All about John

'How can you be a great writer if you are just an ordinary little man?' asks a character in JM Coetzee's new book Summertime.

This unsparing, autobiographical novel continues the intimate conversation the Nobel laureate has been having with a series of alter-egos in his work.

James Meek listens in.

James Meek in The Guardian, Saturday 5 September 2009

At some point during the past couple of years, an eminent South African writer now living in Australia wrote this dismissive appraisal of John Maxwell Coetzee's œuvre: "In general, I would say that his work lacks ambition. The control of the elements is too tight. Nowhere do you get a feeling of a writer deforming his medium in order to say what has never been said before, which is to me the mark of great writing. Too cool, too neat, I would say. Too easy. Too lacking in passion."

Even when a writer has achieved international fame and won the biggest trophies - the Nobel and two Booker prizes, in Coetzee's case - a bad review can't be easy to stomach. Harder if it is not just your book that is criticised, but the premise on which you have built your life: namely, that you can, must and should write. Worse still, if the reviewer impugns your character along with your novels.
It sounds hurtful, and perhaps it is, although the novelist who wrote it was JM Coetzee. The bad meta-review of Coetzee comes out of the mouth of one of the characters in Coetzee's new book, Summertime, which is about Coetzee. Summertime is full of harsh reviews of Coetzee by Coetzee, of Coetzee the writer and Coetzee the man.
The critics are four women, all once loved by "John Coetzee", the Coetzee character, three of them loving him back, in different ways. Another says: "... to my mind, a talent for words is not enough if you want to be a great writer. You have also to be a great man. And he was not a great man. He was a little man, an unimportant little man ... How can you be a great writer if you are just an ordinary little man?"

Coetzee built his literary reputation on the eight novels he published between 1974 and 1999. None was less than unusually good, but three in particular have carried his work into the realm of lasting things. The first was Waiting for the Barbarians, a parable about the use of falsely imagined enemies for social control. Substitute "terrorists" for "barbarians" and you have a history of Britain and America since 2001. (Coetzee's book came out in 1980.)

Coetzee won the Booker with his fourth novel, Life and Times of Michael K, an eerily colour-blind account of its eponymous hero's odyssey from the city to the wilderness and back in a South Africa enduring an imaginary war.

A third masterwork, Disgrace, won him the second Booker. Coetzee took off his skin to write the almost unbearably truthful story of a white lecturer who takes sexual advantage of a student, is disgraced and goes to his daughter in the country, where she is gang-raped. The fact that the rapists are black, and that the up-and-coming black farm worker who lives close to his daughter isn't cooperative in catching them, provoked anger in the upper echelons of South Africa's post-apartheid government. Coetzee emigrated to Australia in 2002, although it is not clear whether this was because of the new South African order.
T=Read the full article at The Guardian.