Life And Times Of Michael K (2005) - Plot & Excerpts
Is There Joy in Utter Destitution?Musings on The Life and Times of Michael K.When I was thirteen, we moved out to a smallholding on the outskirts of Johannesburg. We still refer to it as “The Farm”, but only about a third of the land was arable, the rest was slate, covered with a thin crust of dust and scrub. There was a borehole and an orchard, a vegetable patch, chickens, three horses, two donkeys, a cow, and two pigs. There was also a family of nine – Wilson and Rebecca M. and their seven children – living in two small rooms behind the three garages that sheltered our Japanese sedans from the harsh African sun.Within a month, my parents had arranged to build two extra prefab rooms, one for the boys and one for the girls, and had ensured that all the children could attend the little mission school behind the quarry. The warm winds swiftly spread word of this charitable new family and soon people from surrounding farms came limping in with sick and injured relatives in need of medical attention. Clothes, food, transport and advice were also liberally dispensed.Let me stop there, because this is not intended as an ode to my parents’ compassion, but rather as a counterpoint to Coetzee’s vivid examination of the contention that there is freedom and even joy to be found in utter destitution. The author tempts the reader to ask himself: Do those who want or need next to nothing become irrelevant and therefore exempt from subjugation? Although it is risky to assign intent to the work of any author, this is the burning question I have taken from The Life and Times of Michael K – a book about a man who turns his back on an emaciated urban existence and seeks to return to the soil of his ancestors, carrying his dying mother on this back.On his way, Michael encounters numerous obstacles in a war-torn country – roadblocks, robbers and a detention camp, where one of the inmates has a truly novel perspective on the sinister motives underlying the charity of a regime that cares for its poorest by incarcerating them:“After that they started dropping pellets in the water and digging latrines and spraying for flies and bringing buckets of soup. But do you think they do it because they love us? Not a hope. The prefer it that we live because we look too terrible when we get sick and die. If we just grew thin and turned into paper and then into ash and floated away, they wouldn't give a stuff for us. They just don't want to get upset. They want to go to sleep feeling good.” (p. 88) Food for thought, in more ways than one. To what extent is our own sense of charity fuelled by such selfish motives? Who hasn’t turned the sick and dying into paper and ash by simply switching channels on the remote? But Coetzee refuses to tread such beaten tracks. Instead, he takes the reader down the road less rutted. Michael escapes from the detention camp and makes his way out into the boondocks to the abandoned farm where his mother grew up. Here he finds a sense of place that lies somewhere between Freedom and Oblivion, digging a hovel for himself and living off the land, his sole purpose in life being the cultivation of pumpkins. This bucolic idyll is disturbed by a band of rebels, seeking to replenish their water supply at the farm, and later by a company of soldiers who capture and incarcerate Michael, because they suspect he is in cahoots with the guerrillas. Later, we find Michael in a rehabilitation centre, where he becomes the object of fascination of the doctor who is in charge of guiding him back into society. The second part of the book consists of the doctor’s observations and musings, which again bear testimony to Coetzee’s ability to distil crystal-clear metaphors from murky realities, letting his characters do the thinking and talking:“He is like a stone, a pebble that, having lain around minding its own business since the dawn of time, is now suddenly picked up and tossed randomly from hand to hand. A hard little stone, barely aware of its surroundings, enveloped in itself and its interior life. He passes through these institutions and camps and hospitals and God knows what else like a stone. Through the intestines of war. An unbearing, unborn creature. I cannot really think of him as a man, though he is older than me by most reckonings.” (p. 135) All of which brings my back to The Farm, where Rebecca, Wilson and their children were tossed randomly from hand to hand like pebbles. Driven by curiosity rather than compassion, I went back to take a look several years after my parents had returned to the suburbs and I had emigrated to Holland. After negotiating passage with the farm’s new owner, I found Rebecca in her room behind the garages. She embraced me warmly and then gave me a bleak update on the rest of the family – the dead, the dying, the incarcerated, the subjugated – pebbles reduced to dust by poverty’s sledgehammer, a brilliant system of disenfranchisement that constantly reinforced the belief that some are destined to spend their lives as members of an underclass, a caste who could or should have no higher ambition than to seek joy in utter destitution.And so Coetzee has led me down the path less-rutted, causing me to reassess my own memories, ideas, morals and motives. Yes, the author and I share a South African background, but I am convinced that any reader will find a great deal to ponder, enjoy and recognise in The Life and Times of Michael K.Tomorrow, when I re-read this review, I will undoubtedly find much to be at fault or at best imprecisely surmised or argued. But perhaps that is greatest strength of Coetzee’s work: it cannot be pinned down and made to reveal its intentions, but continues to provoke new questions and interpretations by remaining always open to new perspectives.
Ask me to pronounce verdict on a work of literature flaunting mere self-indulgent wordplay, revelling in its own brand of avant-gardism, which stops short of making a powerful statement on our troubled times, and my response to it is likely to be lukewarm. Ask me to judge a book dissecting the greater human quandary with keen insight but in stilted prose, and my reaction will possibly be more or less the same. But give me a story capable of dismantling all the divides of race, culture, political/religious indoctrination, time and space, encompassing all the inner contradictions of our existence into a compelling commentary on human follies that elicits a very visceral, emotional response, and my being won over is practically guaranteed.Reading Michael K's tale took me on one such heart-breaking, metaphorical journey, at the culmination of which I realized that pitying the innocence of Michael Ks of the world who are repeatedly squashed like bugs under the bootsoles of the 'system' is but a foolish thing to do. Instead, I felt pity for the ones who are incapable of recognizing true misery when they see it, the ones who fail to identify the root cause of all human conflict and its futility, who pride themselves on their achievements which are, sometimes, nothing but grave mistakes in the greater scheme of things.In spite of being born with genetic deformities and other crucial handicaps like the absence of a privileged background, Michael K is a fortunate being in my eyes. Someone who doesn't baulk at staring truth right in the eye, a venerable hero stranded in the midst of cowards. He can summon the moral strength to shun the comforts of life, deprived of which each one of us are bound to wither away and die the pathetic death of an unwatered plant. He can seek refuge in the heart of the inhabitable mountains, combat starvation by feasting on insects and the cherished pumpkins he cultivates with the tender care of a mother. He is brave enough to eschew the path prescribed by the ones positioned on the top most echelons of the social hierarchy. He doesn't know which side to choose during a war. So he chooses life over death, physical suffering over psychological enslavement, creation over destruction. Simply put, he deserts the company of men to embrace humanity. "You are precious, Michaels in your way; you are the last of your kind, a creature left over from an earlier age, like the coelacanth or the last man to speak Yaqui. We have all tumbled over the lip into the cauldron of history: only you, following your idiot light, biding your time in an orphanage, evading the peace and the war, skulking in the open where no one dreamed of looking, have managed to live in the old way, drifting through time, observing the seasons no more trying to change the course of history than a grain of sand does. We ought to value you and celebrate you, we ought to put your clothes and your packet of pumpkin seeds too, with a label; there ought to be a plague nailed to the racetrack wall commemorating your stay here."Despite being considered 'messed up in the head', he understands the one thing that others are too afraid or too ignorant to acknowledge. That laying the groundwork for a future way of life through ruthless violence blunts the human intellect to the point where one is only aroused by the urge to draw blood, inflict fatal injury and the application of reason loses its appeal.Michael doesn't understand what a war is, so he struggles to flee the myriad horrors of it, clinging to the last shred of his dignity and his self-made definitions of right and wrong. As everything falls apart in the cities, in the labour camps, swallowed up by the chaos brought forth during war, Michael busies himself with creating and rebuilding life in the countryside.Thus, Michael is nothing but a representation of that slumbering voice of reason within each one of us, the voice of the dissenter, the voice of the one putting up a passive but stubborn resistance against the absurd, inhumane demands of society at large. And that is precisely the reason why this world needs more silent revolutionaries like him. P.S.:- My only grouse with Coetzee is his pedagogical compulsion to launch into a lengthy discourse, expounding on hidden meanings, instead of having faith in the perceptive reader to grasp underlying implications. That caused me to take away that 1 star which I had no intention of taking away otherwise.
What do You think about Life And Times Of Michael K (2005)?
“Dear Michaels, I want to know your story.” Nobel laureate John M. Coetzee tells us the story of Michael K, "an earthworm," in three enigmatic chapters in this short Booker-Prize novel. Michael K replies: “Truth is I am a gardener.” Life marked Michael K for solitude, and his allegory calls to fellow earthworms-- “What grows is for all of us. We are all children of the earth.”(139) In Chapter 1, Michael K pushes his ill mother in a wheelbarrow as they escape the anarchy in dystopian South Africa to return to the farm where she was born. We know Michael’s mother, but I see his unknown father as a composite of political, religious and literary antecedents: Camus' (Meursault); Kafka's (The Hunger Artist, The Trial, Metamorphosis); Jesus' (The Parable of the Sower, 40-days in the wilderness; silence before Pilate; claims to be “the bread of life”); Gandhi's (hunger strikes and passive resistance); and Moses' (exodus from slavery into the wilderness)--to name only a few of the obvious "fathers." Indeed, there are scores of other ancestors whom astute readers will discover, but casual readers looking for a traditional plot or hero may be disappointed in this allegorical novel of ideas.As Michael K passes through “the intestines of war,” he rejects doctrine, history, ideology, racism, tribalism, nationalism, and, seemingly, he even withdraws from a humanity that is caught in an endless cycle of absurd civil-racial-ideological-geographical wars. “He is like a stone, a pebble that, having lain around quietly minding its own businesses since the dawn of time, is now suddenly picked up and tossed randomly.” (135)For a period, K lives an idyllic life, alone on the veld, wrestling goats and killing birds with a sling and a stone until his life is interrupted by a landowner looking to "employ" K. Demanding freedom, Michael K refuses benevolent servitude, and the rest of the story is a series of imprisonments and escapes. Each escape leads K to a further withdrawal from people and their fear-based thinking. Increasingly indifferent to food, K clutches his pumpkin seeds and eschews processed prison food. This gardener eats only the “bread of freedom.” The point of view shifts in Chapter 2 (my favorite) to that of a doctor at a “rehabilitation” (concentration) camp who tries to heal K of malnourishment and to learn K's story. But the doctor questions the purpose of healing K--only to send him to slave labor where he will be forced to chant slogans and salute flags. "Can you remind me why we are fighting?” asks the doctor. A head guard replies: “So that minorities [whites] will have a say in their destinies.” Yet, in order to safeguard these "rights," other rights become casualties as whites feel that they must oppress people of color in order to save themselves from harsh retaliation that they expect at the hands of the majority. They fear what they themselves dish out. Wars are often based on apocalyptic tribal fears of "the other"--not on rationality, but K does not belong to any tribe. He embodies "the other." Indeed, Coetzee does not explicitly reveal Michael K’s race, but K is an “unbearing, unborn creature,” who prefers not to participate in the war, though the doctor warns K he must compromise or die. K’s silence infuriates and fascinates the doctor, but the doctor confronts his own participation as a cog in a oppressive machine. “Do any of us believe what we are doing here? I doubt it.” The doctor sees K as a “genuine little man of the earth” and, alternately, pleads with K to yield while, later being tempted to become K’s disciple: I alone see you as…a human soul above and beneath classification, a soul blessedly untouched by doctrine, untouched by history….You are precious, Michaels, in your own way; you are the last of your kind, a creature left over from an earlier age, like the like coelacanth or the last man to speak Yaqui. We have all tumbled over the lip into cauldron of history: only you, following your idiot light…have managed to live in the old way, drifting through time, observing the season, no more trying to change the course of history than a grain of sand does. We ought to value you and celebrate you. (151-52) I wonder if the doctor's attitude represents the more achievable paradigm for most individuals with a conscience rather than the extreme withdrawal of Michael K.Chapter 3 is an enigmatic and short chapter that opens the story to many interpretations. Does Michael K reject only doctrines or all human pleasures? Is this story cyclical? Did it even happen? Regardless of my final disappointments in the novel, Michael K personifies freedom. This allegory beckons me to follow my own “idiot light" and to unclassify myself and to refuse categorical thinking We are free men and women. Earthworms and gardeners of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains and your slavery!
—Steve Sckenda
حياة وزمن مايكل ك أي شقاء هي حياة مايكل ك!! وأي زمن هو زمنه!! حصلت هذه الرواية على جائزة البوكر سنة 1983 م، الكاتب هو الجنوب أفريقي الشهير جي. إم. كويتسي صاحب روايتي (في انتظار البرابرة) و(خزي). تذكرنا هذه الرواية بانتظار البرابرة، لا... لا يوجد تشابه في الأحداث، ولكنه فقط تشابه في البؤس، تشابه في تحول الإنسان إلى لا شيء في وجه أحداث عاصفة، في حالة مايكل ك العاصفة هي حرب أهلية مدمرة، حرب خيالية، تركت جنوب أفريقيا في حالة ما بعد الحرب، حيث الحكومة متحفزة ورجال العصابات يقومون بغزواتهم المدمرة من حين إلى حين، في هذه الظروف يتنقل مايكل ك، محاولاً الخروج بأمه من المدينة، وعندما تموت يحاول العيش متوحداً، ولكن يقبض عليه ويزج في معسكرات تأهيل، لا تفلح في تأهيله أبداً، مايكل ك حالة محيرة، للطبيب الذي حاول معالجته، ولنا نحن كقراء، ولكنه للأسف حالة مزمنة في الحروب والاضطرابات، هي حالة الإنسان البائس المسكين الذي لا يدري ماذا يفعل! وكيف يدبر أموره وكل شيء قد انقلب، وصار العالم مكاناً عسيراً، لهذا عندما انتهت الرواية شعرت بالرعب من تخيل آلاف المايكل ك الذين يجوبون ويحاولون العيش في العراق وسوريا، وكل المناطق العربية المنكوبة.
—Fahad
Life and Times of Michael K completely lives up to the hype and deserves every fucking award it has received. Both corporeally and allegorically it is as deep as they come; it isn’t just about the slow thinking Michael K. trying to survive; it is about inner strength, our perceptions of others, individuality in a world in which we are alone; it is about how we view meaning, and the depths one can reach through those meanings when they are extensions of one’s true self.Coetzee amazed me....take a look at this one sentence:But most of all, as summer slanted to an end, he was learning to love idleness, idleness no longer as stretches of freedom reclaimed by stealth here and there from involuntary labour, surreptitious thefts to be enjoyed sitting on his heels before a flowerbed with the fork dangling from his fingers, but as a yielding up of himself to him, to a time flowing slowly like oil from horizon to horizon over the face of the world, washing over his body, circulating in his armpits and his groin, stirring his eyelids.His tough wisdom:When my mother was dying in hospital, he thought, when she knew her end was coming, it was not me she looked to but someone who stood behind me: her mother or the ghost of her mother. To me she was a woman but to herself she was still a child calling to her mother to hold her and help her. And her own mother, in the secret life we do not see, was a child too. I come from a line of children without end.In manmade squalor there is beauty to be found; in the doltish, something special to offer the world; in the darkest despair, new levels of hope can be reached. As we go forward planting the seeds of who we are, especially in times of peril, if we stay true to ourselves, the beauty of our unique human condition makes its mark; meaning is carved out; life is strengthened and affirmed, and it all sprouts from what is inside us. Michael K. knows this.If you're thinking of reading Life and Times of Michael K. -- and I think you should -- be sure to read the reviews by David and Donald. They do this novel far more justice than I ever could.http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...
—Ben
