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159 Book Notes ety as a whole seems distracted. In “Kokomo,” a small Indiana city emits a low-grade hum that only some people can hear, or, more accurately, to which only some people are paying close enough attention to notice. A young boy, J.J., begins to have nightmares triggered by the noise. They start as the usual childhood fears but transform over several years into apocalyptic visions à la Sodom and Gomorrah. J.J. warns that God is about to cleanse the world unless more people pay attention. “I can’t believe He’d sweep the whole town away,” he says. “Even if it’s only ten of us who hear the noise, I have to believe He’d spare us.” Here, paying attention is literally the key to survival. In “Kokomo,” as in several other stories, Pitt plays with the line between realism and surrealism: the town hums, a woman sees apparitions of dogs, a rebel leader in a war-torn country hires a mercenary anthem-writer, a Parisian accountant channels the spirit of a recently dead anarchist. This surrealism manages to be both comical and moving. There is an absurdity in these imaginative stories that delights, but in the middle of all this mirth, Pitt socks us with the understanding that these lives suffer from the same damning isolation as those firmly anchored in reality. With these surreal stories, Pitt alerts us to the social critique that is present, but camouflaged, in his more realistic stories. In Attention Please Now almost no one pays attention to anyone else, distracted instead by the buzz of modern life. It is a societal case of attention deficit disorder. Pitt deftly portrays this tragic absurdity: both its humor and pathos. But he goes further than that, allowing his characters to escape from their loneliness by connecting with other human beings. When his characters finally do pay attention to each other’s needs, a much-needed life raft inflates for them all. Summertime, by J. M. Coetzee Viking, 2009 reviewed by Emily J. Benson It sometimes seems there’s an inverse relationship between an artist’s talent and his or her achievements as a human being. Think of Dostoevsky’s gambling, Hemingway’s alcoholism, Plath’s suicide, Salinger’s reclusiveness. Why then bother with colorado review 160 literary biography at all unless it’s to satisfy a lurid desire that lurks in all of us for sordid drama and gossip? J. M. Coetzee’s latest fictionalized autobiography seems to pose the same question. Summertime is the most recent volume in what now constitutes a trilogy of fictionalized memoirs, beginning with Boyhood and continuing with Youth. Like its antecedents, Summertime does include events and facts from Coetzee’s own life, such as his departure from the us in the early 1970s and return to South Africa, during which time he published Dusklands. But much of this alleged memoir is pure fabrication. For example, as opposed to leading a largely solitary existence shared only with his aging father in a suburb of Cape Town, he was married with two children. Nor did his father become a widower until 1985. Then there’s the minor detail of Coetzee being conveniently deceased as a pretext for the author’s latest experiment in genre promiscuity. Summertime consists of five interviews conducted by Mr. Vincent, an English biographer, and is bookended by fragments from Coetzee’s notebooks. The first interview is with Julia, a feisty and witty daughter of Hungarian immigrants, who’s working as a psychiatrist in Canada when Mr. Vincent seeks her out. At the time she met Coetzee, she was trapped in a miserable marriage with an inveterate philanderer, and willfully embarked on an affair with the solitary writer, who, she recalls, reminded her of “one of those flightless birds” or “an abstracted scientist who had wandered by mistake out of his laboratory.” Overall she was unimpressed with their affair, diagnosing Coetzee with a form of sexual “autism” after the author attempted to make love in time with Schubert’s String Quartet. Julia concludes that “he was not built for love,” but concedes he always treated her with the “utmost gentleness.” She then explains: “That...

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