Life & Times of Michael K (1983)

A novel in parts. The first being a comically miserable little tale of a Kafka character in Sud-Afrika, the second of a doctor's philosophical investigations of this man, and the third being some hippy-dippy nonsense.

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I’ve read Coetzee’s Disgrace and absolutely loved the book. The Life and Times of Michael K is a small but equally powerful book.
There are three chapters or sections of this book. The first and third is the story of Michael K told in third person. These sections bookend a middle one which tells Michael’s story from the perspective of an unnamed doctor under whose care Michael finds himself. This double-telling, helps to paint a fuller portrait of a baffling and strangely innocent individual caught in a no-win situation in a society that has completely broken down. Michael K is portrayed as a complete innocent who tries unsuccessfully to stay above the fray. He encounters obstacles with which he is completely unequipped to deal or understand. Though Coetzee writes about K’s encounters with South African bureaucrats that even the most logical and articulate person couldn’t handle, he clearly is writing about a universal existence in an irrational and brutal world devoid of any social order. As the book progresses, K. abandons what little language he has, much to the frustration of those who want to help him as well as to those who want to harm him. I found this lack of language a moving literary device.
Coetzee tips his hat to Kafka both through the name of the main character as well as to references to “The Castle” and it seems to me that his subject matter, though specific to South Africa is similar to that of Kafka’s books. Both authors grapple with the concept of freedom and the individual's attempt to make sense of a world devoid of sense. ( )

Can reading a book give you physical and mental pain? If yes, this is one of those books. (Thank goodness it’s a short book.) You follow his loneliness, his hunger, his mistreatment by so many, his war-torn surroundings. But you can’t stop, either. You’re absorbed by Michael K; you want to know what happens to K, you want to know how he manages the steps of his life with his supposed ‘simple’ mind.

A long section 1 is entirely in K’s view. How he sees the world, how he takes each step of his life. I read this section very, very slowly. With little dialogue and frankly unpredictable and unfamiliar situations, you drink in the words as you mentally paint each scene in your mind and create your own definition of K.

A section 2 is entirely from the view of Dutch doctor(?). With K refusing to tell his story, the doctor interpret out loud to us, the readers, what he thought and what he saw. This section started out brilliantly, and the different viewing angle was refreshing. I wish it had been shorter, ending shortly after the letter he wrote where he had signed ‘friend’. My head was full of images and my own interpretations of who K is from section 1. It felt odd that the author seemed to have tried to cram in an infinite number of words describing and interpreting what K’s world might have been via this second view.

Lastly, section 3, provides the wrap-up – where K returns to where he started. More clearly than ever, he has but one thought and one goal in life – to be a gardener of this land; this land that needs healing from the war, from all the tragedies in life. Connection to the earth is the only true meaning.

I didn’t take away from this book that K was above all others morally. I took away that K lived as morally as he knew how.

Some nuggets from this book:

What happens when someone grew up so alone, so long to remain alone, fearing others, but wonders (at brief moments) if he should have a ‘normal’ life with a wife and children, wondering if he’s in love at one point while at ‘camp’. It’s not explored in depth, but you sense him touching upon this conflict – wanting but mostly NOT wanting.

He didn’t grow up with compassion, nor is it taught to him. In his first encounter where he faced genuine compassion for the first time, he faced confusion. His friend: “People must help each other, that’s what I believe.” K allows this utterance to sink into his mind: “Do I believe in helping people? he wondered. He might help people, he might not help them, he did not know before hand, anything was possible. He did not seem to have a believe, or did not seem to have a believe regarding help. Perhaps I am the stony ground, he thought.” K was still learning to connect with people at this point, and for that matter, learning to appreciate people. In later pages, he did express compassion – offering to hold the two girls tight at the ‘camp’ and even finding his voice for the bleeding guard.

My sadness over how little love and care K received in his life that a pie can impact him so deeply.
“’why don’t you go and get us both a pie,’ and passed K a one-rand coin. K went to the bakery and brought back two hot chicken pies. He sat beside his friend on the bench and ate. The pie was so delicious that tears came to his eyes…”

For a ‘simple’ minded individual, I applaud K’s ingenuity. His building of the wheel/cart, catapult, irrigation system, house/burrow, and vent-tunnel with no real materials.

The gardener that he is:
His Pumpkin is his Firstborn.
“…enough men had gone off to war… there must be men to stay behind and keep gardening alive, or at least the idea of gardening; because once that cord was broken, the earth would grow hard and forget her children…”

Hunger, a theme throughout the book, haunts.
“As a child K had been hungry….. Then he had grown older and stopped wanting. Whatever the nature of the beast that had howled inside him, it was starved into stillness.“

Living in times of war, to find peace, freedom, and be simply left alone. Forgo the normal definition of life.
“What a pity that to live in times like these a man must be ready to live like a beast. A man who wants to live cannot live In a house with lights in the windows. He must live in a hole and hide by day. A man must live so that he leaves no trace of his living. That is what it has come to.”
“…hundreds of thousands of people were daily following their cockroach pilgrimages in flight from the war”
“…would it not be better to bury myself in the bowels of the earth than become a creature of theirs?”

Some brilliant lines in section 2, where the second person view visualizes K for the reader:
“He is like one of those toys made of sticks held together with rubber hands.”
“Can’t you tell the difference between a thin man and a skeleton?”
“He is like a stone, a pebble that, having lain around quietly minding its own business since the dawn of time, is now suddenly picked up and tossed randomly…”
“….Maybe he only eats the bread of freedom.”
“I alone see you….. a human soul above and beneath classification, a soul blessedly untouched by doctrine, untouched by history… You are precious… you are the last of your kind…” ( )

A powerful, powerful book. Michael K is a South African living during the heyday of Apartheid and civil war. He simply wants to live his life and care for his mother, going so far as to attempt to wheel her to the place in the country where she grew up when her health starts to wane and life in the city becomes increasingly tenuous. It’s a fool’s mission, for that place and that time are gone, moreover, his mother is not up to the journey. Michael K wanders on somewhat aimlessly, living off the land, under the harshest of conditions, and subject to roundup and detention in work camps by roving bands of the military who insist disingenuously that the camps are not prisons.

The book was written in 1983 at a time when Apartheid was white-hot politically, but despite that, Coetzee writes with great restraint; he does not make explicit moral judgments, he lets these develop with simple actions and dialogue, and in fact does not allude to race in the entire novel.

Amidst this difficult backdrop, the story is one of life-affirming transcendence. Michael K is in a brutal, absurd situation, but he is not one to get angry. He is simple-minded and often mistaken for being unintelligent. His body wastes away from lack of food such that he begins to look like “one of those toys made of sticks held together with rubber bands.” And yet in this story he comes across as the most enlightened of all, rising above his conditions, and understanding that in the time of war and chaos, some must keep the tether to life and to mother earth uncut.

Quotes:
On Apartheid, and the controlling of the many by the few:
“What if there were millions, more millions than anyone knew, living in camps, living on alms, living off the land, living by guile, creeping away in corners to escape the times, too canny to put out flags and draw attention to themselves and be counted? What if the hosts were far outnumbered by the parasites, the parasites of idleness and the other secret parasites in the army and the police force and the schools and factories and offices, the parasites of the heart? Could the parasites then still be called parasites? Parasites too had flesh and substance; parasites too could be preyed upon. Perhaps in truth whether the camp was declared a parasite on the town or the town a parasite on the camp depended on no more than on who made his voice heard loudest.”

On charity that is not based on the goodness of one’s heart, this after Dysentery had swept through the camp:
“’Anyway,’ said Robert, ‘they got a big fright. After that they started dropping pellets in the water and digging latrines and spraying for flies and bringing buckets of soup. But do you think they do it because they love us? Not a hope. They prefer it that we live because we look too terrible when we get sick and die. If we just grew thin and turned into paper and then into ash and floated away, they wouldn’t give a stuff for us. They just don’t want to get upset. They want to go to sleep feeling good.’”

On children, and parents:
“When my mother was dying in hospital, he thought, when she knew her end was coming, it was not me she looked to but someone who stood behind me: her mother or the ghost of her mother. To me she was a woman but to herself she was still a child calling to her mother to hold her hand and help her. And her own mother, in the secret life we do not see, was a child too. I come from a line of children without end.”

On gardening, and valuing life:
“…enough men had gone off to war saying the time for gardening was when the war was over; whereas there must be men to stay behind and keep gardening alive, or at least the idea of gardening; because once that cord was broken, the earth would grow hard and forget her children.”

“He thought of the pumpkin leaves pushing through the earth. Tomorrow will be their last day, he thought: the day after that they will wilt, and the day after that they will die, while I am out here in the mountains. Perhaps if I started at sunrise and ran all day I would not be too late to save them, them and the other seeds that are going to die underground, though they do not know it, that they are never going to see the light of day. There was a cord of tenderness that stretched from him to the patch of earth beside the dam and must be cut. It seemed to him that one could cut a cord like that only so many times before it would not grow again.”

On living in the moment:
“He was neither pleased nor displeased when there was work to do; it was all the same. He could lie all afternoon with his eyes open, staring at the corrugations in the roof-iron and the tracings of rust; his mind would not wander, he would see nothing but the iron, the lines would not transform themselves into pattern or fantasy; he was himself, lying in his own house, the rust was merely rust, all that was moving was time, bearing him onward in its flow.”

On hardening, or perhaps becoming more stoic:
“I have lost my love for that kind of earth, he thought, I no longer care to feel that kind of earth between my fingers. It is no longer the green and the brown that I want but the yellow and the red; not the wet but the dry; not the dark but the light; not the soft but the hard. I am becoming a different kind of man, he thought, if there are two kinds of man. If I were cut, he thought, holding his wrists out, looking at his wrists, the blood would no longer gush from me but seep, and after a little seeping dry and heal. I am becoming smaller and harder and drier every day. If I were to die here, sitting in the mouth of my cave looking out over the plain with my knees under my chin, I would be dried out by the wind in a day, I would be preserved whole, like someone in the desert drowned in sand.”

And this one, from the perspective of the Dutchman in chapter two:
“He is like a stone, a pebble that, having lain around quietly minding its own business since the dawn of time, is now suddenly picked up and tossed randomly from hand to hand. A hard little stone, barely aware of its surroundings, enveloped in itself and its interior life. He passes through these institutions and camps and hospitals and God knows what else like a stone. Through the intestines of the war. An unbearing, unborn creature. I cannot really think of him as a man, though he is older than me by most reckonings.”

I love this one, converting a gesture of punishment into one of enlightenment:
“One of the teachers used to make his class sit with their hands on their heads, their lips pressed tightly together and their eyes closed, while he patrolled the rows with his long ruler. In time, to K, the posture grew to lose its meaning as punishment and became an avenue of reverie; he remembered sitting, hands on head, through hot afternoons with doves cooing in the gum trees and the chant of the tables coming from other classrooms, struggling with a delicious drowsiness. Now, in front of his cave, he sometimes locked his fingers behind his head, closed his eyes, and emptied his mind, wanting nothing, looking forward to nothing.”

And:
“Ducking through the fences, he could feel a craftsman’s pleasure in wire spanned so taut that it hummed when it was plucked. Nonetheless, he could not imagine himself spending his life driving stakes into the ground, erecting fences, dividing up the land. He thought of himself not as something heavy that left tracks behind it, but if anything as a speck upon the surface of an earth too deeply asleep to notice the scratch of ant-feet, the rasp of butterfly teeth, the tumbling of dust.”

Lastly, on war, this one again from the Dutchman in chapter two:
“What would yield the greater benefit to mankind: if I spent the afternoon taking stock in the dispensary, or if I went to the beach and took off my clothes and lay in my underpants absorbing the benign spring sun, watching the children frolic in the water, later buying an ice-cream from the kiosk on the parking lot, if the kiosk is still there? What did Noel ultimately achieve laboring at his desk to balance the bodies out against the bodies in? Would he not be better off taking a nap? Maybe the universal sum of happiness would be increased if we declared this afternoon a holiday and went down to the beach, commandant, doctor, chaplain, PT instructors, guards, dog-handlers all together with the six hard cases from the detention block, leaving behind the concussion case to look after things. Perhaps we might meet some girls. For what reason were we waging the war, after all, but to augment the sum of happiness in the universe? Or was I misremembering, was that another war I was thinking of?” ( )

A terribly sad and melancholy story about a not-quite-right young man caught in the vortex of the wars in South Africa. Interestingly, this wasn't in the slightest about race, but was so focussed on this one man's journey through time and space. I just love Coetzee's prose, so clean, so simple, yet jam packed with meaning and imagery. Just fantastic. ( )