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It's tough to decide between four and five stars for this quite excellent book. On one hand, it's a fantastic piece of speculative fiction, which doesn't use hypothetical (but impossible) technology as a crutch; the hypothetical technology is just a literary device which could be replaced with existent technologies instead. On the other hand, there is only a single female character in the whole book, which makes me wonder if Isaac Asimov ever spoke to a woman. It made sense with Tolkien, who was only ever around men, but Asimov should have no excuse.

I think I definitely would've enjoyed this book more if I hadn't had to re-read it multiple times over a two-year period for my English Literature class. I could probably give a page-by-page account of the story - but, to be fair, it is a short book.

I didn't really enjoy this book as much as the others. There were a lot of errors due to grammar, and Alice seemed so different (yes, I know she was really upset). However, by the end, it started to get really interesting, and I didn't want to put it down.

I've read a lot of JM Coetzee. In fact, it's quite likely that I've read more of his novels than of any other living author. I found this book fascinating. I couldn't put it down. For me it's up there among Coetzee's best -- up with The Life and Times of Michael K and Disgrace. I've marked it 4 stars, but it's really 4.5 for me. It's the third book in a series of semi-autobiographical novels (Boyhood and Youth are the others). Coetzee is known for his reclusiveness and I'm not sure what's true and not true or biographical. In the end, I'm not sure it matters. In the novel a British academic is writing a biography about the now deceased Nobel Laureate John Coetzee's life during the 1970's when he's in his 30's. All you as the reader get are fragments from Coetzee's journals (written in the third person) and a series of five interviews with people from Coetzee's life -- a former lover, the mother of one of his students, his cousin, and a couple of fellow professors. What comes through is an emotionally isolated, awkward man whom several female interviewees describe as void of sexuality. Those interviewed say so many negative or bland things about this John Coetzee you'd think the self-deprecation would get tiresome. It doesn't. For me what stood out in Summertime is how much people's lives are intertwined. The people interviewed in the novel talk so much about their own lives in order to discuss Coetzee's place in it. The interviews are really their stories, not stories about Coetzee. A former lover talks about Coetzee in terms of her own liberation from a bad marriage. A Brazilian dancer deals with Coetzee's awkward infatuation while going through a family tragedy. Coetzee is just a figure in her story - a nuisance, in fact. In Summertime I think Coetzee is also showing how trivial it is to focus on the lives of the famous. He is just a man with a lot of awkwardness. Nothing special. He's just a guy who intersected with some other people's lives, none of whom found him particularly special but he is still a part of their life stories. Lastly, South Africa is an important character in the novel. Many of the interviewees had been immigrants to the country and no longer live there. You hear about how living there affected them. You also learn about John Coetzee's relationship to his Afrikaans family and political ideas related to South African society. The technique of learning about an absent character through interviews is similar to what Roberto Bolano does in The Savage Detectives.