Life & Times of Michael K

Summary

Amid an unspecified civil war in South Africa, a quiet, harelipped gardener pushes his dying mother in a homemade cart toward the country of her childhood. Coetzee strips the prose to a parabolic minimum, letting Michael's near-silence resist the demands of a state that wants to define and detain him. The novel is a haunting study of bare survival, refusal and the dignity of those who fall outside official narratives.