Uma narrativa que aborda a desolação de Michael K, que vive num mundo em guerra e sente não ter utilidade para o mundo.

É um leitura dura, em que o protagonista passa a maior parte do tempo em campos de trabalho (tentam demonstrar serem para a segurança dos habitantes, mas na verdade é um outro tipo de prisão). Michael K é um jovem demasiado frágil para as dificuldades da vida, e ao longo da sua jornada tentará sempre ser livre.

Three allegoric movements compose this symphonic tale, whose inert melody is inwardly repeated in a concentric canon of voices where character, writer and reader create a fused metanarration alternating rhythms of disquiet, frigidity and discomfort.

It all starts with bafflement.
Michael K is an outsider with a harelip, a defective soul whom people take for an indolent moron, a wooden man thrown into the battlefield of life with a past as opaque as his present and as elusive as his future.
I read subjugated, tempted to dissect such specimen to find a logical explanation but the text acts as a mirror showing a reflection of myself that is everything but gratifying.

Michael K pushes a wheelbarrow that carries his sick mother to her native town in the countryside with little awareness of the phantasmagorical atmosphere that rings in the reader’s ears with its muted bombs, disguised mine shafts and nightmarish ambushes. Does it really matter whether the civil war occurs in South Africa during Apartheid time? Dehumanization knows of no races, no nationalities, no dogmas, and Michael’s insignificant life is diluted in the ocean of human misery.

Michael K abandons himself to starvation surrounded by sterile nature in a desperate attempt to step out of the Kafkaesque labyrinth of mankind and to return to origins, to reconnect with the earth that nurtures his pumpkin seeds and his gardener soul. The silver moonbeams, the sight of every morning and the shadow of the mountain shape his atemporal existence in an alien world where man and land become one.

Michael K knows he is nothing. He doesn’t want to die because his life is not even worth telling but ironically he lives in dying more intensely than he does in living. He refutes the absurdity of an imposed system based on bigoted domination and ruthless abuse and sets for the path of self-determination through passive resistance. With isolation comes spiritual transformation and echoing one of the most famous bugs in the history of literature, Michael K metamorphoses into a “smaller, harder and drier” lethargic creature whose consciousness appears more and more fragmented each passing day.

Michael K is captured and sent to a “rehabilitation” camp. His mind obeys because his rebellion wouldn’t make a difference but his body acts of his own accord, refusing to be poisoned by food that will revive his emaciated frame into a sellable piece of meat ready to be exploited, mistreated and deprived of identity.

The initial bafflement gives way to an escalating distress that reaches its pinnacle coinciding with a narrative shift in the second movement of the novella. The omniscient Michael K disappears and a first person narrator embodied in one of the doctors of the labour camp takes his place and starts contemplating Michael’s motives for his stubborn refusal to eat, making the new narrator reflect on his inculcated beliefs and his reasons to endorse war. Why does he feel an irrepressible urge to save this weird man? What is the story hidden behind his patient’s silence? What is he fighting for? The doctor’s persistent pondering seeps over and into the reader’s thirst for answers and his voice takes a universal quality transcending fiction, character and plotline.
Doctor, reader, the same Coetzee or even the whole humanity incarnate the metaphorical voice-over dwelling on the story of a man without history who understands nothing about wars, political ideologies, dogmatic belief, races, life, death, love or even pain but whose apparent indifference bears a terrifying consistency and a mystical aura reminiscent of Melville’s scrivener Bartleby and his motto “I would prefer not to”. Pacifist revolutionary? Dauntless freethinker?

Coetzee doesn’t supply answers and his slippery hero dissolves into the reeking darkness of a recondite barrow in the uterus of a depraved civilization where he waits in eternal stand-by, oblivious to past or future, to be reborn in a shocking and final third movement where “the obscurest of the obscure becomes a prodigy”. And I, stupefied reader whose life and times are inconsequential, look at the world with closed eyes and see deserts blooming with pumpkin flowers that smell like groundless hope.

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/...

Oh these powerful novels/novellas! My favorite, I think, must be Graham Greene's "The Quiet American" (& his "Brighton Rock" comes a shy second), but lately I've discovered that the much-revered South African titan of lit J. M. Coetzee has a similar (enviable) gift for packing a tremendous wallop in such a tiny package.

The writer has a confidence which is rivaled only by the avid devotion to his topic: mainly of the modern war, or, perhaps more aptly, the Holocaust in that bottom-most region in the poorest continent on Earth. Reading this alongside, say, Hardy's "Jude the Obscure" would be an entertaining exercise in contrasts: The Sad Englishman versus the (true) Global Pariah... this spectrum of bad fortune and human suffering is a pretty wide one! is the collective conclusion. Here, also like with the unforgettable "Animal's People", the suffering and woe goes on and on and on, and that is why the decision for the brevity of the narrative is a wise one. The reader takes as much as he or she can handle, because unlike "Animal's People" the community of Michael K is heartless; the man is by himself and perpetually alone. The figure of the lonely smiling skeleton that is what becomes of Michael K (the name itself assures the reader that there are, as in legion, plenty of Michael Ks in the world, roaming like animals, transcending the bonds of physical life itself). Michael K is like the modern Rapunzel-poet from Bolano's "Amulet"... the reader is shown that with near-death, reaching that certain state, comes brief and brilliant glimpses of what stuff life is REALLY made up of.

Huh.

The prose was detached and lifeless, as I have come to expect from Coetzee. Which leaves you cold and alone. In the rain, outside on the deserted street gazing at the lighted windows of the stalinesque apartment buildings across the road. And inside you there's this dull ache of hollowness that is where the prose would be if it was there. And because you are so empty there is a sort of lack that swells and swells until it fills you whole and spills over into your thoughts and your actions. And this is depression and as you read it emanates from your very pores until you and the book are enveloped in it like a halo of light the colour of the outside of the universe.

So that was good. I always like a book that makes me feel that way. Because here is a man who is alone, more alone than I have ever been and no one cares. Because here's the thing. I have a family and I have friends and if somehing happens to me they care. And I have this government that would give me money if I had none. And when I was sick I got the best medical care around, and it was free, because there's this attitude here that I matter and that everyone matters enough to deserve the same. And then there is Michael K, who doesn't matter to anyone, and all he wants to do is be left alone, but the establishment can't even do that. They have to take him and do things to him even though he can be of no conceivable use to them or anyone else. And he turns away from anyone who could help him and who wants to help him. And that was really good. By which I mean it was brilliantly portrayed and hopelessly moving.

But then we get to part the third and suddenly the thing turns into this pathetic Coelho-esque excuse for a book. And it's full of patronising, pseudo-philosophical drivel that doesn't mean a thing. And the prose loses its beautiful detachment and becomes airy and pretty and floaty and suddenly I'm not liking it nearly so much any more. So I give it five stars for the first part and two point five for the last part, which I somehow average out to make four.

___________________________________

No, I probably shouldn't have borrowed this. But I just joined a new library today and it was sitting there, looking so small and cute and just crying out to be taken to a good home! And it's thin, right, and I can keep it for three whole weeks, right, so I should have plenty of time to read a maths textbook, right, finish off my modern and contemporary literature booklist and read me some Brigade Mondaine before school starts next Monday, right? Right.

And I really would have liked to have joined in the Coetzee-fest when it was actually on. But at that time I had self-discipline. And there were no Coetzee books in the public library.

In a word: devastating.

This is Coetzee's signature novel and absolutely must be read. To say that I loved it feels like a highly inappropriate statement because even though I feel that way I can't love a book that devastated me as a reader and challenged my notions about reconciliation and redemption from injustices of the past on an individual as well as societal levels. Perhaps not many would see it that way but the novel is also a subtle statement on race relations in modern times and its power dynamics, and it offers no rainbow ending, no feel-good resolution.

The Life & Times of Michael K (1983)
Author: J.M. Coetzee
Read: 10/10/20
Rating: 2.5/5 stars

Teeming with praise from Booker to Nobel,
but actual story lacks liveliness.
Despite powerful / skilled writing,
sparsely told allegory
weighed down by politics
and lofty harangues.
Hard to connect
to this man
who shuns
life.

#ReverseEtheree #ReviewPoem #BookerPrize #NobelLaureate #Africa #colonialism #cremains #epigraph #farmlife #gardening #hospital #loneliness #motherson #multiplepointsofview #poverty #prisonescape #socialcommentary #survival #war #workcamp #war

Overwhelming. A kind of book I wish to have written. Regarding part two of the novel, in my mind comes this question: how do the 'living' get to wish for a life of a 'ghost' - a skeleton. Is it, perhaps, because ghosts are free to roam the earth, while the living are kept within confinements of obligation and routine and the need to survive?

A story to read again, and again.

UN GRANELLO DI SABBIA



Non ci sarà più un granello che porti il mio segno, proprio come mia madre che ora, passata la sua stagione sulla terra, è stata lavata via, dispersa dal vento e risucchiata dai fili d’erba.

Michael è nero nel Sudafrica ancora dominato dall’apartheid (il romanzo è uscito otto anni prima che fosse cancellato, e undici prima che Mandela fosse liberato e diventasse presidente). È un giardiniere pubblico e, quindi, lavora per i bianchi, visto che al governo ci sono i bianchi, il potere è nelle loro mani.
Anche sua madre, Anna K., lavora per i bianchi, in una casa di padroni bianchi.



Ma mamma e figlio vivono in case e zone diverse di Città del Capo. Probabilmente perché la donna s’è sempre vergognata di quel figlio nato col labbro leporino, con l’impossibilità di sigillare bene la bocca e dunque d’essere allattato.
Al colore della pelle Michael aggiunge questa menomazione fisica.

Ha trent’anni quando inizia il romanzo. Quanti ne abbia quando Coetzee interrompe la sua narrazione non lo so: ma so che dalla prima all’ultima pagina ha vissuto così tante esperienze da maturare ben più del tempo effettivamente trascorso.



Un po’ di Kafka c’è, checché neghi Coetzee stesso, o la Gordimer. Non è solo quella K solitaria che ricorda lo scrittore di Praga, ma anche quel senso di un rapporto tra stato e individuo nel quale il secondo è un insetto e il primo il corpo che attraverso le sue regole (leggi leggi) lo può calpestare e schiacciare.
O in quel sentore di burocrazia infinita fatta all’unico scopo di difendere il potere e annullare la libertà individuale nella ragnatela di regole: K chiede i permessi (lasciapassare) per poter uscire dalla citta e raggiungere la fattoria portandosi dietro la mamma ammalata. Quando decide che ha atteso abbastanza, quando capisce che l’autorizzazione s’è persa nella rete e non gli sarà mai consegnata, inizia il suo viaggio.



La madre non regge il viaggio, Michael deve portarla in ospedale dove la donna più che morire, crepa.
Con le ceneri della madre messe in un sacchetto, Michael prosegue il viaggio: vuole tornare nella fattoria della sua infanzia.

Coetzze trasporta il lettore in una delle sue tipiche situazioni e atmosfere: è in corso una guerra, come tutte le guerre schifosa e incomprensibile, ci sono campi di raccolta, di internamento, di lavoro, posti di blocco, convogli militari, coprifuoco, armi, violenza, una guerra civile in corso, chi ha la divisa comanda sempre. In che epoca siamo, chi governa, chi si ribella, che sta succedendo…?
Domande che rimangono senza precisa risposta. Per me, anche questo aumenta il fascino della lettura, l’essere lasciato libero di ipotizzare, di trovare le mie risposte.



Michael è un singolo individuo che vive nell’alienazione e nell’isolamento: per lottare contro l’Autorità, contro la violenza del Potere, può ricorrere solo alla resilienza. Virtù della quale sembra ben provvisto: se all’inizio sembra un po’ troppo ingenuo per la sua età, un “semplice di spirito” per usare un eufemismo, alla fine appare carico di saggezza e consapevolezza.
Il suo viaggio è segnato da deviazioni, intoppi, fughe, nascondigli, contrattempi, malattie, ricovero: così tanto frastagliato e faticoso da ricordare l’Ulisse omerico che vuole tornare alla sua casa in Itaca.



Michael non partecipa e non si oppone al male e alla violenza che lo circonda: alla guerra non partecipa, non aderisce neppure alla resistenza, resiste, e, per quanto stretta e costretta, imbocca una sua strada contromano. Resilienza.
Come sottolinea la chiusa del romanzo: se i soldati hanno fatto saltare il pozzo, lui tira fuori dalla tasca un cucchiaio e uno spago arrotolato: piega il cucchiaio e forma un anello a cui lego lo spago:
Poi l’avrebbe calato nella terra in profondità e, quando l’avesse tirato su, ci sarebbe stata acqua nel cavo del cucchiaio. E così, avrebbe detto, si può vivere.

***CONTAINS SPOILERS I.E. HIGHLY INSULTING REMARKS ABOUT THE LAST PART OF THE BOOK***

Uh oh. Last thing I want to do is fall out with my bookfacingoodreadinfingerlickin friends such as Donald and Jessica, both of whom think this is so good you have to invent a new word for it, good just isn't good enough, brilliant is almost an insult. So as you can tell, I didn't share those views. I was so gripped by this book, couldn't wait to get back and finish it today, and then i hit the Doctor's Tale (last third) and the whole thing fell apart like an overripe pumpkin. I loved all the Robinson Crusoe-meets-Knut-Hamsun-in-apartheid-South-Africa. But I didn't love the Doctor's contorted vapourisings on the subject of lowly Michael K. In fact I wanted to Fast Forward very badly. But I had to see where all this handwringing and misunderestimating and fancypants codswallop was leading to. Seems to me that the Doctor is a horrible Sock Puppet through which the Author can write us a ghastly soft rock new age Alchemist daytime tv philosophy essay on the Lowly and Downtrodden, the Great mass of Forgotten People:

"Why? I asked myself: why will this man not eat when he is plainly starving?"

Ah, Grasshopper, why indeed. You have much to learn.

"Then as I watched you day after day I slowly began to understand the truth: that you were crying secretly, unknown to your conscious self (forgive the term), for a different kind of food, food that no camp could supply."

Ah. Yes. Oh, and then it gets Even Worse when Michael K gets a blowjob on the beach. Blimey. I may have got up on the wrong side of the bed today, but I'm quickly developing a theory that Life and Times of Michael K is the intellectual version of Pretty Woman (the movie not the Roy Orbison ballad). Sometimes you have to wonder if you're on the right planet.

Fans of the Book: "No you're not, Bryant, fuck off to your own dismal galaxy and leave us all to enjoy our Nobel Prize and Booker Prizewinner. Here's a spaceship. Now piss off. Pretty Woman? You must be on drugs."

Even now I see a crowd of literary critics and Donald with flaming torches approaching...

Μονο ευχάριστη έκπληξη αποτέλεσε η αγορά αυτού του συγκεκριμένου βιβλίου.Εξαντλημενο εδω και καιρό το βρηκα σε παλαιοβιβλιοπωλείο της οδού Ιπποκρατους όπου μπορεί κανείς να βρει μικρούς "θησαυρούς".Ο Κουτςί στα πρώτα του βήματα στο συγκεκριμένο βιβλιο θα αποσπάσει το πρώτο του Μπούκερ και θα αποτελέσει το λογοτεχνικό του υπόβαθρο σε όλο το μετέπειτα θρίαμβο του,2ο βραβείο Μπουκερ το 1999 για την ατίμωση και Νόμπελ λογοτεχνίας 4 χρονια αργότερα.Το "Βίος και πολιτεια του Μαικλ Κ" αξιζει να διαβαστεί για τα πολλαπλά μηνύματα ανθρωπιάς,Ελευθερίας και ανθρώπινης αξιοπρέπειας.Το δε 2ο μέρος του βιβλίου ειναι απο τα ωραιότερα κείμενα που εχω διαβάσει ποτε..

War is the father of all and king of all.
Some he shows as gods, others as men.
Some he makes slaves, and others free.
-Heraclitus

A South Africa ravaged by civil war, a son who believes he has been brought into the world to look after his mother, a mother bent on returning to the countryside of her girlhood, to die there under blue skies.

Let me not lose my way.

They embark on their laborious journey, fleeing the burning Cape Town without a permit, Michael pushing the heavy makeshift cart carrying his ailing mother, panting under her weight and dodging armed authorities, only for her to die on the way in a hospital.

He did not know what was going to happen. The story of his life had never been an interesting one; there had usually been someone to tell him what to do next; now there was no one, and the best thing seemed to be to wait.

It is a nightmare; to be homeless, to be alone. To be like an ant that does not know where its hole is.
What is left for Michael is a fistful of his mother’s ashes and a determination to continue his journey; to reach the farm and scatter her remains where they belong.

There seemed nothing to do but live…. wanting nothing, looking forward to nothing.

Finally, he arrives at the farm finding it abandoned and dilapidated but also regarding it as a possible shelter; where he won’t feel homeless; where he would belong; where only he knows the way to.
Or so he thinks…

He lived by the rising and setting of the sun, in a pocket outside time. Cape Town and the war and his passage to the farm slipped further and further into forgetfulness.

But for how long this newfound bliss, this oneness with nature will last?

He thought of himself not as something heavy that left tracks behind it, but if anything as a speck upon the surface of an earth too deeply asleep to notice the scratch of ant-feet, the rasp of butterfly teeth, the tumbling of dust.