Product Description

In a South Africa torn by civil war, Michael K sets out to take his 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. Life and Times of Michael K goes to the centre 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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #15848 in Books
• Published on: 2004-09-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 192 pages

About the Author
JM Coetzee's work includes Waiting For The Barbarians; Life and Times of Michael K; Boyhood: Scenes From Provincial Life; Youth; and Disgrace which won the Booker Prize, making him the first author to have won it twice. In 2003 he won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Customer Reviews

A revelation
Coetzee's writing style is typically lean, uncovoluted, and simple. This particular story is not long. The tone is direct. Not many authors can write about simply living and life itself. What does it mean to be?
I admire everything Coetzee writes, and highly recommend this novel.

Not bad
I felt myself wavering through this book, sometimes I was fully engaged sometimes I wasn't. The story is essentially a narative of the central character Michael K, from living with his Mother, to his experience of her death to his personal struggle with his own life - most of which is a fight for survival. There is no doubting Coetzee's lucid writing but at times I just felt I would like to have got some of Michal K's thinking about his own story, what he was feeling and what he was thinking.

While there certainly is the theme of how we think about other people's struggles and hardships from the outside, I would have felt more engaged with the character and the story if we had some more of victim's perspective. A few times, I felt I wanted him the character to open up and let the reader in.

Something brilliant from nothing
In a society in which a whole group of its citizens is accorded no value, what happens when one of them values himself even less? The answer: he becomes like a double negative; and double negatives become positives. 'The obscurist of the obscure,' as Coetzee puts it,'so obscure as to be a prodigy.'

Coetzee writes with an economy and simple elegance which can be misleading. His prose can seem so plain there is a danger one thinks the story is plain too. In fact he draws with the economy of line of a great artist - and through it, like great artists, he achieves great beauty.

Michael K is a man for whom no one has ever much cared, and who consequently cares nothing for himself. He stumbles through civil war torn South Africa and is kicked about like a stone; not a rough, awkward protesting stone, but like a smooth stone, 'like 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.' And is indestructible.

This is a short book that should be read at a run, not picked up and put down. The narrative may seem meandering. Those who encounter K are so perplexed by him they barely bother with him; and he is never bothered by them. The stone is merely kicked about. The point, for some time, seems obscure.

But then the stone that is K lands in the possession of someone different: of someone good. And now, for the first time, K becomes a disturbance; he creates anxiety, he upsets the status quo. And the moral of the tale reveals itself: sometimes, amidst the banality of institutionalised evil, it requires the extraordinary to make good people see the truth - even if, in this case, what is extraordinary is K's extreme ordinariness.

It is a poignant, painful and powerful book, that could only have been attempted - let alone delivered successfully - by a writer of authority, clarity and total control. But then those are the characteristics of J M Coetzee. He has given us a story about something vital out of the life of a man who is nothing.