, the third and final instalment, Coetzee's struggles with the possibility of honest acknowledgment hijack the very structure of the book. Convinced that what's done is done, he seeks less to apologise than acknowledge - and, ultimately, to aestheticise his acknowledgement, transfiguring the truth into art. , the 19-year-old John's 30-year-old girlfriend digs out his diary and reads all the ugly things he's written about her, Coetzee writes: 'If he is to censor himself from expressing ignoble emotions - resentment at having his flat invaded, or shame at his own failures as a lover - how will those emotions ever be transfigured and turned into poetry?' John doesn't regret his ignoble thoughts nearly as much as he regrets not having voiced them more honestly in the first place. He fixates on the liberating promise of sex and the burden of love, and ruminates endlessly on the extent to which literary expression might transmute the sting of past wounds into something of lasting worth. Throughout this period, John's anxieties define him more than anything else. He longs for an idealised abstraction of love, but stiffens at the slightest sign of affection or dependency.

Severing himself from his family, John works as an IBM computer programmer. (2002), begins with John, an aspiring poet, studying maths at the University of Cape Town, then follows him to London on his quest for culture. But, unable to return the intensity of her love, he also resents it, as he later comes to resent the affections of the various mistresses he suffers in the second instalment. He despises his irresponsible and oppressive father, a disgraced lawyer, and relies on the unwavering love of his mother. Young John worries endlessly about being 'normal'.

(1997), tracks Coetzee's school days in Worcester and Cape Town, South Africa. That one word does wonders to distance Coetzee from his own narrative the reader is liberated to appreciate his work as literature. The most effective tool in this process is the third-person: he. Instead of shielding his protagonist - his alter ego, John - from criticism with a dulling hum of rote self-critique, Coetzee splays him open, preserving the pain of each emotion experienced. In his trilogy of 'fictionalised memoirs', JM Coetzee largely pushes beyond self-deprecation with flashes of self-loathing and egoism.

Memoirists who do rid their work of implicit pleas for sympathy often do so by way of equally tedious self-deprecation. Empathy isn't burdensome, but obligations are, particularly when it's implied that letting them go unfulfilled might constitute a moral failing. It costs to realise that a protagonist is a real person with an ego like an egg readers feel an obligation to coddle the author with empathy. Perhaps the most taxing aspect of personal narrative is the very thing that gives it value: the truth.

Summertime by jm coetzee summary