Scenes from the Life of a Provincial. Adolescence. Youth. Summer Time

John Maxwell Coetzee was born in South Africa, worked in England and the USA, and lives in Australia. A two-time Booker Prize winner and a Nobel laureate in literature, he has never attended any award ceremony, rarely gives interviews, and can be said to live as a recluse. He rarely speaks about his work and almost never about himself. The more unique is the “autobiographical” trilogy “Scenes from the Life of a Provincial,” full of episodes of shocking frankness, where “a detailed, unvarnished, mosaic portrait of the creator striving only for what is difficult to achieve forms before the reader. Not all the facts coincide with what we know about the biography of the real Coetzee, but the resulting stereo effect is all the more interesting” The Seattle Times. From childhood in the South African hinterland, through youth at Cape Town University and cold London to the “summer time” of maturity — we see Coetzee or “Coetzee” as closely as we have never seen before: “a self-portrait uncompromisingly confessional and at the same time intricately vague” The New York Review of Books. The trilogy is translated by Sergey 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 contemporary classics. The translation was prepared back in 2011 but is published for the first time.