Life and Times of Michael K: A Novel
From author of Waiting for the Barbarians and Nobel Prize winner J.M. Coetzee.
J.M. Coetzee's latest novel, The Schooldays of Jesus, is now available from Viking. Late Essays: 2006-2016 will be available January 2018.
In a South Africa turned by war, Michael K. sets out to take his ailing mother back to her rural home. On the way there she dies, leaving him alone in an anarchic world of brutal roving armies. Imprisoned, Michael is unable to bear confinement and escapes, determined to live with dignity. This life affirming novel goes to the center of human experience—the need for an interior, spiritual life; for some connections to the world in which we live; and for purity of vision.
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Community Reviews
This is my 3rd JM Coetzee and my favorite so far. The book is very much int he vein of Waiting for the Barbarians - an allegory that still has its own shape as a story with characters and specific events. It's not all ideas, though the ideas are very important to the overall feeling of the story.
Michael K is a possibly intellectually challenged man with a hare lip and of indeterminate race. Because his mother couldn't tolerate looking at his hare lip, he was sent to an orphanage that was not very kind to him. His mother falls ill due to dropsy during a Civil War. Life is not good in Cape Town, so they decide to go to his mother's birthplace, but this requires a rather difficult journey on foot and at the mercy of military caravans, looters/vagrants, and homesteaders with guns. On more than one occasion, Michael finds himself taken into various camps and subjected to varying levels of bureaucracy, forced labor, starvation. He also escapes to find freedom on a few occasions.
The story boils down to his experience of authoritarianism and his attempt to find autonomy and freedom both within and without. He finds that freedom through stripping away what so many of us consider essential to our security.
The prose is exceptionally clear. Sometimes the ideas of the book are hidden - sometimes they are explicit. They often seem simple until you examine them more closely or juxtapose them to other stages in Michael's journey. In many ways, it's the sort of novel that someone will soon write about being an immigrant in 21st century America.
Michael K is a possibly intellectually challenged man with a hare lip and of indeterminate race. Because his mother couldn't tolerate looking at his hare lip, he was sent to an orphanage that was not very kind to him. His mother falls ill due to dropsy during a Civil War. Life is not good in Cape Town, so they decide to go to his mother's birthplace, but this requires a rather difficult journey on foot and at the mercy of military caravans, looters/vagrants, and homesteaders with guns. On more than one occasion, Michael finds himself taken into various camps and subjected to varying levels of bureaucracy, forced labor, starvation. He also escapes to find freedom on a few occasions.
The story boils down to his experience of authoritarianism and his attempt to find autonomy and freedom both within and without. He finds that freedom through stripping away what so many of us consider essential to our security.
The prose is exceptionally clear. Sometimes the ideas of the book are hidden - sometimes they are explicit. They often seem simple until you examine them more closely or juxtapose them to other stages in Michael's journey. In many ways, it's the sort of novel that someone will soon write about being an immigrant in 21st century America.
