Life & Times of Michael K
by J. M. Coetzee
Summary
Michael K is a municipal gardener in Cape Town, born with a cleft lip, raised in an institution, and treated all his life as though he is simple. When civil war reaches the city and his mother falls ill, he decides to take her to the farm in the Karoo where she was born. He builds a barrow from a wheelbarrow frame and pushes her out of the city through checkpoints and permit queues.
She dies on the road. He continues, arrives at a farm that may or may not be the right one, and does the only thing that has ever made sense to him: he plants pumpkins in the dry ground and waits for them.
The state cannot leave him alone. He is picked up repeatedly, put in camps that are called something else, fed, questioned and misunderstood by people who need him to want something. He escapes each time, eats less, and becomes harder to hold.
Coetzee writes in flat, exact prose with no interiority offered at all. Michael K explains himself to nobody, including the reader, and the middle section handing the narration to a camp doctor desperate to interpret him is the sharpest joke in a book with very few.
It is short, austere and hungry, and it is about the refusal to be administered.
Under two hundred and fifty pages, and probably the best entry point to Coetzee, being less brutal than Disgrace and more approachable than the later novels. Expect to find Michael K unknowable, since that is what the book is about.
Historical Context & Significance
Life and Times of Michael K won the Booker Prize in 1983, J.M. Coetzee's first of two. He won again in 1999 for Disgrace, becoming the first writer to take the prize twice, and he attended neither ceremony.
The novel was written under apartheid, published in 1983, and its refusal to name a political programme drew criticism at the time from writers who believed the situation demanded direct engagement. Nadine Gordimer, who had won the Booker herself in 1974, reviewed it with admiration and reservation on exactly that ground.
Coetzee moved to Australia in 2002 and won the Nobel Prize in Literature the following year. The camps in the novel, never explained and entirely recognisable, are the reason it has outlived the circumstances that produced it.