Longlist Debate

finally got my copy of Summertime and just as jmc turns 70 (couple days ago) i am catching up with the rest of the world. deep, meaningful dialogue as well as laugh out loud humour (the wrapping paper incident). good reading, lovely stuff

For readers interested in South Africa, I would highly recommend a novel I just finished: The Native Commissioner by Shaun Johnson.

I have read some very good books this year but The Native Commissioner just might take top spot.

quote from Coetzee on the front: "... a welcome step toward the reconstitution of the South African past".

Well, let's lighten the mood yet again: I just finished Slow Man and think I missed a whole heck of a lot of its meaning, but I loved it!

I kind of knew I should have read Elizabeth Costello first, but didn't.

(No lit crit terms there to get bogged down on, eh?)

I think you are, Simon.

Ah, the difference between authorial intention and reader response. Who is the final arbiter of "correct" interpretation?

The Guardian ran an article in the 1980s sometime when they asked author of one of the books widely studied for English O level to sit the exam on his own book anonymously. He failed miserably because he didn't 'get' his own book according to several different exam markers; he failed to see the important meanings and salient points the teachers and examiners had decreed were key. So yes, I agree entirely that writers may often be bemused by the interpretation of their work.

My thinking was that the ideas that JM (the author) wanted to play with were relating to reportage and collage. He chose to base it [loosely] around his own life simply because that was a human subject he knew well and so what he was writing was likely to have some depth and credibility to it.

I may be way out here - and haven't the benefit of reading the previous books in the series. I always wondered at school what Seamus Heaney would make of us, schoolchildren, picking over his pomes and placing thoughts in his head. I met him since on a couple of occasions when I could have asked him, and I rather regret not doing so.

Similarly, I wonder whether JM Coetzee (the author) isn't sitting at home in Australia, upside down, chuckling to himself at the confusion he has managed to sow with Summertime.

I suspect that Summertime is less autobiographical than the other two in the "series" (?) (I don't want to use the wrong term!) and much less autobiographical than some other books on the longlist... well, one in particular, that shouldn't be used in the same sentence (let alone the same longlist!).

Right, Ang. I tend to treat central characters and narrators as the same thing -- which I know is not right, but is very convenient as a reader. And one of the things that I found most interesting about Summertime was the varying perceptions of those being interviewed of the individual with whom they had interacted. I thought that was a much stronger part of the book than trying to divine which parts of Coetzee were real and which were fictional -- but do admit that is a very personal reaction.

If I had liked Wolf Hall more (I too am in the understanding but not personally agreeing camp), I'd love a debate about Thomas' credibility. But we won't go there.

I think Summertime should have won but I can understand why Wolf Hall did (I don't agree, but I understand).

I'm not sure why we're still arguing about something that everyone agrees on. The interviewees are not narrators in the technical sense of the word. They are merely characters who told a story; some might say they narrated their story, and although that is true in another sense of the word "narrate", "to tell", it is not the correct term to use when discussing literature. We get it, okay?

I didn't see Thomas Cromwell as the narrator of Wolf Hall though. Perhaps we shouldn't go there.