AustLit

'With the publication of The Death of Jesus (2019), following The Childhood of Jesus (2013) and The Schooldays of Jesus (2016), J. M. Coetzee's Jesus novels are a completed trilogy. Baffling to reviewers and critics, attempts have been made to situate the Jesus novels in Coetzee's previous oeuvre, and to establish continuity in the author's literary thinking and style. This essay highlights Coetzee's identification with Jesus in Summertime (2009), the last instalment in the author's autobiographical trilogy, where an author named John Coetzee is already dead. The essay reads Summertime as an elaborate ‘posthumous’ confessional design meant by Coetzee to evade the obstacles of secular confession and to enable (fictional) redemption and absolution. Coetzee's invocation of Jesus as ‘a guide’ in turn serves to code authorial death and resurrection as a final act of sacrifice and taking responsibility. Thus providing a sense of finality to Coetzee's autobiographical trilogy, the confessional design of Summertime prepares for a new phase in the author's writing, in the name of Jesus.' (Publication abstract)