Scenes from Provincial Life: Boyhood. Youth. Summertime (Stseny iz Zhizni Provintsiala)

John Maxwell Coetzee was born in South Africa, worked in England and the United States, and lives in Australia. A two-time Booker Prize winner and a Nobel Prize laureate in literature, he has never attended an awards ceremony, rarely gives interviews, and lives, one might say, as a recluse. He rarely speaks of his work, and almost never of himself. This makes his 'autobiographical' trilogy, 'Scenes from a Provincial,' full of episodes of shocking candor, all the more unique. 'The reader is left with a detailed, unvarnished mosaic portrait of a creator striving only for the hard to achieve. Not all the facts match what we know about the real Coetzee, but the resulting stereoscopic effect is all the more intriguing' (The Seattle Times). From childhood in the South African outback, through adolescence at Cape Town University and chilly London, to the 'summertime' of adulthood, we see Coetzee (or 'Coetzee') as intimately as we've ever seen him: 'a self-portrait both uncompromisingly confessional and intricately fluid' (The New York Review of Books). The trilogy is being translated by Sergei Ilyin (1948–2017), a renowned interpreter of the works of Vladimir Nabokov and Joseph Heller, T. H. White and Mervyn Peake, Stephen Fry, Michel Faber, and many other modern classics. The translation was completed in 2011 but is being published here for the first time.