Life & Times of Michael K

It's not an easy read, but I read this one and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road back-to-back. These are two books about lost souls walking away from something, not knowing where they’re going.

Michael K is another character who invokes more sympathy/pity than admiration. Sometimes, I didn’t overly care about Michael K’s suffering, feeling he’d brought it on himself. Mostly, though, I wanted him to find his simple peace.

JM Coetzee is such a good writer. His sparse but full sentences always deliver something.

The Life and Times of Michael K is a beautifully written allegory about the troubled apartheid era in South Africa. The author, Nobel Laureate JM Coetzee, was one of my lecturers at the University of Cape Town and this is my favorite book of his. It provides superb descriptions of the arid South African landscape and how a solitary figure ekes out an existence: alone, off-grid, reclusive… waiting for the tide of history to turn. The novel is set in the heart of the Karoo, a semi-desert region that I love to visit to get away from the city and… show more.

It was a shock to read this book. So unlike anything I’d read before in the literature of South Africa. A strange almost dreamlike novel about a mostly mute man’s wanderings and sufferings through the societies and landscapes that make up South Africa. Allegorical, subversive, challenging, philosophical, yet ultimately life-affirming. 

Still valid, in our present age of wandering peoples, in its depiction of a failed Eden.

I paid homage to the book by introducing a minor character named Michael in my own novel.