Life and Times of Michael K

Michael K, as Coetzee details in this early novel, is “The obscurest of the obscure, so obscure as to be a prodigy”. Born with a hare lip, Michael is a simple man and a gardener in Cape Town. After trying in vain to cart his mother back to her native soil before she dies, he chooses to live on

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the go and off the land. A social outcast, he becomes collateral damage in a war in which he wants no part. First placed in a resettlement camp and ultimately in a rehabilitation camp, Michael finally escapes, albeit to a future that holds no promises other than freedom itself. A dour novel, one is reminded of Ivan Denisovich in Michael with his doggedness in the face of despair. As with Ivan, we are left to admire Michael but also pray that we are never placed in his shoes.

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An extraordinary book. A week after I did finish it I suddenly realized the book is a hommage to Kafka (Josef K, the trial). When I read it, I didn't have time for such thoughts, so mesmerizing is the story of Michael K, who just wants to be a gardener, but finds himself involuntarily mixed up in

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the troubles at the end of apartheid. Coetzee paints a rather Gothic picture of his native south africa, which although it isn't a 'true'south africa (he pictures a war-torn south africa, something like iraq nowadays), it is in many ways more true than the actual south africa of the mid-eighties.
The power of the story lies in this man Michael K, in a way the only really free man in this book, more free than even his prisonguards or the people who want to do him good. He rejects charity, and prefers death above the bondage charity brings in an unjust society. Very moving

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Michael K was always a bit of an outcast. He was born with a hare lip, and sent to a sort of institution during his school-age years. His mother Anna worked as a domestic for a wealthy family, but when she became ill, Michael left his job as a gardener to care for her. And when Anna expressed a

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desire to visit her birthplace in the countryside, Michael attempted to make her dream come true. Government beaurocracy conspired against them, and they attempted to make the journey on foot. Anna's illness prevented her from completing the trip, leaving Michael to go it alone.

Much of this book describes Michael's solitary journey, his attempts to live off the land, his experiences in various interment camps, and his difficulty dealing with mainstream society. Michael's appearance keeps people at a distance, his naivete makes him vulnerable, and he is unable to function as part of a group. He continually shuns food and shelter, preferring to live alone out in the open, surviving only on plants and grubs.

Coetzee's spare prose often delivered compelling messages that made me stop and think:
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 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. (p. 65-66)

Even though it was all rather bleak, I was fascinated by Michael's journey.

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It seems to me that the author's message is as plain and simple as his protagonist: every life has value, every person is born with a purpose; their lives may not seem to be of much consequence to higher mortals but they also serve who only stand and wait...As far as Michael K is concerned, he does

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not want to earn money, he does not want to work as a servant; he is happiest working on the land, eating fruit / vegetable grown by his own two hands. This is the life that he deems to be of consequence, even though his living quarters are like that of a rabbit warren or an otter's burrow. Tohim, planting the seed, watering it, watching the sprigs of life sprout out of the ground, the flowering and the fruition, the sensual feel of the produce grown by him, their taste and texture on his tongue,is what matters.
It is with this objective that he quite ignores the racial identities of the characters in his book. The action takes place in South Africa, a country which till about 15 years back practised apartheid. Yet Coetze makes absolutely no references anywhere in the 184 pages of his book, to the colour of the skin of the characters of the people his book.. Because of stereotyping we may assume that Michael K is black or coloured, the Army brass is white, and the doctor in the rehab camp could even be an Indian. The absence of racial identification thus seems to be deliberate. It is immaterial, from his perspective, whether the victim protagonist is black ,or the perpetrators of the 'system' are white, because victims and perpetrators come in all sizes, shapes and colours. Good and Bad cannot be compartmentalised into racial blocks is perhaps the message of the book.
However, given the fact of apartheid in South Africa where the action takes place, it is difficult to ignore the absence of racial references in the book. His novel is in danger of being classified as simplistic, to this extent.

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This is one of those magical books that will change you, at least temporarily. When I finished it there was a time where I felt less need.

Couldn't really get into this one. Coetzee's dry style came across a bit bland, and I could never feel for Michael what I felt for Elizabeth Costello, David Lurie or Mrs. Curren. A good story, but not a well told one.

The author skillfully puts you in the skin of a resourceful, but slightly retarded, man who attempts to rescue his mother and ends up having to survive on his own without any of the amenities of civilization, including food. Well worth a second read.

Michael K is a gardener in civil war South Africa. He's not very bright, but seems to be happy as a gardener. His mom gets fired, Michael is about to get fired, and they decide to go back to the countryside where his mom was born. They can't get a permit to travel, they can't travel by train, so

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Michael puts his mom in a wheelbarrow and starts walking. In Stellenbosch, mom dies, leaving Michal alone with his wheelbarrow and her ashes. He decides to go to Prince Albert, the village where his mother was born, to at least bring her back. But he's afraid of people, he doesn't eat for days or even weeks, and doesn't manage.

It's hard to identify with Michael, because every time you think he found a place where at least he can recover, he walks out of it, back into solitude and hunger. He's a simpleton, with only one thing on his mind: freedom. He'd rather not eat than depend on others. I'm not sure that this is the message Coetzee wants to give us, but that's the message I got from the book.

Before this book, I read "A severed head" by Iris Murdoch, which also is a book about a person you don't identify with because he's irrational and making decisions "normal" people wouldn't make. It's hard to believe in coincidence, reading two such books in one week.

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The Life & Times of Michael K won the Booker Prize in 1983. Written by Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee, it is set in South Africa during a civil war. Michael is a gardener in his earlier thirties who has a harelip. He was institutionalized by his mother when he was a child, but at the beginning of the

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book when she is old and very ill, she calls for him. She would like him to take her to the village where she grew up. Getting the proper paperwork for the train is practically impossible because of the war, so finally they give up on it and try to go there on their own.

Many things happen to Michael on the trip. He is captured and made to work for awhile, and then released. He finds what he thinks is the farm where his mother was raised and makes himself a home (if you can call it that) there. Struggling to survive and evade the government, in the midst of it all he still wants to be a gardener and plants a small pumpkin patch, which he guards and tends with fervor.

The book is told in three parts. Parts I and III describe the storyline from Michael’s perspective. Part II is told in first person by a doctor who tries to understand Michael when he is brought under his care. This was a thought-provoking book and I enjoyed it, though I could have done without some scenes at the end. I’ll definitely read more by Coetzee.

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Michael K's hare lip is the first thing everyone notices about him - a disfigurement that sets him apart and causes his mother to institutionalize him at a young age. This physical defect seems to set the tone for Micahel's life of isolation and a turning inward of himself. As an adult, Michael

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finds work as a gardener in the city of Cape Town; later as his mother's health deteriorates he decides to return to the country and the home of her birth. But a civil war makes this journey a challenge in more ways than one. Michael and his mother do not have papers to leave the city, they don't have reliable transportation, and they must avoid armed guards and roadblocks. When Michael's mother dies along the way, Michael is left with her ashes and the determination to reach his destiny.

This is a disturbing and revealing novel about the strength of the human spirit to not only endure, but to overcome physical obstacles in the discovery of self. Michael's connection to the earth, his desire to grow his own food, becomes his sole purpose of living.

Coetzee's writing is vivid in its descriptions. The sense of place is strong, which makes this novel a somber look at South Africa. The human suffering, the pointlessness of the re-education camps, the cruelty of the military - all resound heavily on the pages of this book. Michael stands out, not only because he is physically marred, but because he possesses a peace within that those around him lack. A doctor who treats Michael in hospital seems to be the only character who identifies what makes Michael special.

As with all of Coetzee's novels, Life and Times of Michael K is not light reading. In many ways it is depressing; but ultimately it captures the beauty of the human soul.

Recommended.

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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

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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 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.

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Coetzee's Booker Prize-winning novel, the tale of a young simpleton's life growing up in war-torn apartheid-era South Africa, is a surprisingly frustrating read given its accolades, a book that sneaks up a little too slowly and almost doesn't feel like as good as it is.

The novel opens with K's

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birth and, with a quick brushing aside of time, joins him as a gardener in the Cape. He is kicked out of his apartment and, along with his mother, attempts to legally leave the Cape for her old hometown of Prince Albert. Along the way, he finds himself unable to get a permit, unable to sneak out successfully, unable to transport his mother in a wheelbarrow, and unable to keep himself out of labor camps.

The first part of the story, with a very strongly plotted-based progression and very simple sentence structure is disarming, especially since the personality of K coupled with the detaching third-person point of view renders it all nearly devoid of emotional impact. K's journey is harrowing, but over the 125-page-long chapter, we honestly don't care much.

The next 40 pages, however, change the game entirely. We see Chapter Two from the first-person perspective of the doctor caring for K in the labor camp, and it is this young doctor's attempts to understand K that finally give the novel the heart it was looking for. K's true nature becomes clearer, and our sympathies are finally expressible.

The final 15 pages return us to K and the omniscient narrator, and painted by the doctor's perspective, have far greater impact than the first chapter. The result is a novel that almost demands to be read twice, but is such a challenge to read once that it seems to contradict that desire as well.

Perhaps a second time through will change my view, but Life & Times of Michael K is a well-intentioned but ultimately flawed novel.

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An interesting read. I wondered if Coetzee was writing about himself, not literally but figuratively. So I read a bit on the background of this book afterwards and found that this work might be related to/inspired by Kafka. Though I haven't read Kafka, particularly The Metamorphosis, I was somehow

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reminded of it when I read passages where Michael K reflects on how his wild living is no different from that of a worm, or a spider or any other insects that he comes into close contact with. They are also, to K himself, gardeners, as he comments at the very end of the book, which was K's job at the beginning of the story.

This is the fourth book by Coetzee that I finished, and while his writing seems to be, quite pronouncedly, lamentations of his life and his association with his homeland, this one is a bit heavy compared to his later work. Although Coetzee's brilliant writing style is already very evident in this earlier book of his.

Many good lines I read throughout, but my favourite is probably "... if there is one thing I discovered out in the country, it was that there is time enough for everything." (183) The final paragraph, too long to quote, is amazing as well. It puts a smile to my face.

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Why, oh why, can't Coetzee just write a book and let his readers interpret it for him? Why does this book need a commentary by an educated, guilty feeling doctor? Of course, to remind us that 'interpretation' is 'violence' and that it can never reach the 'real' thing, just as Friday has no tongue ,

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and the Magistrate can't 'know' the 'traces' of torture on the girl, and Lucy's story is hers and can't be known by her father and so on and on and on world without end. If you believe that all this 'you can never know the real of Michael K' stuff is really just a smokescreen to fool the world into thinking that there is something to Michael K, you're missing out. But if you don't at least suspect that all this agnosticism-qua-people is a smokescreen, well, I don't know. Maybe you should read more critically, and think about how meaningless terms like 'authentic self' and 'real you' really are.

That said, Michael K is a great character in the tradition of Crusoe, Dostoevsky's idiot and various saints. That makes the book well worth reading. It does not, as many critics and reviewers seem to think, make him a role-model.

Also interesting to read this in the context of C's later work, which seems to endorse a morality of empathy: that the world would be a better place if we put ourselves in the shoes of other people, other animals and so on. That's probably true. But you can't have it both ways. Either we can more or less put ourselves in other beings' shoes; or they are ultimately unknowable and ought not to be violated by our disgusting interpretive techniques. Interesting that the later novels - which aren't even close to as good as this, or Barbarians, or Dusklands and so on - have the more cogent philosophical background.

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A very deep, thought provoking, and touching book about an individual who doesn't fit in, in a country that is at war. War requires everyone to cease living their own lives submit themselves to serve the nation (on the other hand, those unable to participate are taken care of), but Michael K just

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wants to nurture a tiny pumpkin patch by himself. Only one other person in the book understands K's motives, but in a way that passage proves that a simple, slow-paced life may attract even the "sane".

I love Coetzee's dense, minimalistic writing style. He doesn't "point out" the important moments, so even surprising thoughts can occur in the mind of the reader. I also loved Disgrace by Coetzee, so perhaps I should read more of his books.

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Within a couple of pages, I suspected that the "K" in Michael K. was a reference to Kafka's The Trial, and upon investigation, I discovered that several critics and scholars have made the same observation. In light of this, Life and Times of Michael K might best be viewed as a hopeless struggle

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against unknowable and obscure outside forces--except that, for all the odds set against Michael K, Coetzee offers a glimmer of hope that a Kafkaesque struggle can be overcome.

Through a series of events that demonstrate his purity and strength, Michael K finds himself alone in the middle of a warzone in South Africa. Michael is a simple man, with few needs other than some sense of self-determination. Michael suffers from both physical and mental impairments, but despite these internal barriers, he is able to reach a determination of purpose that is beautiful and profound. Through this resolve, Michael can bear outside persecution with stoicism and grace; no external hardship affects his internal clarity.

Like and Times of Michael K may not necessarily be my favorite book, but Michael is one of my favorite characters ever created. He is one of the few characters in fiction who genuinely creates an example to be lauded and followed.

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Michael is poor and born with a harelip. There's no father and his mother puts him in an orphanage, possibly because he's a bit slow. The book isn't narrated by him but much of it is seen from his point of view. He's inexperienced and unworldly but I'm not entirely sure he's unintelligent. The

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action takes during the civil war in South Africa when Michael K is an adult working as a gardener in a public park. His mother, who's been a maid for a rich family, is existing in a single room; she's clearly too ill to work. There is no politics in this book and the "real" world exists for the reader in the nebulous cloud it seems to be for Michael K. In fact the book reminds me a bit of Cormac McCarthy's The Road with the character moving though a nightmare environment which bears some resemblance (but not much) to the real world. This is not a world of ashes, but Michael knows only what touches him directly and has no clue what the war is about, what side he is on or even what his place in the world should be. He tries to follow the rules in a chaotic environment. His mother wants to return to the country village where she grew up and he fashions a crude cart to attach to his bicycle and pull her. Their journey is made horrid by the weather and by the people they meet along the way—soldiers, others escaping the city, some preying on the travelers. The mother dies in a hospital on the way, is cremated and the ashes given to Michael. With his mother's death, Michael loses his last touch with the world around him and becomes so isolated that he digs a hole in the ground to live in while cultivating pumpkins on an abandoned farm that may or may not be the one where his mother grew up. He has visions of his mother in flames and eventually remembers her death as "They burned her up". He's found in his hole by the authorities and assumed to be a supporter of the rebels who refuses to talk when actually he has no clue what his interrogators are talking about. He is shunted to a hospital where a medical officer tries and fails to "save" him. He escapes initially by refusing to talk and then, cleverly, manages to walk out.One cannot help but think there's a way in which Michael K is "saner" and "brighter" than those around him who engage, one way or another, in a destructive and inhumane war. The reader to some extent shares the frustration of the medical officer who tries to "save" Michael. But save him from what and to what?

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Michael K. is a timid young man, strongly bound with his mother. The book describes his search for a place that he could call 'home', where he could live without anybody telling him how. He finds constant obstacles: he is made stay in a work-camp, he is made to stay in a hospital, but every time he

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escapes and continues his search. I found the book unputtable, as always with Coetzee's books. It brings calmness and an perspective to your life.

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This is a quiet story, performing a character study from outside of Michael K. and following his wanderings. There's much to be said for the simplicity of Michael K. and for Coetzee's delicate writing---the story here is touching and developed with power. Questions of chaos, and of a man attempting

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to live without the world that consistently works to integrate his individual being into societal being, control the narrative at every turn. Land, and the simplicity of survival, are the constants here, and while some readers read this as a depressing tale of one man alone in the world, this reader believes that looking into the story, and into the language and philosophy presented, present a tale of optimism meant to inspire and instruct.

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I feel like this book went right past me.
We follow Michael K., who leaves town with his sick mother to try and find the farm in which she grew up, and live there and not know poverty. Michael seems to be at least somewhat idiotic. He goes through various struggles and meets different people without

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seeming to grasp fully what is happening to him, and focuses only on his search for the farm.
This book therefore felt to me like something of a fable, and there must be some profound meaning to derive from watching this man struggle without caring for the society around him, but it eluded me.
Another reason why this book's meaning may have been lost on me is my lack of knowledge about South Africa. The book describes a seemingly dictatorial regime, but I can't tell if this is supposed to be realistic or if this is fictionised, for the purpose of writing a fable.

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I didn't like this book and I do not see the point of it. Near the end, the main character, Michael K, questions whether the moral of the story is that there is time for everything. But if that is the moral of this story, then it wasn’t clear a all. Michael K has nothing but time, but he

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doesn’t do anything. He seems incapable of doing anything. He cannot cope with living in any kind of society; nor does he succeed in living on his own in the wilderness.

Read literally, the book is horribly depressing, because Michael seems to be mentally ill or mentally deficient (because he cannot provide for himself and he has no will to survive), but no one is able to help him. Read symbolically, I just don’t get it. If Michael is supposed to represent some greater meaning, as the doctor/narrator suggests in the second part of the book, what is that meaning? The book doesn’t answer that question.

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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

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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 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.

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What an awesome book by an amazingly talented author. This is a story of a young man who despite the war all around him is determined to live his life his own way and the country that opposes him.

Michael K is searching for peace and freedom in a world filled with violence and oppression. Set in apartheid South Africa at a time of civil war, Life & Times of Michael K tells a powerful tale of one man’s unrelenting passive resistance to the tyranny, poverty, and strife he finds all around

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him. Described as a simple-minded man with a birth defect that no one has cared enough to correct, Michael K leaves his job as a gardener in Cape Town to help his aging mother return to her country home to live out her last days. When his mother dies during the journey, K is left to fend for himself in a society that he does not really understand. This begins a downward spiral of isolation and starvation that finds him wandering the veld, confined in work or prison camps, and living by himself on an abandoned farm in the mountains.

The story is told in three parts from two different perspectives. In the first, which is the lengthiest section of an otherwise slim book, we learn through second-hand narration of Michael K’s sad upbringing, including the time he spent in a cruel boarding school as a boy. The essence of the tale then picks up with K in his early thirties leaving the coast with his mother and ends with him being arrested as a rebel collaborator while hiding in the cave he has made his home for a year. The second part of the book shifts to the perspective of a prison doctor where the man he knows only as “Michaels” is slowly starving himself to death. It is the doctor’s quest to understand K’s story and save his life in spite of himself that provides much of the novel’s moral direction. The brief final part returns to a second-hand description of K’s life back in Cape Town after escaping from incarceration.

J. M. Coetzee has been justly lauded over the years for his prose, with honors that include multiple Man Booker awards and the Nobel Prize in Literature. His writing here is spare and compelling, but it is also lacking in the sort of warmth that might resonate with the reader. Life & Times of Michael K is really more about the author’s sometime heavy-handed “individual versus the state” message than it is about a developing a compassionate or relatable character. In fact, the author never really allows us to get inside of K and understand why he feels or thinks the way he does. Instead, we are frequently told how “simple” he is even though there is plenty of evidence in the story to the contrary (e.g., his ability to repeatedly escape captivity and live by his own wits). So, while I think that this is almost certainly an important book for the message it strives to convey, it is one that I am not sure I fully enjoyed reading.

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