My favorite read this year was JM Coetzee's Summertime. I loved the first two volumes in this trilogy, particularly Youth, Coetzee's memoir about coming of age as a writer in England -- or, to be more exact, a writer in the English language. But Summertime, the third volume in the trilogy, is something larger and stranger than a memoir. Narrated in the first person, by the biographer of a dead writer named John Coetzee, the novel focuses on interviews with the most significant women in Coetzee's life. Like all Coetzee's work, its exquisitely written and excruciatingly honest (as in the devastating description of Coetzee's attempts at dancing, by a Brazilian woman he fancied). At times it's also laugh-out-loud funny, a quality I have never associated with this writer. After more than a dozen books he is still capable of surprising.Jennifer Haigh is the author of Mrs.Kimble, Baker Towers and The Condition.
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