J.M. Coetzee discusses new memoir

Despite his notoriously reclusive and private nature, J.M. Coetzee, the South African novelist who has won two Booker Prizes and the Nobel Prize for Literature (in 2003), made a public appearance at Oxford University to promote Summertime, a work of "fictionalized autobiography" set to be published later this year.

The South African reports:

Seeing Coetzee read on Thursday night thus presented a spectacle to make any postmodern literary critic lick their chops: an almost pathologically private man reading his own “fictionalised memoir”, with Summertime achieving a further distancing effect by means of the fact that the book takes the form of a series of interviews with people from Coetzee’s life carried out after Coetzee’s death. The surprise for those in the audience was how much of a showman Coetzee emerged as, when reading his own work, inserting moments of broad comedy into his performance that had the audience rocking with laughter. It was an incongruous moment: fellow South African writer Rian Malan claimed a colleague of Coetzee’s once testified that in a decade of working together, he had seen him laugh just once.