In SCENES FROM PROVINCIAL LIFE, Nobel Prize-winning author J.M. Coetzee has gathered his three "fictional memoirs" into one volume. I had read and much admired his novel, DISGRACE, more than twenty years ago, so was curious to know more about the man who wrote so vividly about South Africa after apartheid. What I found out was not all that interesting. Coetzee, it seems, had a lifelong love-hate relationship with his native country, fleeing to England after college, where he worked for several mostly unhappy, lonely years as a computer programmer, always feeling himself an outsider. During this time he earned an MA, and later moved to America, although very little is included about those years, when he earned a Ph.D. and taught in Texas and New York. I looked Coetzee up online and learned he was married for a number of years and had two children, but there is absolutely nothing about that in these fictionalized chapters. He is instead presented as a very isolated, reclusive sort who had several unsuccessful, short term relationships with women, but was a loner for most of his life. I found his character quite unlikable, lacking any sort of warmth, and wondered if he were, in fact, somewhat autistic. The format of the final section, "Summertime," was very odd - a series of interviews with various friends, mostly women, who were part of Coetzee's life, conducted by a biographer after Coetzee's death. Very strange, because he is still very much alive, and has been living in Australia for the past twenty years, where he is a naturalized citizen. Another point: Coetzee was a teacher for most of his working life, but he never liked it.

Bottom line: a very unusual sort of "memoir," interesting, but something of a slog, mostly because its subject was just not a very pleasant person. Was glad to be done with it.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER ( )

J.M. Coetzee has a reputation as an extremely modest, publicity-averse sort of writer - and of course he can afford to be: if you have that many trophies on the mantlepiece, you don't exactly need to go to small-town book-signings every day. But even modest writers usually manage to boast a little bit about their achievements in their memoirs, to look back with amusement at their youthful struggles from the olympian heights of where they are now, and of course to take it for granted that any vengeful ex-lovers will save the embarrassing revelations for posthumous biographers.

Not so Coetzee, apparently: his chief concern in these three lightly fictionalised fragments of autobiography seems to be to show us all the ways in which he falls short of his own standards for what a Coetzee, an Afrikaner, a writer and a human being should be. He shows us his subject "John Coetzee" as a boy at school, as a student and then an exile in England, working in the computer industry, and then back in 70s South Africa as a teacher and academic who has yet to make his mark as a writer. In the first two parts the form is relatively conventional - there are plenty of other famous memoirs in which the author writes about himself in the third person and in the present tense - the only real peculiarity being the absolute exclusion of any kind of explicit hindsight. Coetzee-the-narrator never lets us spot him taking advantage of the intervening years to put events into context or add information we know John-the-subject couldn't have had access to at the time. That gives the text a lot of the rawness and immediacy of a novel, preventing us from standing back and saying "Ah well, that was before...".

Boyhood is mostly about the young John attempting to work out the rules of the complex world he lives in, constantly frustrated by his parents' inability to be "normal" - they speak English, not Afrikaans, they don't go to church, they don't vote for the National party, etc., but they have an Afrikaner name, and they live in the same squalor as their Afrikaner neighbours, not up in the posh part of town like the "real" English and the Jews... Then, when he goes to his grandparents' farm in the Karoo, he feels utterly drawn towards this landscape, even though he knows he has no sort of right to it.

Youth has John at a stage where he knows from everything he's read and dreamed that it's only a matter of days or weeks before the Significant Thing must happen - he will meet the person he wants to spend the rest of his life with and/or find the inspiration to write the great poem/story/novel he's destined to produce and/or discover the professional satisfaction in computer programming that's been eluding him so far and/or take the world of literature by storm with the insights in his MA dissertation on Ford Maddox Ford. But things go on not happening. Affairs with women are unsatisfactory and are usually ended by him behaving badly in some way; his writing is getting nowhere; Ford, apart from the great novels he already knew, turns out to be a bore; and computers are taking John to places where he doesn't really want to be, not least to AWRE Aldermaston.

Then in Summertime Coetzee changes course to play with a quite different and much more dangerous formal approach. He kills off his subject and hands the narration over to Vincent, a clumsy academic and not very good writer, who is compiling material for a biography of "John Coetzee before his breakthrough". As in the last part of Iris Murdoch's The Black Prince, one unreliable narrator is replaced by a whole bunch of others, as Vincent interviews four women and a man who were close to John in one way or another during the first years after his return to South Africa - a married woman with whom he had an affair, one of his female cousins from the Karoo, a Brazilian dance teacher who may have been the inspiration for the woman in Foe, and two faculty colleagues, one male and one female. The whole is topped and tailed by fragments of John's notes presumed to be from an abandoned attempt at a third volume of memoirs. And of course all of it is set up to show us John's repeated failures (as far as the witnesses know) to connect in the wholehearted way he would like to have done with his family, students, his lovers and with the broken culture of the broken country he grew up in.

It's often extremely funny, but it makes painful reading. And it - of course - doesn't manage to answer the question it poses, how someone who seems to be damaged in ways that prevent him from getting to grips in real life with what it means to be a human being could ever be able to write novels that purport to tell us just that. Probably, we have to look into ourselves and decide that no-one could ever really attain the standard of humanness that Coetzee sets himself - as one of his characters points out, Gandhi couldn't dance. ( )

In questo volume Einaudi propone il trittico dell’opera di carattere autobiografico dello scrittore sudafricano. Nel primo volume, Infanzia, che già avevo letto, l’autore parte dal trasferimento della famiglia in una piccola città di provincia, Worcester, per seguire il lavoro del padre, procuratore legale. Il tratto che caratterizza il lavoro di Coetzee è l’esaltazione della normalità, della banalità; ed il racconto è quello di un ragazzino normale, quasi banale, nel Sudafrica delle tensioni sociali tra razze. Ma anche il tema dell’apartheid che avrebbe potuto garantire all’autore ben altra notorietà, quella del politicamente corretto, viene tenuta sotto traccia, la storia del Sudafrica bisogna leggerla dietro i fatti, non viene spiattellata. Il ritorno a Città del Capo coincide con la perdita del lavoro del padre e, conseguentemente, con la crisi dei genitori. Nel secondo volume l’autore racconta i suoi anni londinesi, come informatico prima all’Ibm e poi in una piccola azienda che fornisce servizi informatici all’esercito di sua maestà; mentre cresce forte il furore artistico del poeta; anche in questo romanzo il racconto rimane per chiara scelta dell’autore sotto traccia, quasi irridente. In tempo d’estate Coetzee si propone come scrittore di successo attraverso cinque interviste a persone che hanno avuto un ruolo di rilievo nella sua vita; le interviste sono immaginate come postume, l’autore scrive la sua elegia funebre da vivo. A parte l’originalità dell’impostazione, e non parlo solo dell’ultimo volume, questo romanzo di Coetzee dimostra la grandissima capacità narrativa ed innovativa dell’autore. ( )