materials in the book consist of notebooks by Coetzee, Notebooks 1972-1975, some undated fragments and five interviews with people deemed important in the life of Coetzee. In some sense this is an autobiographical novel, but in true post-modern fashion hardly anything is reliable. Firstly, the Coetzee of the novel resembles the author J.M. Coetzee but is not the 'real man' or not 'the same man'. Then, too, to what extent can we say that writing about anyone in their past are the same man? The interviewer, who is supposedly collecting material to write an autobiography on Coetzee, does no appear to be a reliable narrator. At times, he seems hostile, and intrusive. He seems to be obsessed by Coetzee, but not necessarily in the most sympathetic way. The interviewees wonder why they are selected. It seems the biographer is biased in some peculiar way. We never read the finished biography. It isn't even clear if the purported biography was ever written. Given the biographer's bias we must probably be thanful for that. On the other hand, one must wonder what image the reader can make of Coetzee from reading the raw materials. Is it possible to create a positive image based on these interviews? Which questions are asked, which are not? And which or how are questions answered. The novel raises many questions about the literary process as well as history itself. It is probably one of Coetzee's best novels.
As long as one character speaks, Coetzee's masterful style is on display. But when there is dialogue between investigator and interviewee, the contrivance becomes all too evident: There is no real exchange and no discernable setting. Now we have Summertime, the third in Coetzee's ongoing volumes of more or less fictionalised memoir that began with Boyhood, continued with Youth and are subtitled Scenes from Provincial Life. These volumes are not to be taken as literal truth, a fact underlined by the way in Summertime one John Coetzee, a famous Nobel prize-winning novelist, is dead and an Englishman who never met him is attempting to write a biography of him on the basis of interviews with a number of women who had an effect on his development. The last part of the book is made up of extracts from his journal entries focused on his ageing and ailing father, who appears intermittently in the preceding pages as a frail and constricting figure. The account of the father has, in a way nothing else in this book does, an overwhelming poignancy. Much of this weird book is a meditation on the absurdity of the fame that is the surface noise of a hypothetical immortality. Then there's the grief that throws it all away and in doing so throws it into high relief. Who is JM Coetzee? In one sense the answer is obvious: world-famous novelist and writer, twice winner of the Man Booker, winner of the Nobel prize for literature. But in another sense “JM Coetzee” is a persona created by the author, especially in his volumes of “fictionalised memoir”. The first of these, Boyhood, describes the character’s upbringing in the 1940s and 1950s on a bleak housing estate east of Cape Town. Top of his class yet fearing failure, he is gawky, unsocial and eccentric. The second, Youth, follows his glum fortunes in the early 1960s through a wet, foggy London, where, “dull and ordinary”, he nurtures dreams of artistic triumph while toiling as an IBM programmer. Literary success, he believes, will be linked with success as a lover, once he encounters the “Destined One”: the woman to inspire him. But his sexual entanglements, though surprisingly frequent, prove messy, sordid, embarrassing or boring. He is not, it seems, “built for fun”. Now the third volume of the trilogy, Summertime, focuses on his return to South Africa, covering 1972 to 1977 when he was “finding his feet as a writer”. Like Boyhood and Youth, it refers to “Coetzee” in the third person (“He is the product of a damaged childhood”), thus distancing the autobiographical element. But it adds a startling new dimension of literary artifice: the deployment of a postmortem biographer. For Coetzee, we learn, has died in Australia. An English researcher, Vincent, who never met him, is interviewing five figures crucial to his life in the years when he started to publish. Four of them are women, including two former lovers. Supposed transcripts of their interviews make up most of the book. The rest comprises extracts, real or invented, from Coetzee’s contemporary notebooks. Gehört zur ReiheIst enthalten inAuszeichnungenBemerkenswerte Listen
In this autobiographical novel, a young English biographer is researching a book about the late South African writer John Coetzee, focusing on Coetzee in his thirties, at a time when he was living in a rundown cottage in the Cape Town suburbs with his widowed father--a time, the biographer is convinced, when Coetzee was finding himself as a writer. Keine Bibliotheksbeschreibungen gefunden. |
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Google Books — Lädt ... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)823.914Literature English & Old English literatures English fiction Modern Period 1901-1999 1945-1999Klassifikation der Library of Congress [LCC] (USA)BewertungDurchschnitt:
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