Life and Times of Michael K

Rating:
Summary: Complex, Gripping, Excellent
Review: J. M. Coetzee was awared the Booker Prize for this book back in 1983, so I had great expectations for this book. "Life & Times of Michael K" did not disappoint me, and I think it is highly deserving of the Booker prize.

The story is set in South Africa, in the midst of poverty, Apartheid, and Civil war. We enter the story when Michael K is 30 years old, and working as a gardener. Michael K was born with a harelip, which has never been fixed. His mother, Anna K, works as a maid for the Buhrmann family. As the civil war erupts the family Anna was working for flees out of town. While continuing to watch out for the apartment and the belongings to her employer, Anna falls ill. She has only one wish that K takes her back to Prince Albert where she was born.

On their way there (fleeing in the night, K pushing his mother in wheelbarrow) a day or two in to their journey, Anna is admitted to a hospital where she shortly after passes away. K is devastated with grief, and he looses all energy to continue. He finally makes it to Prince Albert, carrying his mothers ashes in a box. The war catches up with K, and he is taken to a camp where everyone is given food and shelter in return for their labour. K (or "Michaels" as one of the guards calls him) seeks no physical contacts with others, he feels no hunger and as a result, we see this mentally sleeping skeleton emerge.

K continues to flee from the camp where he is held. We follow his struggle to live his life the way he wants to, free and as one with nature.

The author introduces us to a topic that those of us who are not South Africans will probably never quite understand. Coetzee is a splendid writer, and his writing style is compelling, dark, but immensely beautiful.

A remarkable read reflecting on a man's inner strength. Highly recommended!

Rating:
Summary: Complex, Gripping, Excellent
Review: J. M. Coetzee was awared the Booker Prize for this book back in 1983, so I had great expectations for this book. "Life & Times of Michael K" did not disappoint me, and I think it is highly deserving of the Booker prize.

The story is set in South Africa, in the midst of poverty, Apartheid, and Civil war. We enter the story when Michael K is 30 years old, and working as a gardener. Michael K was born with a harelip, which has never been fixed. His mother, Anna K, works as a maid for the Buhrmann family. As the civil war erupts the family Anna was working for flees out of town. While continuing to watch out for the apartment and the belongings to her employer, Anna falls ill. She has only one wish that K takes her back to Prince Albert where she was born.

On their way there (fleeing in the night, K pushing his mother in wheelbarrow) a day or two in to their journey, Anna is admitted to a hospital where she shortly after passes away. K is devastated with grief, and he looses all energy to continue. He finally makes it to Prince Albert, carrying his mothers ashes in a box. The war catches up with K, and he is taken to a camp where everyone is given food and shelter in return for their labour. K (or "Michaels" as one of the guards calls him) seeks no physical contacts with others, he feels no hunger and as a result, we see this mentally sleeping skeleton emerge.

K continues to flee from the camp where he is held. We follow his struggle to live his life the way he wants to, free and as one with nature.

The author introduces us to a topic that those of us who are not South Africans will probably never quite understand. Coetzee is a splendid writer, and his writing style is compelling, dark, but immensely beautiful.

A remarkable read reflecting on a man's inner strength. Highly recommended!

Rating:
Summary: A Moving story
Review: Life and Times of Michael K is a compelling story about a man cought up in a war which he does not want to be a part of. This story is about Michael, a man who wants to fulfill his mothers wishes as well as escape the war.
Coetzee has used many forms and features of post-colonial literature to create this novel. It comments on many issues such as Insecurity, Racism, Superiority, Prostitution and civil war as well as exploring the subject of gardening to some extent.
Coetzee has used the surroundings of Michael K to his advantage to try and convey a message. A message that rings loud and clear. You can never fully understand anyone. This book contains a mix of feelings such as love, loss, betrayl, anger and excitment.
Coetzee explains that people who are unfortunate with their looks and the way that they convey the way that they feel, still feel the same feelings as anyone else. Though someone may try forever and ever to fully understand another person, you will never fully and completley understand them, even if they want you to.
All in all, this book was interesting and was addictive once past the first few chapters. Change of viewpoint in book 2 caught me by surprise, but provided insight into the 'otherside' of the world.

Rating:
Summary: deep messages in a clouded story
Review: Life and Times of Michael K. is a short, yet epic saga of a simple-minded individual who finds peace and a separate reality during a fictitious war in apartheid-era South Africa. Michael K. envelopes himself into his own personal cocoon whilst traversing the South African landscape, shielding himself from generally unpleasent individuals and activities.

While this story is superficially very promising, digging deeper I really found details lacking (especially reasons for Michael's behaviour). For example, the whole premise of this civil war is glossed over in just a word or two. I wonder if Coetzee really needed to bring in this war element at all to bring out his real messages (..on humanity and inner strength).

However one cannot help feel but moved by poor Michael's travails. It's a somewhat depressing feeling rather than inspirational, but Coetzee does get his views across one way or another.

I found Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians to be a much better read. It focuses much more sharply on the human/psychological elements; it just works much better than Life and Times of Michael K.

After all this, I must admit that I am not too familiar with apartheid or South Africa (its people, geography). I think South Africans will get a much better appreciation for this novel.

Rating:
Summary: Desertion
Review: Like a character from Kafka, we never learn Michael K's last name. However, unlike Kafka's characters he chooses a different response to the oppresive society in which he finds himself. He chooses desertion. Rather than take on the system, he flees it and tries to construct a life of dignity.

Unfortunately that choice brings him hunger and loneliness. We can liken the consequences of his choice to those made or imposed on people living outside of the suffocating world of corporations and money. They are treated with contempt and subsist on low income. The choice of living outside of the machine is not always a pleasant one. The hero does not live happily ever after but will always be forced to choose between a dignified life and one of comfort. If you think you can strike a "golden mean" between the two, wake up!

-Thomas

Rating:
Summary: An indifferent outcast
Review: Michael K is a stranger in a world of continuing war.
But he is not an interested, and interesting, character. He doesn't fully understand what is happening around him and he doesn't ask fundamental questions about it.
He only tries to escape a violent world in order to live peacefully on a small piece of land, alone.
If everybody adopts that kind of attitude, mankind is condemned.
The author says it himself: 'It is time that he awakens', but K continues to want to live an outcast's life.

After Dino Buzzati and others, this is a new version of Franz Kafka's K, but it falls way behind the original masterly 'Trial' of Joseph K.

Rating:
Summary: A Simpleton.
Review: Michael K is a very thin, weak-looking man who is a gardner. As the book opens, he is trying to find a way to get his ill mother to Prince Albert where she was born. They make it halfway there when she unexpectedly passes away in a local hospital. Overwhelmed with grief and no longer in possession of any motivation whatsoever, K roams around aimlessly and becomes something of a homeless man. The story is a bit slow until he gets to Prince Albert. Here he begins a lifestyle of survival and escape, which he repeats numerous times throughout his life, and the reader begins to understand K more as a person. He is a man who is so thin he is often described as a skeleton. Even more importantly, he is mentally asleep. He does not desire human contact, food to eat, or work to occupy his body or mind. He is, strangely, not even interested in being nursed back to health at his lowest moment. "All these years, and still I carry the look of an orphan. Everywhere I go, there are people waiting to exercise their forms of charity on me" K says. And, unlike any other man, he resists this charity and escapes to his own company and the company of his gardens for "I am a gardener...I was mute and stupid in the beginning, I will be mute and stupid in the end. There is nothing to be ashamed of in being simple." Let the book speak for itself. It is a fascinating piece well worth anyone's time.

Rating:
Summary: An uplifting tale of spiritual courage
Review: Michael K is by most people's reckoning a subnormally endowed specimen of a human being - physically and mentally handicapped, he appears to be no more than one of life's cruel failures. It is only his indomitable spirit and courage which has helped him endure constant hardship and ultimately transcend human suffering brought upon by South Africa's apartheid regime. At one level, the story seems to be about the victory of spiritual and morale courage over man's cruelty. Just as Michael's natural otherworldliness served as a protective cloak against life's slings and arrows, Coetzee seems to be telling us to take heart and emulate Michael - if such a sorry human specimen can prevail against all odds, so can we. At another level, the story seems to me to be about the independence or autonomy of the human spirit from the realities of social and political life. Through the eyes of soldiers and other conscious members of society, we see a crumbling social order and chaos everywhere. Everything touched by them is, as it were, defiled and rendered foul. Only in Michael's makebelieve world does he still find his private space and food still fit for human consumption. Coetzee's slim novel makes for compelling reading. His message is simple but powerful and uplifting.

Rating:
Summary: Compelling Afternoon's Read
Review: Read this the day after I read "Disgrace." Compelling, beautifully written, and the only book I've ever read to top "Angela's Ashes" in poverty and depression.

Left me with more questions than answers. Fascinating that in South Africa, possibly the only country where race has more social weight than the U.S., races are not part of char. descriptions. Would I be able to pick up on more subtle cues if I knew more about S. African culture, or are they meant to be ambiguous? Also, I wish I understood more about the history of the book's setting- Who's fighting in this civil war, what are the sides?

My only criticism, is that Coetzee doesn't seem to know how to end his books. Both this and "Disgrace" just seem to trail off, leaving me unsatisfied.

Rating:
Summary: Coetzee: philosopher and novelist
Review: The elementary tension between the orders of the 'symbolic' and the 'real' is the foundation which supports Coetzee's narrative imagination. Simplified, the 'symbolic' is the realm of language, which at the same time grounds and destroys our lifeworld. Words are elementary particles that coalesce in ideologies. These ideologies lead to partisanship, conflict and ultimately war. The book's protagonist, Michael K., is someone who is committed to leave behind the realm of the symbolic. He drops out of the war, drops out of human society, out of the magic spell of language in a universe that is enveloped by silence, and supported by selflessness, a slow metabolism, a deep identification with animate and inanimate nature and by moral indifference.

K's dominion is the 'real', that which according to Lacan, 'resists symbolisation absolutely'. The real is that which paradoxically gives meaning to the symbolic order and, at the same time, fundamentally escapes symbolisation. Human beings cannot thrive in the order of the real. They simply suffocate by an absence of meaning. The Life and Times of Michael K. is a philosophical thought experiment: Coetzee has created an avatar which he sends out on the vast and dark ocean of the real to study how he survives in the face of this immensity. What we are reading then is a phenomenological study of a human being who tries to carve out a foothold of utmost symbolic precariousness ('mother', 'earth') at the treshhold of the great black hole of meaninglessness.

I am convinced that Coetzee's argument is basically metaphysical, not ethical. The South African context has led to a strong and unjustified moral and political bias in the reading of this author. J.M. Coetzee is not Nadine Gordimer. Nowhere in this book is there a condemnation of the ravages of war. The violence is simply there, as an inevitable part of the symbolic order. Michael K. is not a pacifist: for him the war simply does not exist.

It is difficult to evaluate this book. As a novel it has enormous merit but also a number of flaws. What troubles me most is the difference in mood and style between the brief second part (narrated by the rehabilitation camp doctor) and the two other sections (where the narrative is told from K's point of view). I believe that Coetzee added the final two parts to show how the human, symbolised world deals with the mystery of K's appearance. Clearly, neither force nor bribery allow to neutralise the disquieting impact of the 'real'. From a didactic point of view this narrative strategy may work, but I am less certain that it enhances the quality of the book as a novel.

The philosophical mind and the writerly imagination are subject to different laws and dynamics. It is very difficult to have them work in sync. Kafka and Nietzsche could do it. Coetzee is not (yet) in the same league. His scintillatingly clear prose and his philosophical acuity are still forming a somewhat uneasy marriage. But this only fuels our hope for a definitive, 21st century masterpiece by this very gifted artist.