Life and Times of Michael K

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 show more 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…” show less

A compelling yet very disturbing read. Even though I finished it a
while ago, I still feel unsettled by it. It's a story of Michael K,
an inarticulate man with a harelip, `not entirely there' yet we
presume of normal intelligence and completely harmless, who is
perpetually not understood or misunderstood by everybody. After the
government permit proved impossible to get, he is illegally on his way
to take his mother, and after she dies her ashes, to the place in the
country where she was born.

The place is South Africa and the time is not defined but dangerous
due to the violent social disturbances. Everybody is under suspicion.
It's dangerous not to be able to explain oneself fully, and so
Michael K is perpetually mistrusted and handled "like a show more 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." He ends up in a strange train turned labour camp, then
shut up in another, and finally on the brink of death from starvation
in a hospital, but runs away from all of them. He can't bear to be
shut up and manages to escape from any enclosure, and as long as he is
free, he can sustain himself on practically nothing, living off what
the land can offer him. He is not fond of killing animals; he'd much
rather live on grubs and wild plants and when he can, and plants he
has planted and grown himself. He is a gardener and this is what
gives him happiness in life.
Despite all his disadvantages, he is unbelievably resilient, stubborn
and self-sufficient. In this respect, it's striking how much he
resembles Lucy from Disgrace, also a gardener, and who also shows all
those qualities under very difficult circumstances. If we assume that
Lucy is a symbol for the solution for SA, then Michel K is one too- he
has no race, does not have clever solutions, hates war, but is
enamoured with the land and loves freedom above everything else. No
matter how damaged he is, he always manages to rebound, so there is hope. show less

A bleak, austere work from a master fiction writer. Coetzee conjures up a book that is part-allegory, part-captivating fiction, and part-news article. His vision of a wartorn South Africa in the mid-to-late 20th century is stark, with not a word out of place. Coetzee takes us to the essence of man, but also to the lives of low, rough individuals, caught by circumstance and cruel society. It's a reminder of the challenges facing people at the bottom of the pecking order, and the unrealistic expectations held by the rest of us towards them. But also an effective, scathing portrait of a society torn at every angle.

"Yo no estoy en guerra." Esta frase la dice K durante su duro recorrido. Sudáfrica sufre una guerra civil, está dividida, y el protagonista de la novela, Michael K, está preocupado, sobre todo por su madre, gravemente enferma. Aunque trabaja de jardinero en Ciudad del Cabo, decide que es hora de abandonar la ciudad y cumplir el deseo de su madre de regresar a la granja en la que se crió. Pero lo que a simple vista parece fácil, no lo es tanto en tiempo de guerra, con los toques de sirena y los controles y la necesidad de conseguir pases. A pesar de los obstáculos que encuentran en su camino, K y su madre no se rendirán. Pero este sólo será el principio de la difícil y terrible odisea de Michael K en su afán por encontrar la show more libertad y la paz.

Coetzee es capaz de hacernos empatizar con los personajes de su novela a través de sus penalidades y sentimientos, utilizando para ello una prosa objetiva, fría y árida, sin concesiones. El interés del libro radica en K, un personaje difícil de comprender, ya que algunas de sus actitudes son ciertamente desconcertantes, pero al que te ves abocado a seguir para saber cómo acabará su historia. show less

I think Coetzee sabotaged himself and took a drastically wrong turn about 2/3 of the way into the book, but I found the first part of the book quite moving. Michael K tries to take his dying mother back to her home in the countryside but she dies on the way, leaving him caught in a nightmare landscape. Ostensibly taking place during a civil war—the time is never specified—Coetzee so overdoes the police state world that it seemed nearly unbelievable to me. So long as Coetzee focuses on Michael’s struggle to survive from day to day, it’s excellent and the first 2/3 of the book are about his efforts to avoid detection. Then, inexplicably (to my mind) Michael gets captured and the book loses all its power and intensity. Coetzee show more switches narrators to a doctor in the rehabilitation/labor where Michael is being held. I found this narrator and his inflexible, unyielding determination to “understand” Michael ruined an otherwise wonderful book. He is constantly badgering Michael and constantly pondering to himself why things might be as they are. I found it a terribly disappointing end to an otherwise powerful story. But maybe you’ll disagree. show less

They want me to open my heart and tell them the story of a
life lived in cages. They want to hear about all the cages
I have lived in, as if I were a budgie or a
white mouse or a monkey.

In the days of apartheid in Capetown, South Africa, Coetzee gives us the story of Michael K, a bullied, downtrodden young man, who finds himself in the middle of a civil war he does not understand. His mother, who is dying, wants to return to her home in Prince Albert, and Michael rigs a cart and sets out to take her there, navigating his way through checkpoints and troops without the necessary papers. The mother dies en route, but that is just the beginning of Michael’s struggles to survive in a society that makes no sense and will not allow anyone of show more Michael’s ilk to live a simple or happy life.

This is a story of isolation and loneliness. Michael becomes so much the secluded individual that he loses any desire or ability to co-exist with other people. The dangers are innumerable and unidentifiable. They come from both sides of the conflict, and no one is likely to be allowed to exist without choosing a side, but Michael is slow and naive, almost childlike, and he cannot even understand the dynamics of the conflict. Even the kind people he encounters befuddle him.

As we begin to wonder if any individual has purpose in such a society, Michael also grapples with what his existence means, and Coetzee asks the question in captivating prose:

Every grain of this earth will be washed clean by the rain, he told himself, and dried by the sun and scoured by the wind, before the seasons turn again. There will be not a grain left bearing my marks, just as my mother has now, after her season in the earth, been washed clean, blown about, and drawn up into the leaves of grass.

A little more than halfway through the novel, Coetzee switches from the story we have been seeing exclusively in a third person voice from Michael’s viewpoint, to a first person voice of a medical officer tasked with Michael’s care in an internment camp. It seems to me that Coetzee wished to show us the human face of the opposition and demonstrate how difficult it would be to separate the players into strictly good and evil camps. This doctor is struggling, as well, with making sense of the system he serves.

I wanted to say, “you ask why you are important Michaels. The answer is that you are not important. But that does not mean you are forgotten. No one is forgotten. Remember the sparrows. Five sparrows are sold for a farthing, and even they are not forgotten.”

I felt acutely the helplessness of Michael’s situation and the attempt at self-preservation that takes the form of self-destruction. Michael rejects any interaction with society, either those who share his position or those who claim authority over him. While we are never told that Michael is black, or for that matter that the doctor or soldiers are white, we instinctively know this to be so. Michael’s deformity that is the source of ridicule and derision, we are told, is his harelip that he has had from birth, but it is clear to me that we are meant to see that it is in truth his color, his class, his position in society that are his handicaps, and just like his physical deformity, they are not of his making or in his control. I found it interesting that more than one character in the novel asks if any attempt was ever made to correct Michael’s deformity, and when told “no”, they each remark how easily the correction could have been made.

Profound writing. show less

Life & Times of Michael K by J.M. Coetzee (1983) is an oddly moving little book about an oddly moving little man. Michael K is an unlikely protagonist. The book begins with his mother’s revulsion at the cleft lip he is born with. Michael spends his school years in an institution, visited by his mother, then becomes a gardener. He cares for his sickly mother until the growing social unrest in their city of Cape Town, South Africa, threatens to take away both their jobs. After a riot in their neighborhood, she persuades him to take her to the countryside where she grew up, but she dies before they arrive.

At this point, Michael is cut loose. The first two-thirds of the book is the oddly clinical chronicling of his long and lonely path. show more He is picked up as a vagrant and spends time in a camp where he is told he is not a prisoner, but that he will be shot if he tries to leave. He eventually finds the farm where he thinks his mother lived, and secretly plants a pumpkin patch, living like an animal in a burrow, before he is picked up and sent back to camp. Michael wonders why he must do as he is told, but never seems to get emotional. He simply leaves when he can.

Part two starts out clinically as well, as it is told from the point of view of a medic in Michael’s last camp. However, this man becomes moved by Michael’s case, almost in awe of the quiet man’s unreachability, and dreams of following him back to the country when Michael escapes yet again. He even starts addressing his musings directly to Michael:

You have never asked for anything, yet you have become an albatross around my neck. Your bony arms are knotted behind my head, I walk bowed under the weight of you.

I take this to mean that the white colonists have created a huge burden for themselves by taking away the natives’ freedom; each man comes to represent his race. However, one of the remarkable things about Michael K is that Coetzee never once describes a person as black, white, or colored. I can only assume that Michael is black or colored, and that the medic is white. Finally, the very brief part three finds Michael back in Cape Town, and willing to tell his story to other people surviving by their wits, away from the camps.

I am reminded of several other works: first, the South African setting reminds me of Nadine Gordimer’s The Conservationist, also about race, and farming. Michael’s last initial, K, as well as the thoughtless bureaucracy that labels this harmless gardener as an arsonist and guerilla, makes me think of Kafka’s The Trial. Finally, the life-or-death bleakness of Michael’s travels through a war-torn landscape reminds me of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Like The Road, this novel is moving without being sentimental. I look forward to reading Nobel prizewinner Coetzee’s next Booker winner, Disgrace (1999). show less