Rating: 
Summary: A difficult story, told well
Review: Even without the K after the Michael, it would be difficult to read this book without thinking about Kafka. Michael K is a simple gardner from a class and a situation where to be simple is not to be protected, but to be unnecessary and even guilty. Guilty of what? Guilty of being expendable, of being bewildered, of being unable to cope or understand the different categories of change around him. Coetzee has created a character who has been judged and found wanting long before he understands that this is even a possibility.
What is interesting about Michael and what is also one of the organising aspects of the book is that Michael does not stay in passive opposition to his situation but gradually moves to a kind of active opposition-- at least as active as such a limited character with limited power is capable of carrying out. A lot of the criticism of this book talks about post-colonial literature and racial relations and all of those things are certainly backdrop to the story, but it is mostly about power imbalance and the effect of power imbalance on the people least equipped to do anything except express confusion. Michael K is a disenfranchised everyman, someone who is only as useful as society is kind.
This is only the second of two Coetzee books that I have read. I unintentionally picked the two books with which he won Booker prizes (this one and Disgrace). If this had been the first Coetzee that I picked up, as good as it is, it may well be that I would not have rushed to read another one. It is a relentlessly unhappy book, and its vision of freedom that Michael is able to achieve is not a glorious one. Michael apparently has only the freedom to be misunderstood and protected, misunderstood and persecuted, or alone and dead. As much as the world around him is creating Michael, it is hard to imagine a world in which he ever had the possibility of happiness. That kind of bleakness is hard to read and there is not even Beckett-style bitter humor to lighten the pages or encourage the reader. Disgrace was not exactly a happy book, but there was a complexity in it that I somehow miss in Life & Times.
It is not where I would start if I had not read any other Coetzee first, but it is difficult to argue with the brilliance of the writing (or the writer).
Rating:
Summary: this, our land.
Review: Having heard the name, "J.M. Coetzee," dropped at a Cambridge dog-park, a fine place to listen for an elusive literary reference or amusing, critical waltz, I sought after this author, "the nape of good hope," as he was praisingly referred to by a man with all the poor nature of his notoriously ill-intentioned mix-of-poodle. Smiles of pure generosity; few understood his meaning at the time. Well, turns out, there was little hope allowed for in the persistently unsentimental treatment of both character and action in "Life and Times...," but much, however, contained in the sight and stylistic mastery of its author, Coetzee. One hears Coetzee accused of a kind of provinciality; I do not know -- but, I certainly think: dear god, not here. An author so able to give a simple, though elegant, philosophical meaning to the life and bad circumstance of such an assumedly vulgar typicality as Michael K is due a massive hats-off. In the absence of humor or ironic caricature is the stark progression of a gardener through territory made infertile for it. This telling is a third-person, as they say, omniscient account; but nonetheless we are most often peering about through the dull eyes of Michael, though not from his unfathoming conscience, at catastrophe. The view is as oppressive as the worst hour on the Warner Brothers Network though in its sureness-fired. Instead of commercially absurd, it is cruelly convincing in its work-a-day insufferability. Hats-off to its author; although I wonder who in this day will labor such a stolid voice as his. Nevermind it, good art here, Coetzee is champion.
Rating: 
Summary: It's all right...
Review: I had to read this for a college class, and as short as it is, I probably wouldn't have finished it if I didn't have to. Considering Coetzee is one of SA's most respected current novelists, I was very sorry I didn't enjoy it as much as I had expected I would. I probably should try some of his other novels, but his writing style just doesn't appeal to me enough.
Rating: 
Summary: our good luck
Review: I have both read & taught Michael K. and consider it a privilege & stroke of luck to be alive at the same time as J. M. Coetzee. He is deeply serious; he cuts himself & his reader no slack, which is the greatest gift a writer can bestow.
Rating:
Summary: Now I know why he got the Nobel Prize
Review: I read a total of 9 of his books. This is his best book. it is very moving, very well written, and very satisfying to read. i am amazed at the change in voice/POV in the second part of the story. Now I know why he got the Nobel Prize! This is by far his best book.
If you want to read books from South African writers or you just want to read Coetzee's work- this book is a must read. Another book of his that I also recommend is "Waiting for Barbarians."
Rating:
Summary: Great book!
Review: I read Coetzee's "Disgrace" before I read this and I was instantly hooked on to his style of compassionate and insightful writing. Michael K shows a fresh way of looking at war, peace, love, compassion and the very nature of our existence. Beyond intelligence, logic and conventions - its nature at its pristine form. The last lines of the book are truly outstanding.
Rating:
Summary: An excellent story of dignity in post-civil war South Africa
Review: I really enjoyed this slim volume of survival on the edges on a surreal post-civil war RSA. Michael K.'s attempts to escape the brutality & degradation he sees around him lead to an exploration of what we really require to survive. Coetzee's commentary on a continually
intrusive civilization applies not only to the RSA in his
not-so-distant future (the book was written while apartheid
was still very much in force)but to all environments in which society interferes with a personal and private attempt
to live independently. Buy, borrow, or steal this book.
Rating:
Summary: The delicate nature of being human
Review: In a world flooded by turmoil and bereft of innocence, Michael K, simple, skeletal gardener and loyal son, stands alone. In the midst of war in South Africa, K withdraws himself from life, as we know it, and regresses, devolves, in order to survive his true bereavement; the loss of opportunity to tend the gardens of the city. This may appear callous at first, considering the event of his mother's death early in the story, and perhaps oversimplified, but K is 'simple', after all.
The backdrop of war is a clever one. War relies heavily on definition, on who we are and which side we are on, with the hope of those in power that a conclusion to this issue will indicate what is to be 'done' with us. It is an assumption the other characters in the story have, their seeming ability to define or classify K variously as homeless, as a walking representation of death, or as a saviour, that builds the concept of his character for the reader. He fits all, and simultaneously none, of these personas. K is resistant to any entirely accurate definition, as everyone in existence is, and it is refreshing, in a world so obsessed with naming and classifying, to be reminded of this.
There is a poignant contrast between K's worldview and his occupation. He is very much involved with the 'smaller picture', primarily focussed on what he is able to do 'right now', looking to his own immediate experiences as a guide. Even his name, 'K', is a reduction to the barest of necessities. But gardening, for which he expresses his only great desire, is innately long-term, requiring the ability to predict and counter outcomes and problems, respectively. This polarity demonstrates, with precision, two spheres of human existence, the instinctual and the rational. Another contrast is expressed through K's desire to grow food, and his unconscionably skeletal frame. His physical form is the one area of K that is capable of reflecting the loss of 'self' he carries, while simultaneously seeking the sustenance that might see him endure long enough to find it.
Despite the evident references to an Apartheid South Africa, and indeed, this was the context for Coetzee while he wrote the 1983 Booker Prize winner, this transcendental story is truly about finding a sense of unity within ourselves. It is about the solidarity our humanity affords us, and the achingly unavoidable frailty so inadmissible by most, and yet welcomed by Michael K, often required to reach it.
Rating:
Summary: The skeletal remains of the black man
Review: In Coetzee's novel, Michael K. is the embodiment of apartheid aggression and brutality heaped on the black man. Powerful writing manifests itself in Coetzee's minds-eye of time and place. At the end of the story when Michael K. wanders the beach barely clothed and dying from starvation it showed that the apartheid era left nothing more and nothing less than the skeletal remains of the black man. As a side note to this, since at the time of this writing Coetzee had just received the Booker prize for DISGRACE; it makes me wonder if any of the journalist questioners read any of his other books. He was asked why DISGRACE is so dark. Darkness is at the heart of his writing as in Michael K. or Dostoevsky's descent into madness or an elderly white woman's suffering from cancer whose friendship with a black man ends with her suicide assisted death.
Rating:
Summary: I disappear...
Review: In the typhoon of civil war, or in the suffocating charity hug of life camp, what we witness as this story goes on is the vanishing of Michael K, or at least of his body, from the face of the earth. And the most amazing thing is that it is a willing action, the protest of silence against a whole system that tries continually to write him dowm and so to swallow him. The only true rebellion left is to hide, to find one "blessedly neglected corner", and hope that noone will come to chase you out of it. This novel is about the fear to live and the impossibility of coming to terms with a world which has no intention of dealing with u for what u are, but only for what it wants u to be. A situation that is, or can be, true for everyone, everywhere.
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