摘要：Reading Summertime is like playing a board game with the man who not only invented it but thought of all the moves you might possibly make at the same moment; the game in this case being to join with the narrator-interviewer’s pursuit of the real John Coetzee, the book’s apparent subject. Which version of this Coetzee bears the closest relation to the truth about him? Which sequence of sentences comes closest to the heart of him, the core of his identity? What relation does ‘John Coetzee’ bear to the J.M. Coetzee whose name appears on the dust jacket, and that J.M. to the prize-winning author currently resident in the Adelaide Hills? But it is possible, even in taking this first modest move in lockstep with the narrator, that we already relinquish a more interesting possibility. The real John Coetzee, after all, cannot exist except as the point of investigation in a novel whose author bears a similar name. In the case of an author so invested in the ways accounts of oneself to oneself may fight each other to a standstill, there may be constraints on interpretation in suspending disbelief which Coleridge himself did not foresee. Caveat lector. love,
