Rating: 
Summary: A wonderful fable
Review: The first thing I've read by Coetzee, and a really beautiful book. Less a "traditional" novel than a fable, it is probably not for the casual reader: it is a book of ideas, it moves slowly and requires careful reading. But it has so much to say about what it means to be human; and about man's relationship to the earth, to society, and to himself. Give it a try, and if you do, stick with it to the end. The meaning of the story reveals itself, but it goes at its own pace.
Rating: 
Summary: Awful
Review: This book is only about 180 pages long, so you'd imagine I'd have no trouble finishing it. Unfortunately, no. I started giving up on it around page 40, slogged through it some more, and then quit at page 80, unable to take any more.It's impossible to convey in this space the unrelenting, pointless lugubriousness of this novel. Michael K is a man with a harelip and a stammer who works as a gardener and lives in a damp cellar with a sick mother who works a menial job. Their home is attacked, and he decides to take her away from Cape Town to her birthplace on a farm by wheeling her for tens of miles in hand-made wooden barrow whilst they sleep in fields at night in the rain and nobody gives them a lift. His mother becomes sick, is hospitalized, dies, and is cremated. He continues his journey to the farm, only now his mother accompanies him in a cardboard box. That's just up to page 32. Oh, and to top the cheeriness, there is a war on. Take this passage: 'He fell into the company of men and women who slept under the railway bridge and haunted the vacant lot behind the liquor store on Andringa Street. Sometimes he lent them his cart. In a fit or largesse he gave away the stove. Then one night someone tried to pull the suitcase from under his head while he was sleeping. There was a fight, and he moved on.' Now imagine an entire book comprised only of hundreds of passages exactly like this, neither rising nor falling in emotional intensity, 180 pages all spoken in a monotone of misery, and you have a good idea of what it's like having to read Life and Times of Michael K. Scores of characters pass quickly through, faceless, unhelpful, or openly hostile. An endless horizon of rottenness stands before the reader: unrelenting, unrealistic, and utterly meaningless. The author's pen is clearly out of control. Wallowing in awfulness, he has no idea when to stop his characters from suffering. The only thing I can think of that comes close is Voltaire's satire Candide (also a short novel), famed for taking human suffering to ludicrous extremes. But the ludicrousness was the point, to disprove Leibniz's doctrine that 'all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds'. Coetzee's novel, however, has no point, no moral: it's just the pornography of suffering. Nor is there a clever turn of phrase, interesting characterization, or florid description throughout the novel. Coetzee's latest book Youth was reviewed in last week's (London) Sunday Times Culture supplement. Surprise, surprise: the central character, apparently autobiographical, 'finds his colleagues uncongenial' and 'socially, ... is grimly alienated'; the book is 'almost funereally doleful'; and Coetzee himself is described as possessing 'a discomfiting personality and an imagination of uncompromising bleakness'. No kidding. Only a mind congealed with pessimism could pour this river of dolefulness out onto paper. I'm sorry to have to say it, but this book's only redeeming feature is the ability to shut it.
Rating:
Summary: Existence in 150 pages.
Review: This book is perhaps the easier to read of Coetzee's but it is nonetheless not easy. This book captures so much of what it is to exist. His simple minded main character's confusion and struggles are so well articulated that we see through his eyes and experience his feelings. Like all of Coetzee's work, this book makes you think about your own existence and makes you feel uneasy about it. I got this very uncomfortable sense as I read along questioning our purpose and place in the order of thing while capturing what to me seems to be a convincing sense of the unease of the whole nation of South Africa in these transition times.
Rating:
Summary: A magical read.
Review: This book ranks as one my ultimate reads - must in any book collection. It is written in a style but captivates the reader right from the beginning. I liken it to having a shower in that it washes over you, leaving you clean, fresh and alive! If J.M. Coetzee reads this, then a big a THANK YOU for Michael K.
Rating: 
Summary: Universal theme
Review: This is not a book about South Africa or the apartheid system. This is a universal theme. No where in the book is "race" or "colour" mentioned. We do not know whether Michael K. is Caucasian, African or Asian--all these races and mixtures are present in South Africa. The area around Cape Town has many descendents of slaves brought by the Dutch to the Cape. We cannot tell by his name what group he belongs to. It seems to me that the author has deliberately avoided a racial theme.If we change the "place" names to that of North America, Australia or Argentina, the message of the book would be the same. A simpleton person surviving in a hostile environment. (partly of his own making)Good people and evil people populate this book as they do our world.
Rating:
Summary: Perplexing
Review: This is the first book I've read by the Nobel Prize winning S. African novelist. It was an interesting Kafkaesque novel set in war-ravaged Africa. Michael K. is an aged sexless, hair-lipped simpleton who goes on an inexplicable journey to get his mother to her place of birth to die. It becomes a strange tale of struggle and survival. A forceful and curious book, still not exactly sure what to make of it.
Rating:
Summary: Perplexing
Review: This is the first book I've read by the Nobel Prize winning S. African novelist. It was an interesting Kafkaesque novel set in war-ravaged Africa. Michael K. is an aged sexless, hair-lipped simpleton who goes on an inexplicable journey to get his mother to her place of birth to die. It becomes a strange tale of struggle and survival. A forceful and curious book, still not exactly sure what to make of it.
| 
