Monday, December 6, 2010

Between Summer's Longing and Winter's End

There is a LONG time between summer's longing and winter's end. I should have known something was fishy when I saw the publisher's sticker on the book, comparing it simultaneously to Henning Mankell, Steig Larsson, and...Ingmar Bergman?Mankell and Bergman...yes--the BBC's Wallender series has proven as much. Mankell and Larsson? Maybe, if the similarities you're going for are (a) Sweden and (b) crime. But Larsson and Bergman? No. Net. Absolutely, positively, in no way possible.

Perhaps the problem is that Leif GW Persson's Between Summer's Longing and Winter's End is trying to please all those audiences simultaneously--the publisher is clearly trying to--and that simply isn't possible. What sets the Larsson books apart is how character-driven they are, unlike many police procedurals, but readers who come to Persson's book expecting more of the same will be sorely disappointed. The book's characters are nearly indistinguishable, which is bothersome up to the point at which you realize that it doesn't really matter, they're all part of one big corrupt machine.

This book will be appreciated only by those who like the driest of dry police procedurals and conspiracy theories. Basically, it's a book for someone who likes a long, slow, black and white Bergman film with complicated subtitles and long stretches of silence. And I am that person, so I liked the book, but I can see why no one else does. I will probably even buy the remaining two books of the trilogy, in hardcover, no less, but I will be prepared to take them like I take my Bergman, in small doses, thank you very much.

Sunday, November 14, 2010

What is Skye Watching?


I've been watching with great interest the three Swedish-made adaptations of Steig Larsson's Millennium Trilogy. My husband and I caught an advance showing of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo at Chicago's European Film Festival, where it was sold out well in advance, weeks before it was released in the US. At that point only the first two books of the series were available in English, and readers were reacting to the cliffhanger that ended The Girl Who Played With Fire. "I just don't know," said the little old lady in front of us in line, "It didn't seem very realistic...crawling out of that grave." Well, I thought, that would depend on how much you wanted to kill your father.

Now, before any criticisms are launched at the films, it must first be acknowledged that Noomi Rapace is a phenomenal actress. She has intelligence, wit, style, gravitas, and above all else, range. Whatever flaws the films might have, she is not their cause. Truly I cannot imagine anyone capturing Lisbeth's character as well as Rapace has. She manages, in all three films to capture Lisbeth's true nature--she is not "autistic," as she is called more than once, she is battle-weary, emotionally wounded, and socially repressed. She also manages to capture the subtle growth that Lisbeth experiences from the first installation to the last, growing from as Aranovsky says "treating your friends like shit," to allowing the DVD of her brutal rape to be used at her trial in her defense. It's a kind of growth that would have been very easy to let slide. I cannot wait to see her in future films.

In many ways the films do capture the nature of the books, for better and for worse. The first book, and thus the first film, as has been said many times before, resemble an Agatha Christie novel. It presents a self-contained mystery, set on an island, no less. If you didn't know that there were more books and films to come, you might not even know that Lisbeth's story is actually more important than Blomkvist's murder investigation. But even in this first, self-contained, film, there are important omissions. Lisbeth's hacking activities are greatly overlooked, for instance, as is the subplot between Blomkvist and Erika, which makes it hard to understand why Lisbeth cuts off her relationship with Blomkvist the way she does. There is also, if possible, too much foreshadowing, with scenes showing twelve-year-old Lisbeth dousing her father in gasoline and flicking a match, long before those memories are relevant to the plot. That said, the first movie is far and away the most successful, and it is the only one that can stand on its own.

The second book was more complicated than the first; the second film was not. In all fairness, neither the second book nor the second film can be judged alone. They must be judged in conjunction with the third. If the first book is reminiscent of an Agatha Christie novel, the second and third remind one of an old school, cold war spy novel...John Le Carre, perhaps. The second and third books, and films, are about the uncovering of a conspiracy--through hacking, through reading documents, and through interviewing leads. All of which make for pretty good reading, if one's interested in research, journalism, and political conspiracy... but not the greatest film. There are also two subplots, one involving the media's construing Lisbeth as a sexual deviant, and one involving Erika's career changes, that add interest and texture to the books, but were left out of the film. Possibly the filmmakers thought one lesbian sex scene to be enough, but not so! Both the second book and film do have some action, leading up to the painful scene in which Lisbeth spends hours sneaking into her father's farmhouse, only to have him tell her that she set off every motion detector on the property. He then takes her out to the grave dug by her "blonde tank" half brother Neidermann and, when she tries to run away, carefully shoots her three times: twice to disable her, and once to kill. Despite the little old lady's objections, Lisbeth apparently wants to kill her father very badly, because she claws her way out of the grave and manages to strike him in the head with an axe. This is when Blomkvist shows up and, in the book, in a moment of great tenderness, staunches Lisbeth's wounds with duct tape, an innovation the surgeon congratulates him for. Clearly, someone was a boy scout.

What is missing from the third film, which my husband and I saw last week, is detail. Detail about Lisbeth's surgery, detail about Blomkvist's slow uncovering of the conspiracy, detail about Lisbeth's autobiography, and detail about her trial. In the book all these things are quite complicated--the mystery slowly reveals itself through careful research and fiendishly clever hacking; in the film they appear much, much, too simple. Of course, if the film had given me the detail I so desperately wanted, it probably would have been six hours long. As much as I wouldn't have minded that, I understand why cuts had to me made. My disappointment is that they cut so much that they completely destroyed the slow revelation of the mystery, which, in the book, is compelling. It's true, though, that this book is not like the others--Lisbeth spends it lying in a hospital bed and then sitting in jail, not kicking ass like we're used to. This was hard to adjust to in the book, and it's a fatal flaw in the movie, which critics, such as my husband, describe as "boring." In the book, though, it all comes together in a trial in which Lisbeth, with the help of Blomkvist's sister Annika, presents a brilliant defense and kicks some (metaphorical) patriarchical ass and gain her independence. In the movie the trial does not come off as brilliant, but rather haphazard and almost "lucky." Lisbeth is saved not because of Blomkvist's months of research and her hacking skills, but because her friend Plague manages to hack just the right computer at just the right time and provide just the right evidence to impeach the lead witness for the prosecution. It's almost as if the movie is too subtle in its depiction of the trial--we see so little use of Lisbeth's autobiography, so few incidents of Telborian accusing her of paranoid schizophrenia, that there almost isn't a "hah! Who's a paranoid schizophrenic now!" moment when Telborian is proved to be a liar. I didn't hate the movie--I got to see Lisbeth in full mufti, after all--but for me it just didn't do the book justice.

Tuesday, April 20, 2010

Broken Glass Park

It continually amazes me how even the most formulaic novel can be enlivened by one good character. This is very much the case with Alina Bronsky's Broken Glass Park. The narrator of Broken Glass Park is a precocious seventeen-year-old girl named Sascha (short for Alexandra). She, and her narration, are hysterically, laugh-out-loud, funny, in, of course, a totally morbid way. Sascha has been scarred terribly by an abusive stepfather who shot her mother and her mother's boyfriend in plain view of her and her siblings. Not one for profound psychological insight, Sascha has two goals in life: one, to kill her mother's murderer, and two, to write a novel about her mother. She has also sworn off men forever, although, not surprisingly, she falls for the first semi-functional father figure she encounters, and several times uses her sexuality to punish herself. The thing that separates her from most seventeen-year-old girls is that when she uses her sexuality to punish herself, she is aware of what she is doing, explicitly comparing herself to classmates who starve themselves or self-injure. That's pretty much what separates Sascha from seventeen-year-old girls generally: although not psychologically astute, she understands her drives and motives (with the notable exception of falling for the older father figure).

To observe the hubbub surrounding this novel is to acknowledge just how rare the self-aware seventeen-year-old girl is in literature. This is a shame, and it is a void that needs filling. Broken Glass Park is an extremely good, well-written, novel no doubt, but the fact that a seventeen-year-old girl can be self-aware should not be the revelation the critics have made it out to be. That it has been such a revelation shows only that there is a job yet to be done by those of us who have pretensions to writing our own novels.

Monday, April 19, 2010

Three by Tana French

There are thrillers that exist merely to thrill, and then there are thrillers that use the genre to make larger statements about history or memory or psychology. Tana French's three novels--In the Woods, The Likeness, and the forthcoming Faithful Place--exemplify the latter type of thriller. One of the characters in The Likeness comments that there is a Spanish proverb that, roughly paraphrased, goes something like "God says, take what you like, but pay the price." He observes that modern individuals have forgotten the second part of that proverb. All three of French's novels might be seen as illustrations of what happens when individuals come face to face with that second part.

French links her novels very subtly: all are stories of the fictional "Dublin Murder Squad," and all have some overlap in terms of characters, but the overlap is slight and not always immediately apparent. In the Woods chronicles an investigation by detective Rob Ryan and his partner Cassie Maddox. The Likeness is about Maddox herself and an undercover investigation she undertakes several years later. Faithful Place, likewise, is about the life history of Frank Mackie, the man supervising Maddox's undercover operation. These connections give the three novels a fascinating continuity without confining French to the limitations of any one character or set of characters.

In the Woods offers a double mystery: twenty years ago three children disappeared. Only one of them was ever found, and he has no memory of what happened. Twenty years later, Rob Ryan, the found boy, is a member of the Dublin Murder Squad. When the body of a young girl is found in the woods, he sees the case as his opportunity to solve both the current crime and the mystery of his past. the best aspect of In the Woods is Ryan's relationship with his partner, Cassie Maddox. Their banter captures a friendship at its height and is utterly believable. The tragedy of the novel is that Ryan is willing to sacrifice everything, from his professional credibility to his relationship with Maddox to his opportunity to solve the crime at hand, in order to chase the demons of his past and try to solve a mystery that, French suggests, may not be--or should not be--solvable.

In The Likeness Maddox is thrust into what almost seems to be a parallel universe when a young woman who looks just like her and has assumed an identity that Maddox herself used as an undercover operative shows up stabbed to death. At Frank Mackie's behest Maddox infiltrates the young woman's life in an attempt to find the killer. This entails inserting herself into a group of five graduate students who have created a makeshift family in an inherited house. As in In the Woods, the relationship between the students is the most beautifully crafted element of French's novel. Their interactions and banter are profoundly appealing, the reader, and to Maddox, who relaxes in their company so far that she doesn't necessarily understand the extraordinary sacrifices the students have made in order to create their impromptu family. When these sacrifices become apparent, however, it is clear that the students are not living in the utopia they may have hoped for and that conflict, even violence, were, and are, inevitable.

In Faithful Place French returns to themes of family in a very different way when she has the prodigal Frank Mackie return to his family in order to solve a a twenty-two-year-old mystery. Mackie grew up in a neighborhood where if you didn't work at the Guinness plant you were likely on the dole, kids slept three or four to a mattress, and alcoholic husbands beat their wives and children with impunity. Mackie's journey is about digging up the past, discovering who murdered his girlfriend twenty-two years earlier, and coming to grips with his own role in and responsibilities to his dysfunctional family. French is at her absolute best when she is showing that individuals are frequently neither as guilty nor as innocent as they initially appear. This is particularly the case when the tells the same story from two different perspectives, as when the younger Mackie sons remember with horror a night they spent locked in the basement of a nearby derelict house, while the older Mackie son explains that he (at eight years old) chose to lock them in that basement to protect them from their drunken, knife-wielding father.

There are legitimate mysteries in French's thrillers, but more often than not the true mysteries are about psychology, emotion, and memory. Family features prominently as a theme, although in very different ways. The students in The Likeness make a pact they call "no pasts" not to bring their pasts into their new family structure. In their attempt to form a new family, they try to recreate themselves as blank slates. As Frank Mackie well knows, that attempt is destined to fail. Just like you can't escape paying God his due, you can't escape your past. Faithful Place is about what happens when all of the members of the Mackie family start to realize that. French knows that no matter how hard we try to deny them, our pasts have a sneaky way of creeping into our everyday lives. She is a true student of William Faukner's adage, "the past isn't dead--it's not even past."

Saturday, April 3, 2010

The Possessed

No, not Dostoevsky's The Possessed, rather Elif Batuman's homage to all things Russian and Central Asian, as well as to the graduate study of literature as an enterprise. This book taught me several things: (1) I must reread Rene Girard's Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, which I haven't read since I was seventeen, but which Batuman claims will explain a great many of what I consider to be the great books; (2) if I wanted to get funding, I should have studied Uzbek, which would have let me travel to even stranger lands with even stranger foods and facilities and which, frankly, would have been even less useful than Russian; (3) elite graduate programs in the humanities are all pretty much the same and attract pretty much the same characters (demonic characters, some of them) but some are MUCH better funded than others (damn you Stanford!); (4) I wholeheartedly approve of the graduate study of literature for its own sake and believe that it needs a better defender than Batuman who seems at times wishy washy and opportunistic, as if she's constantly in search of her next paid gig. Sorry, sucker. The study of literature was, is, and always will be largely pro bono, and if you try to make it anything but you probably deserve to end up in some godforsaken hellhole in Uzbekistan. 'Course, she did get a book contract out of it. Now if only I could harness some of her good fortune. Hmmm....I'll have to think on that one.

Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Eye of the Red Tsar

Sam Eastland's Eye of the Red Tsar runs into many of the problems that plague historical thrillers. Its plot is much too dependent on coincidence, even when the coincidences in question defy all rational explanation. It's a historical thriller, but the coincidences don't have the ring of historical truth.

It also lacks emotional truth, as when we are asked to believe that the Tsar's chief detective and right hand man would willingly take on much the same role for Stalin himself, even after experiencing the worst of the Gulag. Pekkela, the detective, experiences the worst excesses of the Soviet regime, yet he willingly agrees to become a part of it. And being Stalin's chief detective, well...that's like being Stalin's chief detective--neither a resume builder nor a great career move, one would think. It's hard to imagine what he thinks will happen to the "criminals" he apprehends--he doesn't seem to care to ask the question. Maybe it's because I know too much about what happened to too many people falsely accused and punished under Stalin's brutal reign, but the notion of becoming Stalin's right hand man is...unpleasant. The fact that he accepts the job--when he could go anywhere else in the world--with so little thought makes me deeply suspicious of Pekkela, who is supposed to appear in a second novel in 2011. For Eastland's sake, I hope he finds a way to give his main character some kind of moral compass.

Wednesday, March 17, 2010

Buddhism not Buspar

Finished Mary Pipher's book. There are lots of little tidbits of wisdom scattered throughout, certainly (e.g. when she calls herself a "stress monkey" or reminds one of the importance of mindfulness), but I have an underlying problem with the book as a whole. The premise of the book is that she had some kind of nervous breakdown following the Reviving Ophelia maelstrom and that she cured herself...with Buddhism. This might be plausible if her major depressive episode had been purely situational and could be cured by a kind of Rilkean "you must change your life" kind of move, but she makes it very clear that her depression had a great deal to do with her environment growing up, her parents' failings, and so forth. Her episode was the product of a lifetime, not just the stress and overwork and uncomfortable lifestyle of the celebrity shrink.

To hear her tell it though, she basically cured herself through mindfulness, meditation, and expanding her perspective. Now, these are all good things--and it's amusing to read about her attempts to settle her mind for the purposes of meditation--but to suggest that a major depressive episode can be essentially self-cured is, frankly, dangerous. And she's a shrink--she knows that. It's like she's taken the adage "physician, heal thyself" to its most dangerous limit. At the very least her story takes away from the very real struggles of the unenlightened majority who find they cannot cure themselves. It suggests that there is an element of shame in admitting that one needs help, perhaps even that those who fail to lift themselves up by their own bootstraps are in fact weak. And I don't really understand this failing, because, for heaven's sakes, she's a therapist--she knows the value of therapy. Maybe she even got therapy for her depression, but if she did she fails to mention it.

Additionally, the one brief mention she makes of psych meds is a comment that she recommends them for her patients only in dire situations. She also admits to taking an anti-anxiety medication to help her get through one of the worst book tours. I'm not suggesting that psych meds would have cured her...far from it. I am suggesting that they might have helped alleviate some of the worst symptoms and made her more comfortable, and really, if that's an option, why not take advantage of it? To write an entire book about a major depressive episode and hardly mention these medications seems grossly irresponsible. Again, it suggests that those who take advantage of these medications are somehow weak, and perhaps even sets up a false dichotomy between biological depression (treated with medication) and situational depression (treated with therapy or mindfulness). It's generally accepted that this dichotomy is totally misleading and that the best treatment for depression is therapy and meds, but to hear her tell it, she took advantage of neither. This is perhaps most frustrating when she describes her lifelong struggles with insomnia. She seems willing to try anything...anything that is except a sleeping pill. One wants to shake her and tell her to take a goddamn Ambien already.

Finally, throughout the book Pipher is extremely, um, forgiving. She seems at least as interested in understanding the reasons behind her parents' failings than in analyzing how these failings shaped her development. This is noble (noble beyond belief, actually), especially considering just how neglectful and damaging her parents were. I'm not saying that she shouldn't forgive them, forgiveness being a virtue in all major religious traditions and all that, I just wish she had a harder time doing it. Basically, I want her to be like Anne Lamott on this front: recognize the value of forgiveness, but also acknowledge just how bloody hard it is to pull off in reality.

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Ahem...Mary Pipher

It is with some reluctance that I admit that I have (briefly) put down my Russian detective novel to pick up, ahem, Mary Pipher's new memoir on being the "worst Buddhist in the world." This is the kind of thing that my dad can get away with listening to on his daily commute, but which comes perilously close to "self-help" when read by me (and not in enough of an irreverent, hysterical, former cocaine addict--read: Anne Lamott--kind of way). But so be it.

It is, I admit, somewhat quaint and therapisty, but I was swayed by the worst Buddhist in the world line, which is a frighteningly good description of me at the moment (I understand the whole "life is suffering" part...I just don't quite get how one is supposed to detach oneself from that fact). But, as those who know me outside the blog know all too well, I'm having one of those dark night of the soul moments, struggling to establish some kind of identity outside the academy, and battling a lot of my own inner demons. Sometimes this comes out in my need to read masses of Scandinavian crime fiction and plot the perfect murder; sometimes I just want to read about someone who's been there. Besides which, I'm grateful to Pipher for delivering Reviving Ophelia into my hands just in time for me to become a troubled adolescent back in 1994. My only wish is that her sense of humor were a little more self-deprecating and biting--I'm not kidding when I say she should have taken some writing lessons from Anne Lamott. However, on my Anne Lamott, Barbara Kingsolver, Haven Kimmel nonfiction scale of the day she's getting about a B- at the moment. She'd hate that, surely, but hey, I haven't read that much of the book yet. Maybe she'll make it up to me.

Thursday, March 11, 2010

Swedish film version of the Millennium Trilogy

My husband and I were lucky enough to see an advance screening of the Swedish film version of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo as part of the Chicago European Film Festival at the Siskel Center. What can I say? It was outstanding. It didn't once jar with my preconceived mental image of the story. Michael Nykvist and Noomi Rapace are outstanding as Blomkvist and Salander, respectively--the general consensus at the screening was that it was so nice to see actors who looked like real people--and I myself am desperate to chop off my hair in emulation of Rapace. Best of all, the director pulled no punches when it came to the grittier elements of the story--they were on full display, rape, sodomy, and all. Overall, it was a brilliant film realization, and I hope the next two, which are apparently already airing in Sweden, are every bit as wonderful.

On an unfortunate note, I've also learned that Hollywood has optioned the rights to the three books so as to make an Americanized version, no doubt aimed at those among us who don't want to bother reading subtitles and like our films to be sanitized and R-rated. I'll withhold my final judgment, but I'm preparing to hate the Hollywood versions.

Thursday, March 4, 2010

Box 21

Box 21, despite its superficial similarities to Larsson's Lisbeth Salander books, is much less sophisticated, but probably all the more realistic for it. Although oppressed by members of the highest ranks of society, Lisbeth Salander has remarkable skills. She also has the advantage of enlisting a famous journalist to her cause. This allows for a deeply textured, complex narrative and, ultimately, Salander's redemption.

The premise in Box 21 is much simpler. A Lithuanian sex slave gets herself into the hospital, where she--somewhat contrivedly (how does a Lithuanian sex slave attain that much knowledge of plastic explosives?)--sets up a hostage situation with the sole motive of killing a certain detective. This is a Salander-esque move, certainly, with the big difference being that Lydia does not have a Plan B and the only possible result of Plan A is her death. Her wager is that her desperate act will leave enough clues, including a telltale videotape, that it will be impossible for her story to be ignored. Unfortunately, without some kind of accomplice to help her fight the overbearing power structure, the clues she leaves are all too easily covered up by the very power structure she intended them to indict. In the end, even the well-meaning young detective is cowed by the system. And, as the novel makes clear, the cycle of sexual enslavement hardly pauses. This makes for a profoundly unsatisfying novel, but probably one that tells a more realistic tale of the crushing reality of the fate of those living on the furthest fringes of Swedish society.

Wednesday, March 3, 2010

"Hostages mean that you can make demands."

This is a truth universally to be acknowledged. It is also a truth arrived at a little less than half way into Roslund and Hellstrom's Box 21, which the Library Journal claims is "bound to please readers of Steig Larsson." Larsson's books and Roslund and Hellstrom's have plenty of similarities that will, indeed, please. Most important, both have female protagonists who live on the fringe of Swedish society--in Larsson's case a young woman condemned to guardianship, and in Roslund and Hellstrom's a Eastern European prostitute who doesn't speak Swedish but seems to know an awful lot about plastic explosives.

It is also a truth universally to be acknowleged that the Swedish psyche--at least the Swedish crime writing psyche--has an unhealthy fixation on human trafficking, sexual enslavement, and anal rape...at least to the outside observer. It's hard to think of an author who hasn't dealt with the subject. (To be fair, even the most casual observer of shows like CSI, Law and Order, and Criminal Minds would see that the American psyche is itself just as obsessed with serial killers and rapists.) The interesting thing about this Swedish obsession is that it is a vice not of the masses but of the ruling class: in Larsson's books Lisbeth Salander is oppressed by a network of high-ranking lawyers and intelligence officials. Box 21 suggests much the same: Lydia's clients are detectives and doctors and (one assumes) politicians. When she lands in the hospital after her pimp nearly beats her to death, the very people who are supposed to help her turn out to be those who've been imprisoning her all along. Hence the very quick resort to plastic explosives and a hostage situation.

I don't know where the novel is going next, but I do know that it has the potential to function much the way Larsson's did to expose some of Swedish society's dirtier secrets.

Tuesday, March 2, 2010

Reading is Hard

Reading has become difficult for me these last few months as my decreased attention span and wandering mind have made it impossible to follow a narrative for more than a sentence. I'm hoping this will improve slowly and I will be able to get back to reading and blogging about reading.

However, I was able to watch the BBC's three-episode Wallander series, based on three Henning Mankel mysteries. The series stars an unshaven Kenneth Branaugh as Mankel's Kurt Wallander, the everyman of Swedish crime fiction. Wallander, in the books and the movie, is not overly deductive or, gasp, overly psychological--he just guts out every investigation and figures it out. The books are some of the most famous Swedish crime fiction of all time, and the mini-series does them great justice. Ironically, the three mysteries that make up the mini-series all take place around midsummer, so instead of suffering from a lack of light like so much Swedish crime fiction, they suffer from an, assumedly, intentional overabundance. The films seems hyper-saturated with light, and the irony, that even at the height of midsummer with light radiating from every crack, crime still abounds, is not lost. The special features that accompany the films confirm that the director, cast, and crew sought to make the landscape as much a feature of the films as it is of the books.

These are not the only films made out of the Wallander books. If you have a DVD player that reads Region 2 there are numerous Swedish-made Wallander films, as well as other movies made of Swedish crime fiction. Amazon.com sells much of it.

On a related note, my favorite theater has a poster up for the film The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. I am somewhat nervous about how that novel will translate to film, but not so nervous that I won't be the first one in line on opening night. Here's hoping.

Friday, January 22, 2010

I'm not the only one reading Scandinavian crime fiction...

Apparently Scandinavian crime fiction is increasingly popular in our existential day and age. Understandably. Check out this article from the Wall Street Journal.

Wednesday, January 6, 2010

Summertime, this time for real

Finished Coetzee's Summertime, an utterly infuriating book. Coetzee is either overweeningly arrogant (to the point of decadence) or overweeningly insecure (to the point of decadence), and I say that as someone who actually likes the man. At first glance, the former seems to be the case: Coetzee has created an autobiography (an inherently egotistic enterprise) but, by making it a false autobiography has pulled the rug out from under us and robbed us of the "truth" we look for in autobiography in general. and yet, we will read it, looking for...something. It's easy to imagine Coetzee enjoying this state of affairs, chuckling, perhaps, at our foolishness, relishing his plausible deniability.

But maybe it's the latter possibility and he's actually as self-deprecating as you'd conclude if you read the book without irony. I like to think that this is the slightly more likely possibility because it fits with everything I know of the man, which is admittedly not much. Coetzee's conceit in Summertime is that no one really knows him, which we hope is not true given that he did have a wife (at the very time he claims to recount in the book) and, at last check, has a partner. Assumedly he pretends that those who knew him best were mere acquaintances in order to further paint a picture of himself as an emotional shut-in (or "autistic" as one of the women puts it), incapable of connecting with other people. Undoubtedly there is some truth to this notion--the real man is certainly shy and reserved to an extreme degree--but my take on his character has always been that he is not incapable of connecting with others but rather that he does not want to waste his (apparently) limited emotional resources on casual acquaintances or mere social niceties. And one can get away with that when one is a reclusive academic and Nobel Laureate. Those of us not so honored don't have the luxury. The point, though, is that once upon a time, neither did he; there was a moment in his life when his character foibles were in fact pathological flaws.

Reading Summertime it is as though the latter Coetzee--the one I know--did not exist; indeed, several of those "interviewed" haven't even read his mature works and know only the flawed thirty-year-old author of Dusklands. Perhaps he is trying to say that while he has undeniably matured, and redeemed himself as a writer, he has not done so as a human being. This is perhaps true.

He is not, however, "inhuman," as he suggests at one point in Summertime--although he might prefer it if he were. Even in this book--perhaps more in this book than in any book since Disgrace--there are glimpses of a very human truth. This is true, for example, when Julia suggests that John will prove to have been a minor character in his own life, when she speaks of his writing as an "unending cathartic exercise," when she talks about the seeming strangeness of one so unable to connect to others writing novels about intimate human experience, or when Adriana speaks of his not having learned to hide his feelings, "which is the first step to civilized manners."

The ending of the book, when he feels he cannot take care of his father and must turn the responsibility over to strangers is also extremely human. This failure to take care--of one's self, one's loved ones, one's animals--is a recurring theme in Coetzee's work. Does that mean that he sees this failing in himself? Maybe. Does it really matter? Maybe not. Perhaps Coetzee will always hide himself from us. And although it is not our job to psychoanalyze the man, a book like Summertime certainly adds to the temptation. Ultimately it doesn't matter whether the book is classed as fiction or non-fiction--anyone who knows anything about the man and his work will be able to pick up on the themes that have the ring of truth. Coetzee may have given himself plausible deniability, but taken in the context of his life's work, it's clear that in Summertime he is writing about very real failures and feelings, even if they are veiled by a fictional plot and characters.