Doğuştan sahip olduğu fiziksel özürlerle bile kimsenin onun yerinde olmak istemediği bir karakter Michael K. Kimsenin hatta yer yer okuyucunun bile ne yaptığını anlamadığı bir karaktet yaratmış Coetzee. Okurken hem K'ya acıyorsunuz hem de bir insan bu kadar mı talihsiz olur diyorsunuz. Coetzee'nin özellikle kitabın ilk bölümünde yazım tarzını ve dilini sevdim, başka bir kitabına da şans vermek isterim

Totally flawed and periodically Coetzee indulges himself too much in his didactic turns of phrase, but this was transportive and challenging and sensuous and minimalistic and deeply individual. This novel feels like Voltaire meets Kafka meets Defoe meets Han Kang, all while feeling wildly original. It's incomprehensible how enigmatic yet profound this novel is when it basically follows the titular Michael K walking and walking and walking. And yet it handles the banality of war, land ownership, homelessness, refugee experience, welfare, the government as a force that prevents freedom, asceticism, ancestry, idolatry, race (without ever, except for two or so indirect remarks, stating who is white and who is black), survival, etc. It's a bleak one, but, unlike what I remember of Disgrace, this does somehow come out as life-affirming. Coetzee rejuvenates. It is like he whittled down and glazed a hunk of granite and offered up to the world a sublime sculpture of an everyday man who comes from the margins.

Cuenta la historia que estando el filósofo Diógenes sentado frente al tonel donde vivía con su perro, se le presentó Alejandro Magno: “Mis respetos, Diógenes. Soy el hombre más poderoso de la tierra; decime que puedo hacer por vos". Y Diógenes le respondió: “Correte un poco que me tapas el sol”: Diógenes era un hombre libre, porque había logrado reducir sus necesidades a lo esencial.

Michael K es un hombre que tiene todos los factores de la vida en su contra, desde un defecto de nacimiento hasta el contexto histórico de ser un negro pobre en la Sudáfrica del Apartheid.
Y a lo largo de la novela podremos acompañarlo en su deriva, como un hombre libre, con necesidades mínimas; una deriva que me resultó ágil, atrapante y fascinante gracias al arte y la sensibilidad de Coetzee.

Una novela que me cambió: me hizo valorar mucho más la importancia de ser una persona realmente libre, y me permitió desarrollar una sensibilidad para identificar y comprender en otros esta libertad, esta falta de necesidades, en mi vida cotidiana.

Hasta ahora no tenía dudas de que la mejor obra de Coetzee era Esperando a los bárbaros; ahora no estoy tan seguro.

Una obra de arte.

John Maxwell Coetzee nació y vivió gran parte de su vida en Sudáfrica, hasta de la condena social que recibió tras su novela Desgracia (en la era de la euforia post apartheid tuvo la impertinencia escribir una novela en la que el malo es negro; una falta de corrección política inaceptable); actualmente vive en Australia. De cierta manera, más allá de que parece ser arrogante y antipático, Coetzee es posiblemente un hombre libre.

To plant seeds. To be a gardener. To bend the handle of a teaspoon into a loop, tie a string to it, lower it down a shaft deep into the earth, and draw it up with water in the bowl of the spoon.

The world this book created in my mind is divided between the inside and the outside. Being forced to stay inside feels like being in an institution, a prison, a camp—where the air is still, the oxygen slowly leaking, leaving you barely able to breathe. Inside, life is drained from the body until only bones remain, bones that use their last bit of strength to escape to the outside. Like Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, one begins to roam, learning the terrain, but unlike Zarathustra, Michael K doesn’t want to return to any cave. He wants to stay outside, planting seeds.

I’ll begin with the book’s final pages, which brought to mind this inside-outside division. We’re inside Michael’s thoughts as he reflects:

“At least,” he thought, “at least I have not been clever, and come back to Sea Point full of stories of how they beat me in the camps till I was thin as a rake and simple in the head. I was mute and stupid in the beginning; I will be mute and stupid at the end. There is nothing to be ashamed of in being simple. They were locking up simpletons before they locked up anyone else. Now they have camps for children whose parents ran away, camps for people who kick and foam at the mouth, camps for people with big heads and people with little heads, camps for people with no visible means of support, camps for people chased off the land, camps for people they find living in storm-water drains, camps for street girls, camps for people who can't add two and two, camps for people who forget their papers at home, camps for people who live in the mountains and blow up bridges in the night. Perhaps the truth is that it is enough to be out of the camps, out of all the camps at the same time. Perhaps that is enough of an achievement, for the time being. How many people are there left who are neither locked up nor standing guard at the gate? I have escaped the camps; perhaps, if I lie low, I will escape the charity too.”

The lesson, if there is one, seems to be that Michael’s life as a cultivator is grounded in his closeness to the soil. Like a worm turning the earth, the gardener transforms. But war yanks the gardener out of the soil, throws him onto concrete, erects walls around him, forcing him into structures like prisons or camps. War uproots gardeners, soldiers, and all people as if they were worms caged in concrete.

Michael has found a crack, perhaps one that mirrors the small cleft of his harelip—a detail that marks him as incomplete to others, separating him and perhaps saving him. He doesn’t feel compelled to conform to society’s notion of a “complete human being.” Instead, he becomes something simple—a gardener, a worm of the soil.

“It is because I am a gardener,” he thought, “because that is my nature.” He sharpened his spade on a stone, savoring the moment the blade would meet earth. The impulse to plant had reawakened in him; within weeks, he found his waking life tightly bound to the patch of earth he’d begun to cultivate and the seeds he’d planted there.
….
“He even knew the reason why: because enough men had gone off to war saying the time for gardening was when the war was over; whereas there must be men to stay behind and keep gardening alive, or at least the idea of gardening; because once that cord was broken, the earth would grow hard and forget her children. That was why. Always, when he tried to explain himself to himself, there remained a gap, a hole, a darkness before which his understanding bulked, into which it was useless to pour words. The words were eaten up, the gap remained. His was always a story with a hole in it: a wrong story, always wrong.”

But soon, the outside world intrudes on his cultivation. Human society insists on invading his refuge. Michael feels “the old hopeless stupidity” creeping in again, a kind of existential hell Sartre would say is “other people” who refuse to let you garden in peace- another stranger emerges—the farm's owner, hiding from the army.


When Michael is inevitably recaptured and returned to concrete confinement, we’re placed in the mind of a nurse observing him:

“That was where you belonged. You should have stayed all your life clinging to a nondescript bush in a quiet corner of an obscure garden in a peaceful suburb, doing whatever it is that stick insects do to maintain life, nibbling a leaf here and there, eating the odd aphid, drinking dew.
...
Let me tell you the meaning of the sacred and alluring garden that blooms in the heart of the desert and produces the food of life. The garden for which you are presently heading is nowhere and everywhere except in the camps. It is another name for the only place where you belong, Michael, where you do not feel homeless. It is off every map, no road leads to it that is merely a road, and only you know the way.”

We are, like the nurse, both fascinated by and alienated from Michael. He embodies the “other,” that recurring figure in Western literature—disabled, different. Yet in our effort to humanize him, we risk fetishizing his difference, even as we see him as an emblem of simplicity, stripped of the illusions of society, the nature itself.


Ale jak by povedal Žižek, the greatest thing is to be dehumanised and alienated

J. M Coetzee’s Booker Prize winning novella 'The Life & Times of Michael K' is set in Apartheid South Africa during a fictional civil war. Michael K is a simple man and has spent his childhood in institutions and works as a gardener in Cape Town. Michael was born with a hare lip, a disfigurement which makes people look down on him. They view him as a simpleton, as a doctor later explains:

"He is a simpleton, and not even an interesting simpleton. He is a poor helpless soul who has been permitted to wander out on the battlefield, if I may use that word, the battlefield of life"

Michael's mother works as a domestic servant to a wealthy family and Michael wants to do right by her. So when she becomes very sick and decides that she wants to return to her birthplace, he makes plans to take her there. But martial law has been imposed and he is unable to get the proper permits for travel out of the city. He builds a makeshift rickshaw out of a wheelbarrow in which he pushes his mother out into the countryside. It’s an arduous journey. The roads are full of armed convoys from whom they must hide and other travellers who want to steel their possessions. With only cold food to eat and having to sleep outdoors his mother’s health declines further and she dies along the way. Michael resolves to deliver his mother’s ashes to her rural birthplace. But it is an anarchic country and along the way he is robbed, arrested, thrown in an interment camp for vagrants and generally suffers the injustices of an unfair system.

Outside the town of Prince Albert he finds the farm where his mother once lived but it is now long abandoned. Michael builds himself a dug-out, barely surviving communing with nature, making a garden where he grows melons and pumpkins. (I'm sure that they are supposed to represent something but I've no idea what).

Every so often Michael’s quiet and happy existence is disrupted by a war that has nothing to do with him. Eventually he is captured and taken to a 're-education' centre where is forced to answer questions he does not understand. As an act of defiance he rejects the food his captors give him and finally escapes to return to the apartment where he and his mother lived in Cape Town.

Michael is happiest when left alone and he represents a desperate longing for a simplicity that most of us disguise with our busy lives. He is a man brought to the brink of desperation by unfortunate events in his early life on which he had no say. Everywhere he goes there are people who want to exercise their form of charity upon him, asking him questions.

"I have escaped the camps; perhaps, if I lie low, I will escape the charity too."

The first and longest section of this book is written in the third person, the second section in first person in the form of a doctor in the re-education camp before the final section reverts back to third person; all of which I found a little confusing. This was a novel about passive resistance to oppression and about human resilience but has slight religious undertones to it.

Michael was ”an original soul . . . untouched by doctrine, untouched by history . . . evading the peace and the war . . . drifting through time”.

On the whole I enjoyed the sparse nature of the writing, found it insightful but it also seemed to lack momentum at times. Coetzee's sudden decision to ask a moral question right at the end seemed out of place, a little puzzling and rather let down what had come before.

Với tôi, một cuốn sách hay là một cuốn sách nhiều gợi mở. Cuộc đời và thời đại của Michael K đích xác là một cuốn sách như thế. Gạt qua chủ đề số phận con người trong chiến tranh mà ta có thể dễ dàng tìm thấy trong nhiều cuốn sách khác, với cuốn sách này Coetzee đã tạo ra một nhân vật CON NGƯỜi phản chiến huy hoàng nhất theo một cách ít ai ngờ tới nhất. Nói như viên bác sĩ chữa bệnh cho Michael, Michael là một con người quý giá, một con người cuối cùng thuộc loại người của anh, một sinh vật bị bỏ lại từ thời tiền sử. Anh có một hệ quy chiếu của riêng anh. Do đó, sẽ vô ích nếu cố gắng hiểu anh theo cách của đại đa số loài người.

Nói một cách bông phèng thì trong một chừng mực nào đó thì Michael rất giống Danny và các bạn trong Thị trấn Tortilla Flat của John Steinbeck. Michael không quan tâm đến tiền bạc, của cải: tất cả những gì anh cần là một ít hạt giống. Còn Danny và các bạn cũng không quan tâm đến tiền bạc, họ chỉ quan tâm đến rượu và đàn bà. Phần lớn chúng ta thì vừa quan tâm đến rượu và đàn bà vừa quan tâm đến tiền:)Michael K mới đích thực là người làm vườn vĩ đại.

Tôi đang cố gắng miêu tả chính xác cảm giác của mình: cuốn sách này ngấm vào tôi như nước ngấm vào đất. Và với cuốn sách này, tôi chắc chắn thêm rằng Coetzee là một trong những nhà văn yêu thích nhất của mình

در ستایش آزادی ، در ستایش طبیعت
جان ماکسول کوتسی نویسنده اهل آفریقا جنوبی افزون بر پرداختن به جنگ داخلی و آپارتاید از نگاه مایکل ک قهرمان نه چندان دوست داشتنی کتاب به تلاش انسان برای جستجوی آزادی و نیز کوشش او برای زنده ماندن به هر قیمتی اما در زیر چتر آزادی پرداخته است .
قهرمان کتاب او مایکل ک ، که علاوه بر کم هوشی و فقر دچار نقصی در صورت است در ماموریتی دن کیشوت وار تلاش می کند تا مادر پیر خود را به زادگاهش ببرد ، تلاش او بدون آگاهی از جنگ داخلی و آنچه که در جریان است به فاجعه ختم می شود .
می توان شباهتهایی میان مایکل ک داستان کتاب کوتسی و فارست گامپ کتاب ویسنستون گروم پیدا کرد ، اگرچه مایکل استقامت و اراده فارست گامپ را در پینگ پنگ یا صید میگو و یا در دویدن ندارد ( البته آفریقاجنوبی هم مانند آمریکا سرزمین فرصتها نیست )، اما هر دو آنها تلاش برای زیستن دور از آدمیان و در پناه طبیعت دارند .
اما با وجود داستان نسبتا متمایز و شخصیت متفاوت مایکل ک ، کتاب روند یکنواخت ، کند و کسل کننده و قابل پیش بینی دارد ، مسیری که مایکل ک می رود فرجام و عاقبت آن روشن است .

4.5

This book is LEGENDARY.
I reread this LEGENDARY book last week a and there is only one word that can substitute the blank for it-LEGENDARY.


I, before my death, want to meet JM Coetzee once in my life.
A great book ...

"Una pietruzza dura, appena consapevole di quello che ha intorno, chiusa in se stessa e nella sua vita interiore."



"La prima cosa che la levatrice notò di Michael K quando lo aiutò a uscire dal ventre materno fu che aveva il labbro leporino."

Cosa significa vivere in mezzo a sguardi che si distolgono disgustati?
Meglio stare soli dunque e bastare a se stessi.
Un viaggio, tuttavia, cambia tutto.

Città del Capo diventa invivibile con l'infuriare della guerra e Michael costruisce un rudimentale carretto con cui trasportare Anna K, la madre malata, per raggiungere la campagna dove è nata.
Un progetto banale che, però, non fa i conti con la Storia che implacabile incombe sull'uomo semplice.
Il romanzo procede per sottrazione.
Voragini si allargano dentro e fuori il protagonista.
Presenze e bisogni si dissolvono con la leggerezza e la semplicità di un granello di polvere al primo alito di vento.
La madre,
la veglia,
la fame,
la libertà:
tutto pian piano scompare.

"Senza documenti, senza soldi, senza famiglia, senza amici, senza la minima idea di chi tu sia. Il più oscuro degli oscuri, così oscuro da essere un prodigio."

مایکل ک آدم عجیبی است! از الان تا آخر عمرم چهره‌ی تکیده و لب‌های شکری او، بدن فِرز و لاغر و عضله‌ای‌اش از جلوی چشمم کنار نمی‌رود. مایکل در هیچ اردوگاهی جای نمی‌گیرد، می‌جنگد تا به همه ثابت کند خودش آقای خودش است، او می‌خواهد خودش باشد و جالیز‌هایش و طبیعت. جنگ و نظام نژادپرستی هیچ کاری به این آدم در ظاهر مفلوک ندارد. او می‌رود و می‌رود، همه‌ی جاده‌ها را طی می‌کند تا بلکه دمی آرام بگیرد.
کوتسیا از نژادپرستی و جامعه‌ی جنگ‌زده صحبت می‌کند، از جامعه‌ای که می‌خواهد مردمش انگل‌وار زندگی کنند و هیچ‌کس پرچمی جز انگل بودگی را بر سر دستانش بلند نکند. کوتسیا ماهرانه روایتی می‌گوید که تاریخ‌مصرف ندارد، رمانی که به وقایع جنگ‌های داخلی آفریقای جنوبی اشاره دارد اما قابل تعمیم به همه‌ی کشورها و همه‌ی زمان‌هاست. کوتسیا بلد است از جمله‌ها چگونه استفاده کند تا با ریتم تند گام‌های مایکل ک همراه باشد، تا منِ خواننده هم بتوانم سرگشتگی و کلافه بودن او را درک کنم.
اما نکته‌ی جالب این‌جاست که دقیقا در فصل دوم کتاب خودم را پیدا کردم. بعد از خواندن‌های متمادی و دیدن روایت‌های مختلف بالاخره خودم را در قالب استوار پرستارِ نظامی اردوگاه بی‌خانمان‌های جنگی پیدا کردم. تک‌گویی این شخصیت من را تکان داد و به چیزی درونم ضربه زد که خودِ خودم بود. فکر کنم اگر موقع خواندن کتاب کسی من را می‌دید می‌توانست از چشم‌های گرد شده و چهره‌ی مبهوتم بفهمد درونم چه می‌گذرد.
کوتسیا جان ممنونم از شما، این دنیایی که به من هدیه دادی هیچ‌وقت از جلوی چشم‌هایم کنار نمی‌رود، دنیایی که نه در نقش بازیگر نقش اولش که در نقش شخصیت فرعی داستان ظاهر شدم.

... "Ne demek istediğini asla anlatamayacağı gerçeği ile bu neden arasında onu ateşten ayıran mesafeden daha büyük bir boşluk vardı. Ne zaman kendini kendine tanımlamaya kalkışsa hep o noktaya geldiğinde kavrayışının yetersiz kaldığı, sözcüklerle doldurmanın hiçbir yarar sağlamayacağı bir boşluk, bir oyuk, bir karanlık hep kalırdı. Sözcükler öğütülüyor, boşluksa kalıyordu. Onunki, içinde hep eksik bir şey kalan bir öyküydü. Yanlış bir öyküydü, hep yanlış olmuştu"