Left it but love it - growing up in Boksburg

Those of us who took a stand against the apartheid regime often heard "if you don't like Suthefrika then leave it" whence the title of this blog, left it but love it nevertheless. Thanks to Carol Serrurier for this moving account of her home town: Boksburg.

Out of the Box
by
Carol Serrurier-Zucker


The town where I was born and grew up, Boksburg, was a small mining town on the East Rand about 30 km from Johannesburg. I say “was” because although the town still exists, for one thing it has spread out considerably in the intervening years, now forming part of greater Johannesburg, and, for another, its mine has closed down with the dwindling of the gold seam. Its name is not derived from “box”, although I certainly felt closed-in and claustrophobic living there; nor does it refer to “bok” – Afrikaans for “deer” - as in springbok. The town was named after Dr W.E. Bok, who was State Secretary in 1887. Gold was discovered in 1886, but it was the mining of black gold – coal – that took off first in Boksburg, which then became the centre for the eastern goldfields, holding the record for the deepest mineshaft of the Witwatersrand mines (and in the world) until about 50 years ago.

The town I grew up in was very conservative town with a large Afrikaans community. I spent my first 12 years in an attractive, middle-class English-speaking suburb south of the town centre, but then we moved to a larger house in a northern suburb, populated mainly by Afrikaners. This was agony to me as there was a very real antagonism between “die Engelse” – “die rooinekke” - and the Afrikaner “vrot bananas”, the difference made easily obvious to us children through the school uniforms we wore. Travelling on the bus surrounded by kids from Voortrekker Hoogte in my Boksburg High School uniform was not a pleasant experience. I found them too rough and aggressive; one wouldn’t dare make eye contact for fear of loud accusations: “wat kyk jy?” (what are you looking at?) since being looked at, it seemed, was offensive. No doubt, they also found us too something: too prissy? Too snobbish?

The drive into town took one down a long desolate road past Cason mine dump on one side and the prison on the other. One of the “sights” of Boksburg is its Lake, man-made in the late nineteenth century by Montagu White, the Commissioner at the time, in an attempt to lend this barren town a bit of beauty. I have good memories of my father driving us around the lake one night a year in the middle of summer to see the Christmas lights strung across the road and floating on the water. The lake had a moment of gory glory with its “suitcase murder”, where parts of a woman’s body were found in a suitcase which had been dumped in the waters.

A large part of the west of the town was mine property, with its headquarters, pithead, dumps, living quarters (where my father grew up) and the compound, the residence for the migrant labourers who mostly came from Natal to work in the galleries, deep underground. Each compound had its stadium where the workers could play football on weekends or hold traditional dance contests, including Gumboot dancing, a sort of hybrid of tradition and modernity, featuring the rubber boots worn down in the mines. Sometimes at dusk I could hear the rhythms of the drums in the distance, and we would occasionally go to watch the Sunday dancing with their entrancing almost frightening energy. We’d come away covered in a film of red dust which the dancer’s stamping had stirred up from the dirt floor.

Another particularity of that time was the convict workers, those who weren’t dangerous so became a useful source of free labour. They were let out of prison during the day in work teams to keep up roads and parks. I used to say “hello” to them and they would reply respectfully “More, Nonnie (Morning, small madam)”. I felt they were sad, but didn’t know then that often their only crime had been the inability to present a valid pass book when stopped by a policeman for an identity check.

Town celebrities include Gerrie Coetzee, once a world heavy-weight boxing champion, nick-named the “Boksburg bomber”, long before the town exploded into rioting, and Paw-Paw Scheepers, a stock car racer, who once amazed the crowd by driving a Jaguar off a ramp through the side of a double-decker bus! Presumably the aim was to clear the bus and land safely on the other side.

The burg became notorious for its conservative stance during the gradual disappearance of “petty” apartheid, when the signs “whites only” were being taken down in public places all over the country. The Conservative Party, who considered the National Party to be a bunch of “liberal lefties”, selling the country out with its reforms, was elected into the Municipality in the mid-1980s. In 1988, the council decided to put the signs back up and, in a moment of great inspiration, fenced off the Lake, barring Blacks from using its facilities. The Black communities of the various townships in the area, led by Reiger Park, a “Coloured” area, responded by organising a boycott of the town’s shops. Protest picnics were held at the Lake, leading to violent clashes with Conservative Party and AWB (extreme right) members. There were other towns like Carletonville and Krugersdorp on the Witwatersrand which also enacted retrograde policies and faced similar boycotts by their Black citizens.

These boycotts demanded self-control and some sacrifice from the protesters as they had to pay their transport fares to neighbouring, less “verkrampte” towns, a no-mean feat when every hard-earned cent was much needed. However the year-long defiance campaign was successful and had further-reaching effects as it was one factor in the eventual scrapping of the Separate Amenities Act by the government. In addition, an outlying suburb, Windmill Park, was declared a “free trading area” that same year, 1989, by the new president, F.W. De Klerk, and became one of the new “grey areas” henceforth open to people of all races. This further inflamed the right-wing extremists and in 1990, a group of them including the deputy mayor of the town, were accused of being involved in a plot to assassinate President De Klerk, Nelson Mandela and the Nationalist MP of the area, Sakkie Blanché.

But the most dramatic of the town’s infamy was to occur in April 1993, just as South Africa was struggling towards its historic moment of rebirth. On a Sunday morning as he returned from buying the papers, Chris Hani was shot dead in his driveway by a white extremist. Hani, secretary general of the Communist Party and very close to Nelson Mandela, was extremely popular and some even saw him as a possible vice-President in the new South Africa. Grief and outrage at his death gave rise to violence from the black community, demanding revenge, and Nelson Mandela appeared on national television to say that although a white racist had committed the assassination, it was thanks to a prompt call to police by one of Hani’s Afrikaans neighbours reporting the registration of the murderer’s car, that he had been rapidly apprehended and other assassination attempts thwarted. He implored the people not to enter into a spiral of racial hatred and destroy the negotiation process, which was precisely the aim of the assassins.

In returning to Boksburg regularly to visit family, I still recall the claustrophobic feelings of my childhood and continue to think it is one of the most unattractive areas in a beautiful country, but I am heartened to see some of the changes for the better that have come over the years. The first time I ever saw Black children wearing my old school uniform I was moved to tears. What a wonder to see the ease and confidence with which the youngsters chatted and laughed in groups, allowing one to firmly believe that the new generation will go beyond the horrible scars left by apartheid. Another good moment came in meeting musician Pops Mohammed in France, who when he heard that I came from Boksburg – a statement which usually elicits guffaws and mock-Afrikaans accents from my fellow-countrymen - delightedly proclaimed “so am I - from Reiger Park!” The passage of time and the changes wrought now allowed us to be fellow Boksburgers.

The new town council decided to repaint the formerly staid town hall, and chose to do it in a bright shocking bubble-gum pink. Impossible now to ignore this austere building in its new exotic garb. For its reopening, a poem was written by a young schoolgirl, Nompumeleo Motlafi, recapping Boksburg’s chequered history, which I happened upon in the local newspaper. I was touched by her sense of pride in a place I couldn’t leave fast enough and also by the fact that the paper, once reporting only white news, had honoured her young talent.

As is the case in many towns and cities, with the abolition of the Group Areas Act, black businesses have moved into the town centres and white professionals have moved out into the huge malls built on the outskirts of the towns. Boksburg’s centre is no exception and boutiques of sangoma herbs and potions, funeral parlours and the ubiquitous loan sharks flourish among other stores. The pavements are taken up by the hawkers of the so-called informal economy, spilling their wares of fruit and vegetables and handmade goods of all kinds. Needless to say, the shopkeepers who pay rents and overheads for their premises do not always see these pavement merchants in the best light!

Now Boksburg is part of Ekurhuleni Metropolitan Municipality and has as its mayor Duma Nkosi, a former ANC activist who served a nine-month jail sentence in 1985. I have had the opportunity of visiting surrounding townships like Voslorus, Thokoza, Katlehong and Geluksdal where I have seen amazing efforts being made by people who have so little, that little being further diminished by the ravages of AIDS. However, with the help of some good people, one of them being my sister-in-law, they manage to maintain the will to improve their lives through hard work and the sense of being part of a community that now pulls together instead of tearing itself apart.




Written in 2006.

More on Perla Siedle Gibson who sang to the troops

My parents generation, in our family I mean, have now all died out, but as my Dad, Lionel and his brothers, my Mom, Joyce and many of her war friends went up by troop ship to North Africa to fight Nazi forces and their allies, they probably heard Perla Siedle Gibson singing them off.

Thanks to Gail Behrman and Giselle Wulfsohn for the following:

She was a 50 year old soprano who sang to the troops from the peir, there is a statue to her memory I think on the North Pier. It was unveiled in 1995 by Queen Liz 2. I hope the pics come out, for some reason I cannot get the link onto Microsoft Outlook, only Outlook Express which as you know is decidedly faulty. So why are you interested?

Perla Siedle Gibson was born in Durban, South Africa 1888 - 1971

Art Education
- 1907 Perla Gibson studied music and singing in Europe; also later in the United States of America.
- 1909 Perla Gibson studied portraiture under Prof Linde-Walther, Berlin; pottery and crafts under John Adams. Painting under Gwelo Goodman.

Short Artist Biography
- Daughter of Otto Siedle, first President of NSA, related through her mother to Thomas Bainers, who died in their family home. Began her career in Europe as a musician.
- 1917 Perla Gibson studied married Jack Gibson.
- 1923 Perla Gibson studied returned to South Africa and a full life divided between domestic activities, painting and singing. Member of South African Society of Artists and NSA, with whom she exhibited regularly; won the Gundelfinger Award of the NSA (for African subjects) in 1932.
- 1939 An accomplished musician and dramatic soprano of extensive experience, Perla Gibson gained an international reputation as “The Lady in White” during World War 2, when she became known to thousands of troops passing through Durban by serenading them from the quayside, clad always in white. In the course of this practice, which she continued after the war, she amassed a vast circle of friends throughout the world, with whom she corresponded regularly.
- 1968 Lost an eye in a household accident, but, with customary spirit, soon took up her active life.

Art Exhibitions
- 1936 Empire Art Exhibition, Johannesburg. Group shows in Durban; Paris Salon; Hibernian Academy; one-man art exhibition, London, opened by Roy Campbell; few one-man art exhibitions in South Africa.

Public Art collections
Durban Art Gallery

more on the Lady in White

Thanks Robin and Rod Margo for suggesting a google search which immediately turned up many periwinkles, here's just one:

http://www.allatsea.co.za/army/ladywhite.htm

South Africa's war-time sweetheart

Jumaane sent me this letter from Oakland after finding an old press clipping in his basement, probably stored by my brother Glen in 1991. I will publish any replies and send them on to Jumaane. To zoom in on the picture, just click on it. The woman's name was Perla Siedle Gibson. Ian

"I was knocking about in my basement today and found a framed photo in a dark corner. I brought it upstairs and decided to hang it in the Lounge. I turned it over and found these two newspaper articles attached to the back of the frame. It clearly must have belonged to Glen. Do anyone of you know of this woman?"

Review of a JM Coetzee book

Edito: James Munnick sent in this interesting review of a JM Coetzee book:

All about John

'How can you be a great writer if you are just an ordinary little man?' asks a character in JM Coetzee's new book Summertime. This unsparing, autobiographical novel continues the intimate conversation the Nobel laureate has been having with a series of alter-egos in his work. James Meek listens in

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• James Meek
• The Guardian, Saturday 5 September 2009
• Article history

The novelist JM Coetzee. Photograph: Reuters

At some point during the past couple of years, an eminent South African writer now living in Australia wrote this dismissive appraisal of John Maxwell Coetzee's œuvre: "In general, I would say that his work lacks ambition. The control of the elements is too tight. Nowhere do you get a feeling of a writer deforming his medium in order to say what has never been said before, which is to me the mark of great writing. Too cool, too neat, I would say. Too easy. Too lacking in passion."

Even when a writer has achieved international fame and won the biggest trophies - the Nobel and two Booker prizes, in Coetzee's case - a bad review can't be easy to stomach. Harder if it is not just your book that is criticised, but the premise on which you have built your life: namely, that you can, must and should write. Worse still, if the reviewer impugns your character along with your novels.

It sounds hurtful, and perhaps it is, although the novelist who wrote it was JM Coetzee. The bad meta-review of Coetzee comes out of the mouth of one of the characters in Coetzee's new book, Summertime, which is about Coetzee. Summertime is full of harsh reviews of Coetzee by Coetzee, of Coetzee the writer and Coetzee the man.

The critics are four women, all once loved by "John Coetzee", the Coetzee character, three of them loving him back, in different ways. Another says: "... to my mind, a talent for words is not enough if you want to be a great writer. You have also to be a great man. And he was not a great man. He was a little man, an unimportant little man ... How can you be a great writer if you are just an ordinary little man?"

Coetzee built his literary reputation on the eight novels he published between 1974 and 1999. None was less than unusually good, but three in particular have carried his work into the realm of lasting things. The first was Waiting for the Barbarians, a parable about the use of falsely imagined enemies for social control. Substitute "terrorists" for "barbarians" and you have a history of Britain and America since 2001. (Coetzee's book came out in 1980.)

Coetzee won the Booker with his fourth novel, Life and Times of Michael K, an eerily colour-blind account of its eponymous hero's odyssey from the city to the wilderness and back in a South Africa enduring an imaginary war. A third masterwork, Disgrace, won him the second Booker. Coetzee took off his skin to write the almost unbearably truthful story of a white lecturer who takes sexual advantage of a student, is disgraced and goes to his daughter in the country, where she is gang-raped. The fact that the rapists are black, and that the up-and-coming black farm worker who lives close to his daughter isn't cooperative in catching them, provoked anger in the upper echelons of South Africa's post-apartheid government. Coetzee emigrated to Australia in 2002, although it is not clear whether this was because of the new South African order.

Since Disgrace, the nature of Coetzee's project has changed. He has moved away from naturalistic, storytelling fiction towards other forms - essays, polemic and memoir, or a composite of all three in a fictional framework. It is ironic that a writer with an undeserved reputation for being a recluse (Coetzee doesn't like giving interviews) seems to be taking less interest in the storytelling keel of his books and is inviting us instead to listen in to an intimate conversation he is having with himself, in the form of multiple alter egos.

One is a character type who crops up in Coetzee's novels, a type that has served western male writers of the last half century well, from Saul Bellow to Michel Houellebecq: the learned, sceptical man in middle years, unsure whether the lust for life and love that continues to course through him is a curse or a benison. The magistrate in Waiting for the Barbarians and David Lurie in Disgrace are two such.

Another is Coetzee's female alter ego, Elizabeth Costello, an elderly, scholarly, world-weary novelist whose stern moral principles are provoked more by fear of death than by belief. ("She is by no means a comforting writer," Coetzee writes of her in his 2003 novel, Elizabeth Costello. "She is even cruel, in a way that women can be, but men seldom have the heart for.")

Coetzee's third literary alter ego is Coetzee himself. Summertime is the third of his fictionalised memoirs. Boyhood, published in 1997, tells of his rural childhood in the parched grandeur of the Karoo, in the west of South Africa, and Youth, which came out seven years ago, is an account of a hesitant coming of age into writership in Cape Town and London in the yet-to-swing 60s.

In the two earlier memoirs/novels, John, whose life closely follows what we know of the writer's actual biography, is portrayed in the third person as an obsessive self-questioner. He oscillates between contempt for himself and wild ambition. He is frantic for intimacy with others, but ambivalent about it when it comes - is it love? Power? Duty? Curiosity? These gem-like books - small, hard, glittering with piercing image and feeling - are narrated in the present tense, not the present tense of fake immediacy, but the present tense of recurring dreams.

In Summertime, Coetzee uses a more novelistic structure. He imagines that his doppelganger died just as he was about to write a sequel to Boyhood and Youth, covering his return to South Africa from the US in the 70s. He left notebooks - we are shown extracts - which suggest that, had he lived, this fictional Summertime would have been written in the same style as the earlier memoir-novels. Now an academic, Mr Vincent, who has never met John, is writing an account of that period of the writer's life, using the notebooks and interviews with five people who were close to him.

On the page, it is less complicated than it sounds. The interviews, which take place in 2007 and 2008, are the bulk of the book. The fifth interviewee, the only man, contributes little. The other four are Julia Frankl, a housewife who had an affair with John, and is now a psychotherapist in Canada; Margot Jonker, the Coetzee character's cousin and childhood sweetheart; Adriana Nascimento, a Brazilian dancer whom the Coetzee character fell for, but who rejected him; and Sophie Denoël, a French academic who had an affair with the Coetzee character while they were teaching at the University of Cape Town.

The intaglio Coetzee who emerges from the women's accounts is an unprepossessing figure, cold, awkward, remote, stubborn, foolish. He is scruffy and unattractive, physically, emotionally and intellectually. He is rude, bold when he should be discreet, withdrawn when he should be passionate. He has wispy hair, a scraggly beard and bad clothes. He is an unromantic loser, living with his old father in a rundown cottage, single, childless and poor. He's an ordinary failure, a bad lover.

"In his lovemaking, I now think there was an autistic quality. I offer this not as a criticism but as a diagnosis," Julia tells Mr Vincent. "Two inscrutable automata having inscrutable commerce with each other's bodies: that was how it felt to be in bed with John." She describes how John believed that Schubert had distilled sex into music, and obliged her to make love in time to a Schubert string quartet, saying that she would find out "what it felt like to make love in post-Bonaparte Austria". Adriana suggests the interviewer call his book about John "The Wooden Man".

Sophie, the last interviewee, is the most laconically damning: "He had no special sensitivity that I could detect, no original insight into the human condition," she tells Mr Vincent. Even cousin Margot, who has a sisterly affection for John and defends him from the suspicion of his other country relatives, calls him "an alleenloper, as some male animals are: a loner. Perhaps it is as well that he has not married."

The line is a reminder of how far Summertime is a fictive construct. Not only is the real Coetzee alive as I write, and I hope will long remain so; by the time the real Coetzee went back to South Africa in 1971, he was married with two children. His first wife, Philippa Jubber, died in 1991, long after they were divorced; his son Nicolas died in 1989. Of these stories, there are no traces in Summertime

Nonetheless, it would be fatuous to pretend that John is not in most ways the actual Coetzee's proxy. He shares the name, the fame, the book titles, the CV; John follows Coetzee like Wenceslas's page stepping into the king's footprints in the snow.

Why is Coetzee so hard on himself? Is it for comedy? He can make his Johns very funny, with their Don Quixote-like personal codes of conduct and their Woody Allenish neuroses about sex and status. The "Schubert as sublimated coitus" era is there to be laughed with, like the sequence in Boyhood where John pretends to be a Catholic at school and ends up being both subjected to antisemitism and accused of apostasy because he doesn't go to mass. "John Coetzee was actually quite funny. A figure of comedy," says Julia. But that doesn't explain the all-encompassing disdain of John that Coetzee puts into the mouths of his ex-loves.

Nor is Coetzee's portrait of the autist as a young man merely self-indulgent compliment-fishing, a rehearsal of a classic biographical device, the ugly duckling story. After all, the women of Summertime are not appraising John's thirtysomething self to contrast it respectfully with his present grandeur. They are talking now; they know his stature, the honours heaped upon him. Their words are as much obituary as biography, and the obituary is an unusually brutal one.

I don't believe Coetzee had a choice here. If he hadn't run the risk of seeming self-indulgent, he wouldn't have been able to capture an essential truth about "great men" - that the women who reject them in the early days are not necessarily blind to their potential. A woman who chooses not to sacrifice her life to the kind of selfish, cranky, vain, obsessive, unstable slobs who tend to become "great men" may be making a wise decision.

Books, like people, must be judged for what they are, not what they do, and Summertime is a sincere, unsparing attempt by a writer in his late 60s to imagine how a man like him would have appeared, in his early 30s, to women like the women he loved then; and how they might remember him now. The women's toughness towards their subject, their insistence that their reluctantly provided accounts of him are their own stories rather than Coetzee's, has the force of truth.

"I really was the main character. John really was a minor character," insists Julia. Her story is, to her, an account of her escape, at the age of 26, from erotic triteness, a dull marriage and the cynical mores of middle-class white Cape Town in the 70s, where husbands "wanted the wives of other men to succumb to their advances but they wanted their own wives to remain chaste - chaste and alluring". John may, she admits, have allowed her to glimpse "the possibility of growth without end in the realm of the erotic", but he is only a portal, and she walks through it. As lovers, they are truly together, body and soul, only once. "John was not my prince ... how very unlikely it was that he could have been a prince, a satisfactory prince, to any maiden on earth."

Adriana, the dancer, has a more visceral reaction to John's attempts to woo her and to his intellectual seduction of her daughter (he teaches her English at a local school). John's hopeless courtship includes an abortive barbecue - it rains - and efforts in Adriana's dance classes. She rejects the very language of his body. "He moved as though his body were a horse that he was riding, a horse that did not like its rider and was resisting."

Remembering the time of John - "a brief, one-sided infatuation that never grew into anything" - Adriana expresses loathing for his efforts to win her, and contempt that he gave up so easily. She is so vehement that the reader forgets the real Coetzee is in control of it all; piling on the invective against his alter ego until it seems, finally, that Adriana protests too much, and that the mooncalf did, after all, leave a faint mark on her heart.

Of John's women, the tenderest towards him is his cousin, Margot, who provokes a kind of tenderness in return that Julia, Adriana and Sophie did not see. But even Margot has to endure John quoting Waiting for Godot at her when she asks him to tell her a story; and even Margot "cannot imagine her cousin giving himself wholeheartedly to anyone".

The modern reader may admire John for his principles, for his insistence on doing "kaffir work" - manual labour such as laying concrete that white South Africans never do - and for his vegetarianism; but any lingering idea that John was a lifelong fighter for majority rule in South Africa gets short shrift from Sophie. "As long as liberation meant national liberation, the liberation of the black nation of South Africa, John had no interest in it," she says. "The liberation struggle was just, but the new South Africa toward which it strove was not utopian enough for him."

What, the interviewer asks, would have been utopian enough?

"The closing down of the mines. The ploughing under of the vineyards. The disbanding of the armed forces. The abolition of the automobile. Universal vegetarianism. Poetry in the streets. That sort of thing."

Coetzee has long been interested in the concept of the double. One of the requirements for a novelist is to be able to split his or her consciousness, to simultaneously be the fabricator of a character and that character's observer. It is a short step from there for the writer to see his own worldly persona, his striving, compromised social self, as a character distinct from the shy, confused, guilty recluse who takes up occupation in his head when he is alone.

Dostoyevsky's short novel The Double, where a clerk finds himself edged out of society by another man identical to him in every respect except that he is popular and clubbable, can be read as just such a text: the writer standing back and watching the grotesque spectacle of himself being successful in public, him and yet not him.

Dostoyevsky is a hero to Coetzee. When Coetzee was awarded his Nobel prize in 2003, instead of making a speech, he read out a short story, a strange, allusive tale called "He and His Man", ostensibly about Robinson Crusoe and Daniel Defoe, but really about doubles, about a character and his creator, a recluse and his busy, worldly reflection; how they were close, yet could never meet. The Nobel performance itself was a sort of doubling. "Here you see JM Coetzee, the silver-haired old fellow who joins you for dinner," it seemed to say. "Yet that isn't the Coetzee you are giving a prize to; you are giving a prize to Coetzee the writer, who perforce cannot be here. I shall read you some of his work."

Confession is another old preoccupation of Coetzee's, and through his double, John, the memoirs are replete with confessional moments. Two shameful childhood actions - pulling the leg off a locust and leaving his cousin to kill it, and secretly scratching his father's beloved recording of Italian opera with a razor - have haunted him ever since. Indeed, there is a sense in which Summertime, more than the two earlier memoirs, is part of a sequence of transgression, confession, penitence and absolution. That sequence comes up in an essay Coetzee wrote in 1985, "Confession and Double Thoughts". In it he is disappointed by the didactic moralism of the late Tolstoy; finds Rousseau's ur-autobiography, The Confessions, to be the work of a cynic who knew that the promotional value of exposing his petty sins outweighed the shame of revealing them; and points out that Dostoyevsky doesn't believe secular confession works. You can confess only to God.

"The end of confession," Coetzee concludes, "is to tell the truth to and for oneself." He doesn't offer a prescription for that. But his essay brings up the possibility that both an author and his character may not know the truth about themselves; which leads, in Coetzee's case, to the possibility of setting out to make fictions in the hope that, in the discourse between his unreliable self and the unreliable character he has created, he may perceive some truth.

"What is the one theme that keeps recurring from book to book?" Julia asks the interviewer in Summertime, referring to John Coetzee's work. "It is that the woman doesn't fall in love with the man." Certainly Coetzee's novels are about love between men and women, but so are most novels. The common thread that leaps out of Coetzee's work is not so much the gulf between men and women as the gulf between two incompatible life paths, the path of surrender and the path of appetites. Again and again, his books put these two ways of living in opposition: one character will be passionate, lusty, engaged, hungry, while the other will be austere, self-denying, detached, finding virtue in deserts and silence and small things. David Lurie and his daughter in Disgrace; Paul Rayment and Elizabeth Costello in Slow Man; the concentration camp doctor and Michael K in Life and Times of Michael K. Or, to use examples Coetzee has used, Byron and Jesus.

One way of reading Summertime is as a confession, an acknowledgement to women Coetzee has loved, of this double nature. The Byron in John pulls him towards women and engagement in worthy causes, the Jesus in him pulls him away. "His life project was to be gentle," says Julia of John; but goes on to say that this was why she couldn't stay with him.

In one of Summertime's most poignant (and, from Coetzee's point of view, self-accusatory) passages, Adriana, whose husband is dying after having his face smashed in with an axe while working as a security guard, asks why John could not have been a "facilitator" for her and her children, instead of a self-conscious Byron-Christ wannabe; instead of leaving her to cope with an alien bureaucracy alone:

"Sometimes, you know, I would be trudging the streets of that ugly, windy city from one government office to another and I would hear this little cry come from my throat, yi-yi-yi, so soft that no one around me could hear. I was in distress. I was like an animal calling out in distress."

It would be a cold reader who would falter here and ask who Adriana really is in Coetzee's post-modernist house of doubles: is she a real person? Is she made up? This is one of the moments in Coetzee's work where something stirs; where an expression succeeds which very rarely appears in English-language literature, and tends to sound off-key when it does - an expression of love which is not love for a person, but a tenderness, an empathy, with the very idea of life itself. How brave any creature is, just to live.

What was said

Life & Times of Michael K

September 1983: He is stronger than any hero, more subversive than any freedom fighter, simply by being the sort of creature he is. He is unassimilable; he has "passed through the bowels of the state undigested", which is the ultimate heresy of our time. It makes for a strong and memorable novel.

Disgrace

October 1999: Disgrace is an allegory. It is also, paradoxically, a novel of harsh, documentary realism ... It is a chilling read, taut as a drumskin. A far cry from the narrative exuberance of Salman Rushdie or Roddy Doyle, it raises the question of what the Booker is about.

Elizabeth Costello

August 2003: Perhaps Coetzee is now going to give up story-telling for ever, and write philosophical essays instead. Judging by this difficult and unforgiving book, that would be a diminishment. But he is impossible to predict.

Slow Man

September 2005: Coetzee's first novel since he won the Nobel prize begins with a bang and ends with a whimper ... There is something affecting about the writer who lets us watch him seeking to turn his fictions into flesh - and then lets us see why he fails. But the momentum of the book - always slow, like the man at its centre - is lost.

Diary of a Bad Year

September 2007: This isn't a book you'd press on someone new to this great writer. But it's much more than an exercise in letting off some steam inside a tricky fictional frame. Funnier than anything else he's written, if sometimes in a rather donnish way, it eventually becomes unexpectedly moving.

• Summertime is published by Harvill Secker (£17.99). To order a copy for £16.99 with free UK p&p click here

Interesting BBC programme

Edito: Suggestion from Carol Zucker (née Serrurier) from Boksburg, now living between Toulouse and the Pyrénees.

This is an interesting programme on BBC 4, which one will be able to listen to for a week. Sorry I don’t have time to try and put it on the blog otherwise I would have.

www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00mjk5l

Peter Harris' book "In a different time"

For those of us who left South Africa before the Soweto uprising, this lawyer's account of Umkhonto we sizwe activites, brutal government 'legal' repression and illegal hit squads fills in many gaps. Everything in the book is factual and as one reviewer puts it "it reads like a John Grisham novel, but it's all true."

I received it on Friday as a present from a friend who spent the summer in SA and couldn't put it down.

IN A DIFFERENT TIME. Peter Harris. Umuzi, 2008.