Autrebiography
My new word for the week. And a new genre on the shelf.
By my reckoning, JM Coetzee is the art-form’s inventor, the South African novelist behind Disgrace, and double-winner of the Booker, plus a Nobel in the swag as well.
I’ve just finished reading Book 3 in his memoir trilogy, a thing called Summertime – and I use the word thing wisely. Why? Plunking Summertime in a neat literary box is no doddle. The entire book is built on the idea of JM Coetzee being dead for starters, with a make-believe biographer named Mr Vincent charged with the task of interviewing five associates from Coetzee’s Cape-Town past.
We meet an ex-lover, a cousin, a dance instructor and two lecturers, each one describing through seamless Q+A the sort of bloke this Coetzee was. Bookend this format with a few looseleaf diary entries and you have a…a what? An autrebiography, obviously. Another way of saying ‘your own life story written through the eyes of another self’ – or the eyes of those you know. In short, another-auto-bio.
A little contrived? Perhaps, but the washup is powerful, a crafted essay on the whole puzzle that is human connection, what we end up meaning to others, and how the past preserves who we seemed.
“Male artists aren’t built for what I am calling love,” reckons Julie, the first interviewee. “They can’t or won’t give themselves fully for the simple reason that there is a secret essence of themselves they need to preserve for the sake of their art. Am I right?”
Well Julie, Summertime sheds ample diffracted light on Coetzee – a man who’s “scrawny and soft at the same time”, a loner and misfit in the words of some, all the while exploring the hydraulics of feeling and connection. It’s a masterful work which is neither novel nor reportage, memoir nor monologue – but a bone-fide, and arguably inaugural, autrebiography.