Summertime: Scenes from Provincial Life III (2009) is the third volume of J. M. Coetzee’s autobiographical trilogy begun with Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life (1999) and Youth: Scenes from Provincial Life II (2002). As is common to all three volumes, the technical approach employed in Summertime is strangely divorced from the familiar autobiographical mode in which the author simply outlines a series of notably events from her/his life in the first-person past-tense. The premise behind the text is that the “Coetzee” of Summertime has died sometime after the completion of Diary of a Bad Year (2007) – instead of a memoir, the text purports to be a collection of materials assembled by an English academic named only as “Vincent”, which reads as an unfinished manuscript for an unauthorized biography of Coetzee’s early years as a...
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Citation: Hyde, Franklyn. "Summertime". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 14 February 2011 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=28550, accessed 09 June 2026.]
