Interesting discussion. Somewhat relatedly, it's interesting to contrast this whole Roth fiasco with what Coetzee achieved in his faux-memoir "Summertime." Coetzee seems to foreshadow this whole mess when one of the characters being interviewed by Coetzee's fictional biographer says something like "is this just going to be a book where people get to settle old scores?" "Summertime" offers a nice meditation on the limits of fact-checking, the unreliability of memory, the inability of an author to control the narrative about themselves. Roth would have been wise to heed its message.
I decided to track down the actual passage, and this seems so apt for what happened here. The first speaker is "Coetzee's" former colleague, and the second speaker is the fictional biographer who is interviewing him (part of the conceit of "Summertime" is that Coetzee has already died). This "interview" takes place towards the end of the novel, after the reader has already read the fictional accounts of two previous women who had romantic entanglements with Coetzee:
"Let me ask: Leaving aside Sophie, and leaving aside the cousin, was either of the women you mention emotionally involved with Coetzee"
Yes. Both. In different ways. Which I have yet to explore.
Shouldn't that give you pause? With your very narrow roster of sources, will you not inevitably come out with an account or set of accounts that are slanted towards the personal and the intimate at the expense of the man's actual achievements as a writer? Worse: do you not run the risk of allowing your book to become no more than - forgive me putting it in this way - no more than a settling of scores, personal scores?
Interesting discussion. Somewhat relatedly, it's interesting to contrast this whole Roth fiasco with what Coetzee achieved in his faux-memoir "Summertime." Coetzee seems to foreshadow this whole mess when one of the characters being interviewed by Coetzee's fictional biographer says something like "is this just going to be a book where people get to settle old scores?" "Summertime" offers a nice meditation on the limits of fact-checking, the unreliability of memory, the inability of an author to control the narrative about themselves. Roth would have been wise to heed its message.
I decided to track down the actual passage, and this seems so apt for what happened here. The first speaker is "Coetzee's" former colleague, and the second speaker is the fictional biographer who is interviewing him (part of the conceit of "Summertime" is that Coetzee has already died). This "interview" takes place towards the end of the novel, after the reader has already read the fictional accounts of two previous women who had romantic entanglements with Coetzee:
"Let me ask: Leaving aside Sophie, and leaving aside the cousin, was either of the women you mention emotionally involved with Coetzee"
Yes. Both. In different ways. Which I have yet to explore.
Shouldn't that give you pause? With your very narrow roster of sources, will you not inevitably come out with an account or set of accounts that are slanted towards the personal and the intimate at the expense of the man's actual achievements as a writer? Worse: do you not run the risk of allowing your book to become no more than - forgive me putting it in this way - no more than a settling of scores, personal scores?
That's a great citation and eerily prophetic! I'll look up the Coetzee book.