The strange amalgamation of attributes thrust upon a solitary soul by his life and times forms his reality of self and informs his moral universe. But if Robert Musil’s Ulrich was a creature of the Vienna that disappeared with the Great War, such “men without qualities” come to us every now and then. The Ulrichs, gifted with the undeceiving eye, cannot help staring at themselves in the mirror. From the margins, they inspect everybody in the great game. In J.M. Coetzee’s Summertime, the late writer John Coetzee, who is given the author’s name and part biography, is our man without qualities, an alien in the land of his birth, not quite “manly” man, in love with what is dead or dying, incapable of fully giving himself to others.

This book ends the trilogy of Coetzee’s fictionalised memoir, after Boyhood (1997) and Youth (2002). Not yet published, it is on the Booker longlist, marking what is being celebrated on strange shores as a return of the “masters” to the Booker or of the Booker to the masters. (That’s delightfully ironic, since Coetzee is an essential bridge between postmodernism and post-colonialism, especially a “postcoloniser” writing post-colonial fiction.)

It is sacrilegious to trace authors in their characters and narratives, but it is also difficult to not read fictionalised memoir as a case of acute self-reflexivity, albeit a literary one, where the fictionalised life investigates not just the workings of human relations but also how a literary work relates to itself, to the world of letters, to history and the world around. The story of its creation is also how fiction comes into being.

... contd.