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夭賳丿诏蹖 賵 夭賲丕賳賴鈥屰� 賲丕蹖讴賱 讴
夭賳丿诏蹖 賵 夭賲丕賳賴鈥屰� 賲丕賷賰賱 賰 乇賲丕賳蹖 倬賷趩賷丿賴 丕爻鬲 賰賴 亘丕 爻亘賰蹖 鬲丨爻賷賳鈥屫ㄘ必з嗂娯� 賵 賳孬乇蹖 賲賵噩夭 丨賯丕乇鬲 丕賳爻丕賳 乇丕 丿乇 爻賷胤乇踿 亘賵乇賵賰乇丕爻蹖 丌倬丕乇鬲丕賷丿 賳卮丕賳 鈥屬呟屸€屫囏� 賵 乇賵購賷丕蹖 賰爻蹖 乇丕 鬲氐賵賷乇 賲蹖鈥屬冑嗀� 賰賴 賯氐丿 丿丕乇丿 禺丕乇噩 丕夭 亘丕賮鬲 賴賲夭賷爻鬲蹖 賲鬲毓丕乇賮 丕賳爻丕賳鈥屬囏� 賵 亘賴 賲賷賱 禺賵丿卮 夭賳丿诏蹖 賰賳丿 賵 丨乇賲鬲 丕賳爻丕賳蹖 禺賵丿 乇丕 賲丨賮賵馗 亘丿丕乇丿. 賲丕賷賰賱 賰 丕賳爻丕賳蹖 丕氐賷賱 丕爻鬲 賵 亘丕 丕賷賳鈥屬冑� 禺卮賵賳鬲 賵 鬲亘毓賷囟 乇丕 鬲噩乇亘賴 賲蹖鈥屬冑嗀� 亘丕 卮賰賷亘丕賷蹖 亘賴 丌夭丕丿诏蹖 賳丕亘蹖 丿爻鬲 賲蹖鈥屬娯жㄘ� 趩乇丕賰賴 丕賵 丿乇 賳賴丕賷鬲 爻丕丿诏蹖 賴賷趩鈥屭嗁娯� 賳賲蹖鈥屫堌з囏� 賳賴 噩賳诏 賵 賳賴 丕賳賯賱丕亘貙 賳賴 賯丿乇鬲 賵 賳賴 倬賵賱貨 賲丕賷賰賱 賮賯胤 賰乇丕賲鬲 丕賳爻丕賳蹖 賲蹖鈥屫堌з囏�.
毓賱丕賵賴 亘乇 噩丕賷夭賴鈥屰� 賳賵亘賱 鄄郯郯鄢貙 噩賵丕賷夭 丕丿亘蹖 亘賭爻賷丕乇蹖 亘賴 丌孬賭丕乇 賰賵鬲賭爻賷丕 鬲毓賱賯 诏乇賮鬲賴 丕爻鬲. 丕夭 噩賲賱踿 丌賳鈥屬囏� 賲蹖鈥屫堌з� 噩丕賷夭踿 亘賵賰乇 賵 賳賷夭 噩丕賷夭踿 賮賲賷賳丕 乇丕 亘乇丕蹖 乇賲丕賳 夭賳丿诏蹖 賵 夭賲丕賳踿 賲丕賷賰賱 賰 賳丕賲 亘乇丿.
毓賱丕賵賴 亘乇 噩丕賷夭賴鈥屰� 賳賵亘賱 鄄郯郯鄢貙 噩賵丕賷夭 丕丿亘蹖 亘賭爻賷丕乇蹖 亘賴 丌孬賭丕乇 賰賵鬲賭爻賷丕 鬲毓賱賯 诏乇賮鬲賴 丕爻鬲. 丕夭 噩賲賱踿 丌賳鈥屬囏� 賲蹖鈥屫堌з� 噩丕賷夭踿 亘賵賰乇 賵 賳賷夭 噩丕賷夭踿 賮賲賷賳丕 乇丕 亘乇丕蹖 乇賲丕賳 夭賳丿诏蹖 賵 夭賲丕賳踿 賲丕賷賰賱 賰 賳丕賲 亘乇丿.
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First published January 1, 1983
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About the author
J.M. Coetzee
197听books5,100听followersJ. M. Coetzee is a South African writer, essayist, and translator, widely regarded as one of the most influential authors of contemporary literature. His works, often characterized by their austere prose and profound moral and philosophical depth, explore themes of colonialism, identity, power, and human suffering. Born and raised in South Africa, he later became an Australian citizen and has lived in Adelaide since 2002.
Coetzee鈥檚 breakthrough novel, Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), established him as a major literary voice, while Life & Times of Michael K (1983) won him the first of his two Booker Prizes. His best-known work, Disgrace (1999), a stark and unsettling examination of post-apartheid South Africa, secured his second Booker Prize, making him the first author to win the award twice. His other notable novels include Foe, Age of Iron, The Master of Petersburg, Elizabeth Costello, and The Childhood of Jesus, many of which incorporate allegorical and metafictional elements.
Beyond fiction, Coetzee has written numerous essays and literary critiques, contributing significantly to discussions on literature, ethics, and history. His autobiographical trilogy鈥擝oyhood, Youth, and Summertime鈥攂lends memoir with fiction, offering a fragmented yet insightful reflection on his own life. His literary achievements were recognized with the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003.
A deeply private individual, Coetzee avoids public life and rarely gives interviews, preferring to let his work speak for itself.
Coetzee鈥檚 breakthrough novel, Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), established him as a major literary voice, while Life & Times of Michael K (1983) won him the first of his two Booker Prizes. His best-known work, Disgrace (1999), a stark and unsettling examination of post-apartheid South Africa, secured his second Booker Prize, making him the first author to win the award twice. His other notable novels include Foe, Age of Iron, The Master of Petersburg, Elizabeth Costello, and The Childhood of Jesus, many of which incorporate allegorical and metafictional elements.
Beyond fiction, Coetzee has written numerous essays and literary critiques, contributing significantly to discussions on literature, ethics, and history. His autobiographical trilogy鈥擝oyhood, Youth, and Summertime鈥攂lends memoir with fiction, offering a fragmented yet insightful reflection on his own life. His literary achievements were recognized with the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003.
A deeply private individual, Coetzee avoids public life and rarely gives interviews, preferring to let his work speak for itself.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 1,427 reviews
August 31, 2022
Life & Times of Michael K is another wonderful novel by Coetzee. It is the 3rd that I鈥檝e read and I am sure it is not going to be the last.
Michael K lives in a South Africa ravaged by civil war together with his servant mother. Born with a harelip and a simple mind, Michael has spent his childhood in a home for special kids. Following a dying wish, Michael tries to take his mother from Cape Town to her childhood village. There are many obstacles on the road and only one of them reach the destination alive. Michael is trained as a gardener so he is trying to live independently in the wild. However, the authorities have other plans and imprison him a couple of times, trying to 鈥渞e-educate鈥� him in the spirit of the war.
The novel is exceptionally written, it was a humbling and impactful experience to be inside such an odd and simple mind, which only wants to exist free and alone. Michael is a man of contrasts, on one hand he does not seem able to hold a conversation and on the other he is capable of creating a complex irrigation system and to grow successful crops. It was interesting but also bleak to follow his journey through the wilderness, detention, hunger but also self-reliance and freedom in its different forms.
Despite being an intriguing novel, I still prefer the other two that I鈥檝e read. I did not consider Part II to be the best stylistic choice. The author chooses to leave Michael K and we read the thoughts of a nurse who treats the MC of starvation while in detention. There is a bit too much philosophy here, which is in too much contrast with the 1st and last part of the novel.
Michael K lives in a South Africa ravaged by civil war together with his servant mother. Born with a harelip and a simple mind, Michael has spent his childhood in a home for special kids. Following a dying wish, Michael tries to take his mother from Cape Town to her childhood village. There are many obstacles on the road and only one of them reach the destination alive. Michael is trained as a gardener so he is trying to live independently in the wild. However, the authorities have other plans and imprison him a couple of times, trying to 鈥渞e-educate鈥� him in the spirit of the war.
The novel is exceptionally written, it was a humbling and impactful experience to be inside such an odd and simple mind, which only wants to exist free and alone. Michael is a man of contrasts, on one hand he does not seem able to hold a conversation and on the other he is capable of creating a complex irrigation system and to grow successful crops. It was interesting but also bleak to follow his journey through the wilderness, detention, hunger but also self-reliance and freedom in its different forms.
Despite being an intriguing novel, I still prefer the other two that I鈥檝e read. I did not consider Part II to be the best stylistic choice. The author chooses to leave Michael K and we read the thoughts of a nurse who treats the MC of starvation while in detention. There is a bit too much philosophy here, which is in too much contrast with the 1st and last part of the novel.
December 17, 2021
(Book 266 from 1001 books) - The Life And Times of Michael K, J.M. Coetzee
Life & Times of Michael K is a 1983 novel, by South African-born writer J. M. Coetzee. The novel won the Booker Prize for 1983.
The novel is a story of a man named Michael K, who makes an arduous journey from Cape Town to his mother's rural birthplace, amid a fictitious civil war during the apartheid era, in the 1970-80s.
毓賳賵丕賳賴丕蹖 趩丕倬 卮丿賴 丿乇 丕蹖乇丕賳: 芦夭賳丿诏蹖 賵 夭賲丕賳賴 賲丕蹖讴賱 讴禄貨 芦乇賵夭诏丕乇 丌賯丕蹖 賲丕蹖讴賱 讴禄貨 賳賵蹖爻賳丿賴: 噩蹖.丕賲 讴賵鬲爻蹖 (讴賵鬲夭蹖)貨 (賮乇賴賳诏 賳卮乇 賳賵) 丕丿亘蹖丕鬲貨 鬲丕乇蹖禺 賳禺爻鬲蹖賳 禺賵丕賳卮: 乇賵夭 卮卮賲 賲丕賴 丕讴鬲亘乇 爻丕賱2012賲蹖賱丕丿蹖
毓賳賵丕賳: 夭賳丿诏蹖 賵 夭賲丕賳賴 賲丕蹖讴賱 讴貨 賳賵蹖爻賳丿賴: 噩蹖.丕賲 讴賵鬲爻蹖貨 賲鬲乇噩賲: 賲蹖賳賵 賲卮蹖乇蹖貨 賵蹖乇丕爻鬲丕乇 賲丨賲丿乇囟丕 噩毓賮乇蹖貨 鬲賴乇丕賳貙 賮乇賴賳诏 賳卮乇 賳賵貙 丌爻蹖賲貙 爻丕賱1383貨 丿乇 倬丕賳夭丿賴 賵221氐貨 卮丕亘讴9647443242貨 趩丕倬 丿賵賲 爻丕賱1385貨 趩丕倬 趩賴丕乇賲 爻丕賱1396貨 卮丕亘讴9789647443241貨 賲賵囟賵毓 丿丕爻鬲丕賳賴丕蹖 賳賵蹖爻賳丿诏丕賳 丕賮乇蹖賯丕 - 爻丿賴 20賲
毓賳賵丕賳: 夭賳丿诏蹖 賵 夭賲丕賳賴 賲丕蹖讴賱 讴貨 賳賵蹖爻賳丿賴: 噩蹖.丕賲 讴賵鬲爻蹖貨 賲鬲乇噩賲: 丌賳丕賴蹖鬲丕 鬲丿蹖賳貨 鬲賴乇丕賳貙 乇賵夭诏丕乇貙 爻丕賱1384貙 丿乇318氐貨 趩丕倬 丿賵賲 爻丕賱1390貨 丿乇262氐貨
毓賳賵丕賳: 乇賵夭诏丕乇 丌賯丕蹖 賲丕蹖讴賱 讴貨 賳賵蹖爻賳丿賴: 噩蹖.丕賲. 讴賵鬲夭蹖貨 賲鬲乇噩賲: 賳丿丕 乇賴賳賵乇丿丨賯貨 鬲賴乇丕賳貙 賳诏丕乇 賵 賳蹖賲丕 (賳诏蹖賲丕)貙 爻丕賱1384貙 丿乇274氐貨 卮丕亘讴9647905637貨 趩丕倬 丿賵賲 爻丕賱1384貙 丿乇299氐貨 卮丕亘讴9647905521貨
夭賳丿诏蹖 賵 夭賲丕賳賴 芦賲丕蹖讴賱 讴禄貙 卮乇丨 丨丕賱 賲乇丿蹖 賲賳夭賵蹖貙 賵 亘賴 丿賵乇 丕夭 鬲賲丿賳 丕爻鬲貙 讴賴 賴賲丕乇賴 讴賵卮卮 丿丕乇丿貙 亘乇 爻鬲賲 趩蹖乇賴 卮賵丿貙 賵 爻丕蹖賴 蹖 爻賱胤賴 蹖 乇丕 丕夭 禺賵丿 丿賵乇 讴賳丿貙 賵 亘賴 賲蹖賱 禺賵蹖卮 乇賮鬲丕乇 賳賲丕蹖丿貨 亘賴 丕蹖賳 丕賲蹖丿 讴賴 丿乇 賲夭乇毓賴 丕蹖 夭賳丿诏蹖 丌乇丕賲蹖 丿丕卮鬲賴 亘丕卮丿貙 亘賴 卮賲丕賱 讴卮賵乇 賲蹖乇賵丿貨 賵 亘賴 乇睾賲 鬲賲丕賲 丕爻丕乇鬲賴丕貙 鬲賳诏丿爻鬲蹖 賵 卮賯丕賵鬲賴丕貙 鬲爻賱蹖賲 賯賵丕賳蹖賳 爻禺鬲 賵 禺卮讴 亘卮乇 賳賲蹖卮賵丿 賵...貨 讴鬲丕亘 丌爻丕賳蹖 賳蹖爻鬲貙 鬲丕 亘鬲賵丕賳賲 丌賳 乇丕 丿乇 蹖讴蹖 丿賵 噩賲賱賴貙 蹖丕 倬丕乇丕诏乇丕賮貙 鬲賮爻蹖乇 讴賳賲貨 倬爻 丕夭 乇爻蹖丿賳 亘賴 噩丕蹖蹖 丕夭 讴鬲丕亘貙 丿蹖诏乇 丿賱賲 丌乇丕賲卮 賳丿丕卮鬲 賵 丌乇丕賲 賳亘賵丿貙 賴賲趩賵 丌賳乇賵夭賴丕蹖 卮蹖乇蹖賳 毓爻賱蹖 亘賵丿貙 讴賴 讴鬲丕亘賴丕蹖 芦乇賵賱丕賳禄貙 賵 芦噩丕賳 卮蹖賮鬲賴禄蹖 丕蹖卮丕賳貙 乇賵丨 賵 噩丕賳賲 乇丕 鬲爻禺蹖乇 讴乇丿賴 亘賵丿賳丿貙 卮丕蹖丿 賴賲 亘乇丕蹖 賴賲匕丕鬲 倬賳丿丕乇蹖 亘丕 芦讴禄貙 讴賴 丌賴爻鬲賴 賲蹖丕賳丿蹖卮蹖丿貙 讴鬲丕亘 乇丕 丌賴爻鬲賴 禺賵丕賳丿賴 亘丕卮賲貙 诏丕賴 鬲賳賴丕 蹖讴 倬丕乇诏乇丕賮卮 乇丕 賲蹖禺賵丕賳丿賲貨 賳賵蹖爻賳丿賴 丕賳诏丕乇貙 讴丕賲倬蹖賵鬲乇 賵 夭亘丕賳 卮賳丕爻蹖 禺賵丕賳丿賴 亘丕卮賳丿貨 丿乇 噩丕蹖蹖 丿蹖丿賲貨 讴賵鬲丕賴 夭賲丕賳蹖 丿乇 芦丕賳诏賱爻鬲丕賳禄 亘乇賳丕賲賴 賳賵蹖爻 卮乇讴鬲 丌蹖.亘蹖.丕賲 賴賲 亘賵丿賴 丕賳丿貙 倬爻 丕夭 丌賳 亘賵丿貙 讴賴 亘蹖卮鬲乇 亘賴 讴鬲丕亘賴丕蹖 丕蹖卮丕賳 丿賱 亘爻鬲賲貙 讴鬲丕亘 賴賳賵夭 讴賳丕乇 丿爻鬲賲 丕爻鬲
鬲丕乇蹖禺 亘賴賳诏丕賲 乇爻丕賳蹖 25/09/1399賴噩乇蹖 禺賵乇卮蹖丿蹖貨 25/09/1400賴噩乇蹖 禺賵乇卮蹖丿蹖貨 丕. 卮乇亘蹖丕賳蹖
Life & Times of Michael K is a 1983 novel, by South African-born writer J. M. Coetzee. The novel won the Booker Prize for 1983.
The novel is a story of a man named Michael K, who makes an arduous journey from Cape Town to his mother's rural birthplace, amid a fictitious civil war during the apartheid era, in the 1970-80s.
毓賳賵丕賳賴丕蹖 趩丕倬 卮丿賴 丿乇 丕蹖乇丕賳: 芦夭賳丿诏蹖 賵 夭賲丕賳賴 賲丕蹖讴賱 讴禄貨 芦乇賵夭诏丕乇 丌賯丕蹖 賲丕蹖讴賱 讴禄貨 賳賵蹖爻賳丿賴: 噩蹖.丕賲 讴賵鬲爻蹖 (讴賵鬲夭蹖)貨 (賮乇賴賳诏 賳卮乇 賳賵) 丕丿亘蹖丕鬲貨 鬲丕乇蹖禺 賳禺爻鬲蹖賳 禺賵丕賳卮: 乇賵夭 卮卮賲 賲丕賴 丕讴鬲亘乇 爻丕賱2012賲蹖賱丕丿蹖
毓賳賵丕賳: 夭賳丿诏蹖 賵 夭賲丕賳賴 賲丕蹖讴賱 讴貨 賳賵蹖爻賳丿賴: 噩蹖.丕賲 讴賵鬲爻蹖貨 賲鬲乇噩賲: 賲蹖賳賵 賲卮蹖乇蹖貨 賵蹖乇丕爻鬲丕乇 賲丨賲丿乇囟丕 噩毓賮乇蹖貨 鬲賴乇丕賳貙 賮乇賴賳诏 賳卮乇 賳賵貙 丌爻蹖賲貙 爻丕賱1383貨 丿乇 倬丕賳夭丿賴 賵221氐貨 卮丕亘讴9647443242貨 趩丕倬 丿賵賲 爻丕賱1385貨 趩丕倬 趩賴丕乇賲 爻丕賱1396貨 卮丕亘讴9789647443241貨 賲賵囟賵毓 丿丕爻鬲丕賳賴丕蹖 賳賵蹖爻賳丿诏丕賳 丕賮乇蹖賯丕 - 爻丿賴 20賲
毓賳賵丕賳: 夭賳丿诏蹖 賵 夭賲丕賳賴 賲丕蹖讴賱 讴貨 賳賵蹖爻賳丿賴: 噩蹖.丕賲 讴賵鬲爻蹖貨 賲鬲乇噩賲: 丌賳丕賴蹖鬲丕 鬲丿蹖賳貨 鬲賴乇丕賳貙 乇賵夭诏丕乇貙 爻丕賱1384貙 丿乇318氐貨 趩丕倬 丿賵賲 爻丕賱1390貨 丿乇262氐貨
毓賳賵丕賳: 乇賵夭诏丕乇 丌賯丕蹖 賲丕蹖讴賱 讴貨 賳賵蹖爻賳丿賴: 噩蹖.丕賲. 讴賵鬲夭蹖貨 賲鬲乇噩賲: 賳丿丕 乇賴賳賵乇丿丨賯貨 鬲賴乇丕賳貙 賳诏丕乇 賵 賳蹖賲丕 (賳诏蹖賲丕)貙 爻丕賱1384貙 丿乇274氐貨 卮丕亘讴9647905637貨 趩丕倬 丿賵賲 爻丕賱1384貙 丿乇299氐貨 卮丕亘讴9647905521貨
夭賳丿诏蹖 賵 夭賲丕賳賴 芦賲丕蹖讴賱 讴禄貙 卮乇丨 丨丕賱 賲乇丿蹖 賲賳夭賵蹖貙 賵 亘賴 丿賵乇 丕夭 鬲賲丿賳 丕爻鬲貙 讴賴 賴賲丕乇賴 讴賵卮卮 丿丕乇丿貙 亘乇 爻鬲賲 趩蹖乇賴 卮賵丿貙 賵 爻丕蹖賴 蹖 爻賱胤賴 蹖 乇丕 丕夭 禺賵丿 丿賵乇 讴賳丿貙 賵 亘賴 賲蹖賱 禺賵蹖卮 乇賮鬲丕乇 賳賲丕蹖丿貨 亘賴 丕蹖賳 丕賲蹖丿 讴賴 丿乇 賲夭乇毓賴 丕蹖 夭賳丿诏蹖 丌乇丕賲蹖 丿丕卮鬲賴 亘丕卮丿貙 亘賴 卮賲丕賱 讴卮賵乇 賲蹖乇賵丿貨 賵 亘賴 乇睾賲 鬲賲丕賲 丕爻丕乇鬲賴丕貙 鬲賳诏丿爻鬲蹖 賵 卮賯丕賵鬲賴丕貙 鬲爻賱蹖賲 賯賵丕賳蹖賳 爻禺鬲 賵 禺卮讴 亘卮乇 賳賲蹖卮賵丿 賵...貨 讴鬲丕亘 丌爻丕賳蹖 賳蹖爻鬲貙 鬲丕 亘鬲賵丕賳賲 丌賳 乇丕 丿乇 蹖讴蹖 丿賵 噩賲賱賴貙 蹖丕 倬丕乇丕诏乇丕賮貙 鬲賮爻蹖乇 讴賳賲貨 倬爻 丕夭 乇爻蹖丿賳 亘賴 噩丕蹖蹖 丕夭 讴鬲丕亘貙 丿蹖诏乇 丿賱賲 丌乇丕賲卮 賳丿丕卮鬲 賵 丌乇丕賲 賳亘賵丿貙 賴賲趩賵 丌賳乇賵夭賴丕蹖 卮蹖乇蹖賳 毓爻賱蹖 亘賵丿貙 讴賴 讴鬲丕亘賴丕蹖 芦乇賵賱丕賳禄貙 賵 芦噩丕賳 卮蹖賮鬲賴禄蹖 丕蹖卮丕賳貙 乇賵丨 賵 噩丕賳賲 乇丕 鬲爻禺蹖乇 讴乇丿賴 亘賵丿賳丿貙 卮丕蹖丿 賴賲 亘乇丕蹖 賴賲匕丕鬲 倬賳丿丕乇蹖 亘丕 芦讴禄貙 讴賴 丌賴爻鬲賴 賲蹖丕賳丿蹖卮蹖丿貙 讴鬲丕亘 乇丕 丌賴爻鬲賴 禺賵丕賳丿賴 亘丕卮賲貙 诏丕賴 鬲賳賴丕 蹖讴 倬丕乇诏乇丕賮卮 乇丕 賲蹖禺賵丕賳丿賲貨 賳賵蹖爻賳丿賴 丕賳诏丕乇貙 讴丕賲倬蹖賵鬲乇 賵 夭亘丕賳 卮賳丕爻蹖 禺賵丕賳丿賴 亘丕卮賳丿貨 丿乇 噩丕蹖蹖 丿蹖丿賲貨 讴賵鬲丕賴 夭賲丕賳蹖 丿乇 芦丕賳诏賱爻鬲丕賳禄 亘乇賳丕賲賴 賳賵蹖爻 卮乇讴鬲 丌蹖.亘蹖.丕賲 賴賲 亘賵丿賴 丕賳丿貙 倬爻 丕夭 丌賳 亘賵丿貙 讴賴 亘蹖卮鬲乇 亘賴 讴鬲丕亘賴丕蹖 丕蹖卮丕賳 丿賱 亘爻鬲賲貙 讴鬲丕亘 賴賳賵夭 讴賳丕乇 丿爻鬲賲 丕爻鬲
鬲丕乇蹖禺 亘賴賳诏丕賲 乇爻丕賳蹖 25/09/1399賴噩乇蹖 禺賵乇卮蹖丿蹖貨 25/09/1400賴噩乇蹖 禺賵乇卮蹖丿蹖貨 丕. 卮乇亘蹖丕賳蹖
October 29, 2024
C卯t de greu e s膬 fii liber...
Un b膬rbat de 31 de ani, gr膬dinar 卯n Cape Town, Michael K / Michaels, 卯葯i duce mama b膬tr卯n膬 & bolnav膬 spre locul natal, Prince Albert, 卯ntr-un soi de roab膬 / cotig膬. A fost dorin葲a ei, femeia vrea s膬 moar膬 acas膬, la ferma unde s-a n膬scut. Moare, din p膬cate, pe drum, 卯ntr-un spital mizer, 葯i Michael K prime葯te a doua zi o cutie cu cenu葯a ei.
Nu-葯i schimb膬 planul 葯i c膬l膬tore葯te mai departe, c卯nd pe jos, c卯nd cu trenul, p卯n膬 ajunge la o ferm膬 p膬r膬sit膬: acolo a copil膬rit mama lui, de葯i nu e sigur de asta 葯i nici n-are cum s膬 verifice. E gr膬dinar (chiar gr膬dinar de gradul 1), va cultiva fasole, porumb, dovleac. Va fi liber. C卯nd la ferm膬 sose葯te nepotul proprietarilor, un ins fugit din armat膬, K 卯葯i d膬 seama c膬 e tratat ca un servitor 葯i pleac膬 卯n mun葲i.
葮tim de la bun 卯nceput, prin glasul naratorului, c膬 Michael K are dou膬 defecte din na葯tere: o buz膬 de iepure 葯i o minte greoaie. Dac膬 primul defect, cel fizic, e veritabil (de葯i femeile 卯l plac 葯i a葯a), al doilea e numai aparent. K g卯nde葯te altfel dec卯t ceilal葲i, are un mod particular de a 卯n葲elege via葲a: 鈥瀋el mai bine e s膬 tr膬ie葯ti 卯n a葯a fel 卯nc卯t s膬 nu la葯i nici o urm膬 a trecerii tale prin lume鈥�. Ciudat, nu? A葯 face adaos c膬 povestea lui Michael K se petrece 卯n timpul unui r膬zboi civil. Luptele se duc 卯n Nord. Nu afl膬m cine lupt膬 cu cine...
Unii au v膬zut o afinitate 卯ntre personajul lui Coetzee 葯i Josef K din Procesul lui Kafka, dar, la urma urmelor, pe cei doi nu-i une葯te dec卯t ini葲iala numelui: e prea pu葲in pentru a urma aceast膬 sugestie de lectur膬, nu duce nic膬ieri. Unul e taciturn (Michael), cel膬lalt foarte guraliv. Unul prefer膬 solitudinea, cel膬lalt adun膬rile. Doar indiferen葲a medical膬 a naratorului, lipsa oric膬rei simpatii, tonul neutru 卯n care consemneaz膬 p膬葲aniile lui Michael K ar putea trimite la Kafka, nu mai mult.
Sigur, K nu este s膬rac cu duhul dec卯t 卯n sensul inocen葲ei depline. Poate e naiv, dar naivitatea nu e o gre葯eal膬 de ra葲ionare. 脦n fond, discursul lui interior 卯l arat膬 卯ntreg la minte, capabil de g卯ndire abstract膬 葯i de comentarii originale. Spune: 鈥濧m decis de la 卯nceput s膬 tac 葯i s膬 fac pe n膬t卯ngul鈥�. Singura lui dorin葲膬 e s膬 fie l膬sat 卯n pace. Ceea ce 卯n vreme de r膬zboi nu e cu putin葲膬. Dac膬 ar fi singur pe p膬m卯nt 葯i nimeni nu ar mai trage de el, s-ar sim葲i fericit. Tot Michael K ofer膬 cea mai precis膬 imagine a existen葲ei lui:
Receptarea acestui roman este c卯t se poate de interesant膬. Dac膬 卯n 1983, J.M. Coetzee a primit Booker Prize, iar cartea a avut parte de recenzii entuziaste - 鈥濷 capodoper膬 dur膬 葯i limpede, asemenea unui diamant 卯ndelung 葯lefuit鈥� -, cronicarii de azi 葯i-au cobor卯t tonul 葯i au repro葯at c膬r葲ii o mul葲ime de neajunsuri. C卯nd voi avea timp, voi cita din recenziile mai noi...
Eu, unul, cred, totu葯i, c膬 am citit un roman bun. 葮i-mi men葲in p膬rerea...
P. S. 脦n treac膬t fie spus, nu e prima dat膬 c卯nd 卯nt卯lnesc aceast膬 imagine: 卯n America lui Kafka, Brunelda, o artist膬 卯nfior膬tor de gras膬, dar plin膬 de talent, e purtat膬 de admiratori 卯ntr-o roab膬. Iat膬 ce 卯nseamn膬 s膬 fii vedet膬!
Un b膬rbat de 31 de ani, gr膬dinar 卯n Cape Town, Michael K / Michaels, 卯葯i duce mama b膬tr卯n膬 & bolnav膬 spre locul natal, Prince Albert, 卯ntr-un soi de roab膬 / cotig膬. A fost dorin葲a ei, femeia vrea s膬 moar膬 acas膬, la ferma unde s-a n膬scut. Moare, din p膬cate, pe drum, 卯ntr-un spital mizer, 葯i Michael K prime葯te a doua zi o cutie cu cenu葯a ei.
Nu-葯i schimb膬 planul 葯i c膬l膬tore葯te mai departe, c卯nd pe jos, c卯nd cu trenul, p卯n膬 ajunge la o ferm膬 p膬r膬sit膬: acolo a copil膬rit mama lui, de葯i nu e sigur de asta 葯i nici n-are cum s膬 verifice. E gr膬dinar (chiar gr膬dinar de gradul 1), va cultiva fasole, porumb, dovleac. Va fi liber. C卯nd la ferm膬 sose葯te nepotul proprietarilor, un ins fugit din armat膬, K 卯葯i d膬 seama c膬 e tratat ca un servitor 葯i pleac膬 卯n mun葲i.
葮tim de la bun 卯nceput, prin glasul naratorului, c膬 Michael K are dou膬 defecte din na葯tere: o buz膬 de iepure 葯i o minte greoaie. Dac膬 primul defect, cel fizic, e veritabil (de葯i femeile 卯l plac 葯i a葯a), al doilea e numai aparent. K g卯nde葯te altfel dec卯t ceilal葲i, are un mod particular de a 卯n葲elege via葲a: 鈥瀋el mai bine e s膬 tr膬ie葯ti 卯n a葯a fel 卯nc卯t s膬 nu la葯i nici o urm膬 a trecerii tale prin lume鈥�. Ciudat, nu? A葯 face adaos c膬 povestea lui Michael K se petrece 卯n timpul unui r膬zboi civil. Luptele se duc 卯n Nord. Nu afl膬m cine lupt膬 cu cine...
Unii au v膬zut o afinitate 卯ntre personajul lui Coetzee 葯i Josef K din Procesul lui Kafka, dar, la urma urmelor, pe cei doi nu-i une葯te dec卯t ini葲iala numelui: e prea pu葲in pentru a urma aceast膬 sugestie de lectur膬, nu duce nic膬ieri. Unul e taciturn (Michael), cel膬lalt foarte guraliv. Unul prefer膬 solitudinea, cel膬lalt adun膬rile. Doar indiferen葲a medical膬 a naratorului, lipsa oric膬rei simpatii, tonul neutru 卯n care consemneaz膬 p膬葲aniile lui Michael K ar putea trimite la Kafka, nu mai mult.
Sigur, K nu este s膬rac cu duhul dec卯t 卯n sensul inocen葲ei depline. Poate e naiv, dar naivitatea nu e o gre葯eal膬 de ra葲ionare. 脦n fond, discursul lui interior 卯l arat膬 卯ntreg la minte, capabil de g卯ndire abstract膬 葯i de comentarii originale. Spune: 鈥濧m decis de la 卯nceput s膬 tac 葯i s膬 fac pe n膬t卯ngul鈥�. Singura lui dorin葲膬 e s膬 fie l膬sat 卯n pace. Ceea ce 卯n vreme de r膬zboi nu e cu putin葲膬. Dac膬 ar fi singur pe p膬m卯nt 葯i nimeni nu ar mai trage de el, s-ar sim葲i fericit. Tot Michael K ofer膬 cea mai precis膬 imagine a existen葲ei lui:
鈥濩eilal葲i oameni vor ca eu s膬 卯mi deschid inima 葯i s膬 le deap膬n povestea unei vie葲i petrecute 卯n cu葯ti. Vor s膬 aud膬 despre toate cu葯tile prin care m-am perindat, de parc膬 a葯 fi un 葯oarece alb... Dac膬 la Huis Norenius a葯 fi 卯nv膬葲at s膬 spun pove葯ti..., a葯 fi zis povestea unei vie葲i petrecute 卯n 卯nchisori, 卯n care am stat zi de zi, an de an, cu fruntea lipit膬 de s卯rma de la gard, privind lung 卯n dep膬rtare鈥�.
Receptarea acestui roman este c卯t se poate de interesant膬. Dac膬 卯n 1983, J.M. Coetzee a primit Booker Prize, iar cartea a avut parte de recenzii entuziaste - 鈥濷 capodoper膬 dur膬 葯i limpede, asemenea unui diamant 卯ndelung 葯lefuit鈥� -, cronicarii de azi 葯i-au cobor卯t tonul 葯i au repro葯at c膬r葲ii o mul葲ime de neajunsuri. C卯nd voi avea timp, voi cita din recenziile mai noi...
Eu, unul, cred, totu葯i, c膬 am citit un roman bun. 葮i-mi men葲in p膬rerea...
P. S. 脦n treac膬t fie spus, nu e prima dat膬 c卯nd 卯nt卯lnesc aceast膬 imagine: 卯n America lui Kafka, Brunelda, o artist膬 卯nfior膬tor de gras膬, dar plin膬 de talent, e purtat膬 de admiratori 卯ntr-o roab膬. Iat膬 ce 卯nseamn膬 s膬 fii vedet膬!
August 7, 2024
UN GRANELLO DI SABBIA
Non ci sar脿 pi霉 un granello che porti il mio segno, proprio come mia madre che ora, passata la sua stagione sulla terra, 猫 stata lavata via, dispersa dal vento e risucchiata dai fili d鈥檈rba.
Michael 猫 nero nel Sudafrica ancora dominato dall鈥檃partheid (il romanzo 猫 uscito otto anni prima che fosse cancellato, e undici prima che Mandela fosse liberato e diventasse presidente). 脠 un giardiniere pubblico e, quindi, lavora per i bianchi, visto che al governo ci sono i bianchi, il potere 猫 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 Citt脿 del Capo. Probabilmente perch茅 la donna s鈥櫭� sempre vergognata di quel figlio nato col labbro leporino, con l鈥檌mpossibilit脿 di sigillare bene la bocca e dunque d鈥檈ssere allattato.
Al colore della pelle Michael aggiunge questa menomazione fisica.
Ha trent鈥檃nni quando inizia il romanzo. Quanti ne abbia quando Coetzee interrompe la sua narrazione non lo so: ma so che dalla prima all鈥檜ltima pagina ha vissuto cos矛 tante esperienze da maturare ben pi霉 del tempo effettivamente trascorso.
Un po鈥� di Kafka c鈥櫭�, checch茅 neghi Coetzee stesso, o la Gordimer. Non 猫 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 猫 un insetto e il primo il corpo che attraverso le sue regole (leggi leggi) lo pu貌 calpestare e schiacciare.
O in quel sentore di burocrazia infinita fatta all鈥檜nico scopo di difendere il potere e annullare la libert脿 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鈥檃utorizzazione s鈥櫭� persa nella rete e non gli sar脿 mai consegnata, inizia il suo viaggio.
La madre non regge il viaggio, Michael deve portarla in ospedale dove la donna pi霉 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: 猫 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鈥�?
Domande che rimangono senza precisa risposta. Per me, anche questo aumenta il fascino della lettura, l鈥檈ssere lasciato libero di ipotizzare, di trovare le mie risposte.
Michael 猫 un singolo individuo che vive nell鈥檃lienazione e nell鈥檌solamento: per lottare contro l鈥橝utorit脿, contro la violenza del Potere, pu貌 ricorrere solo alla resilienza. Virt霉 della quale sembra ben provvisto: se all鈥檌nizio sembra un po鈥� troppo ingenuo per la sua et脿, un 鈥渟emplice di spirito鈥� per usare un eufemismo, alla fine appare carico di saggezza e consapevolezza.
Il suo viaggio 猫 segnato da deviazioni, intoppi, fughe, nascondigli, contrattempi, malattie, ricovero: cos矛 tanto frastagliato e faticoso da ricordare l鈥橴lisse 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鈥檃vrebbe calato nella terra in profondit脿 e, quando l鈥檃vesse tirato su, ci sarebbe stata acqua nel cavo del cucchiaio. E cos矛, avrebbe detto, si pu貌 vivere.
Non ci sar脿 pi霉 un granello che porti il mio segno, proprio come mia madre che ora, passata la sua stagione sulla terra, 猫 stata lavata via, dispersa dal vento e risucchiata dai fili d鈥檈rba.
Michael 猫 nero nel Sudafrica ancora dominato dall鈥檃partheid (il romanzo 猫 uscito otto anni prima che fosse cancellato, e undici prima che Mandela fosse liberato e diventasse presidente). 脠 un giardiniere pubblico e, quindi, lavora per i bianchi, visto che al governo ci sono i bianchi, il potere 猫 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 Citt脿 del Capo. Probabilmente perch茅 la donna s鈥櫭� sempre vergognata di quel figlio nato col labbro leporino, con l鈥檌mpossibilit脿 di sigillare bene la bocca e dunque d鈥檈ssere allattato.
Al colore della pelle Michael aggiunge questa menomazione fisica.
Ha trent鈥檃nni quando inizia il romanzo. Quanti ne abbia quando Coetzee interrompe la sua narrazione non lo so: ma so che dalla prima all鈥檜ltima pagina ha vissuto cos矛 tante esperienze da maturare ben pi霉 del tempo effettivamente trascorso.
Un po鈥� di Kafka c鈥櫭�, checch茅 neghi Coetzee stesso, o la Gordimer. Non 猫 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 猫 un insetto e il primo il corpo che attraverso le sue regole (leggi leggi) lo pu貌 calpestare e schiacciare.
O in quel sentore di burocrazia infinita fatta all鈥檜nico scopo di difendere il potere e annullare la libert脿 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鈥檃utorizzazione s鈥櫭� persa nella rete e non gli sar脿 mai consegnata, inizia il suo viaggio.
La madre non regge il viaggio, Michael deve portarla in ospedale dove la donna pi霉 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: 猫 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鈥�?
Domande che rimangono senza precisa risposta. Per me, anche questo aumenta il fascino della lettura, l鈥檈ssere lasciato libero di ipotizzare, di trovare le mie risposte.
Michael 猫 un singolo individuo che vive nell鈥檃lienazione e nell鈥檌solamento: per lottare contro l鈥橝utorit脿, contro la violenza del Potere, pu貌 ricorrere solo alla resilienza. Virt霉 della quale sembra ben provvisto: se all鈥檌nizio sembra un po鈥� troppo ingenuo per la sua et脿, un 鈥渟emplice di spirito鈥� per usare un eufemismo, alla fine appare carico di saggezza e consapevolezza.
Il suo viaggio 猫 segnato da deviazioni, intoppi, fughe, nascondigli, contrattempi, malattie, ricovero: cos矛 tanto frastagliato e faticoso da ricordare l鈥橴lisse 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鈥檃vrebbe calato nella terra in profondit脿 e, quando l鈥檃vesse tirato su, ci sarebbe stata acqua nel cavo del cucchiaio. E cos矛, avrebbe detto, si pu貌 vivere.
April 4, 2022
No ser铆a extra帽o que en alg煤n momento de la lectura les venga a la mente pasajes de La carretera de McCarthy o de El extranjero de Camus o a Josef K. de Kafka, pero es el famoso Bartleby el que a partir de un punto de la narraci贸n m谩s rondaba la m铆a. 鈥淣ada exaspera m谩s a una persona seria que una resistencia pasiva鈥�, se dice en el cuento en el que Melville recalca el desconcierto que nos provocan los comportamientos alejados de la normalidad, ese territorio que nadie es capaz de confinar entre fronteras precisas.
Michael K es aqu铆 el Bartleby que desconcierta a todos con unos actos que escapan a cualquier conjetura, que impide cualquier acercamiento, cualquier acci贸n sobre 茅l, que les lleva a cuestionarse si, de hecho, deben hacer algo por 茅l, aunque sepan que sin ayuda est谩 abocado a una muerte segura.
鈥淢ichaels significa algo y su significado no es solo asunto m铆o.鈥�Desde su nacimiento Michael K provoc贸 extra帽eza y rechazo debido a su labio leporino y a su limitada inteligencia. Ello, en un contexto de marginalidad, miseria e injusticia, y tras la muerte de su madre, intensific贸 su m谩s que posible tendencia natural a la soledad, al silencio, a la rutina vac铆a de los d铆as todos iguales, a no esperar ni necesitar nada.
鈥淣o se ve铆a como un cuerpo pesado que va dejando un rastro, sino como algo parecido a una part铆cula liviana sobre la superficie de una tierra demasiado dormida como para notar el rasgu帽o de las patas de las hormigas, el mordisqueo de las mariposas, el revoloteo del polvo.鈥�Carec铆a de vocaci贸n y de ambici贸n, teniendo como 煤nico prop贸sito dejar pasar el tiempo. A eso se reduce su libertad, la cual valora por encima de cualquier otra cosa, incluido su salud o su bienestar. No quiere depender de nadie, pero tampoco quiere que nadie dependa de 茅l (鈥淣o parec铆a tener creencias, o al menos no parec铆a tener una creencia en cuanto a ayudar al pr贸jimo鈥�), no quiere hijos, no necesita amigos ni compa帽era, no procura ayuda ni caridad, por muy bienintencionada que sea, y responde con el silencio a cualquier intento ajeno por comprender qui茅n es Michael K.
鈥淐uando ten铆a trabajo, no se sent铆a contento ni descontento; daba lo mismo. Pod铆a tumbarse toda la tarde con los ojos abiertos, mirando las ondas y las manchas de 贸xido de la plancha del tejado; su mente no se desviaba, no ve铆a m谩s que la plancha, las l铆neas no se transformaban en dibujos o fantas铆as; 茅l era 茅l mismo tumbado en su propia casa, el 贸xido no era m谩s que 贸xido, todo lo que se mov铆a era tiempo, y le llevaba a 茅l en su curso鈥�Este es el personaje descrito en el cap铆tulo uno, dos tercios del libro, por parte de un narrador omnisciente, que tambi茅n se encargar谩 del cap铆tulo tercero a modo de ep铆logo, caracterizado por un estilo sobrio con el que no cabe decir m谩s que lo estrictamente necesario, de forma objetiva y distante que, sin embargo, no nos aleja ni un 谩pice ni de la historia ni del personaje sino que recalca lo inh贸spito del paisaje y de aquellos que lo habitan, un mundo en guerra permanente.
鈥淪e parece a una piedra, un guijarro que, tras haber estado tranquilamente en la tierra, ocup谩ndose de sus cosas desde el origen de los tiempos, de repente ahora lo recogen y lo lanzan al azar, pasando de mano en mano. Una piedra peque帽a y dura, apenas consciente de lo que la rodea, arropada en s铆 misma y en su vida interior... una criatura inconsciente, irresponsable.鈥�En medio de estos dos cap铆tulos, el autor inserta otro en el que se le da voz al doctor del sanatorio en el que es internado Michael y que ser谩 el encargado de enfrentarse a la anomal铆a que 茅l representa, de plantearnos de una forma m谩s visceral y emotiva las cuestiones centrales de la novela: 驴Se puede ser una isla autosuficiente separado de todo y de todos, indiferente a todo y a todos, se puede ser un animal, una piedra, una planta? 驴Este distanciamiento te protege o te hace m谩s d茅bil? 驴Es envidiable ese af谩n de libertad pese a todo? 驴C贸mo encaja la vida que ha elegido Michael en la sociedad de nuestra 茅poca? 驴Se puede hacer algo por 茅l鈥� se debe hacer algo por 茅l? 驴Qu茅 responsabilidad tiene la sociedad en lo que es Michael y en su bienestar, se debe actuar incluso en contra de su deseo?
鈥淓mpezaron a encerrar a los simples antes que a los dem谩s. Ahora tienen campamentos para los ni帽os cuyos padres han huido, campamentos para los que patalean y echan espuma por la boca, campamentos para los de cabeza grande y para los de cabeza peque帽a, campamentos para los que no tienen un medio de vida aparente, campamentos para los expulsados de la tierra, campamentos para los que descubren viviendo en cloacas, campamentos para las chicas de la calle, campamentos para los que no saben sumar dos y dos, campamentos para los que se olvidan los papeles de casa, campamentos para lo que viven en las monta帽as y dinamitan puentes por la noche. Quiz谩s la verdad sea que ya es suficiente estar fuera de los campamentos, no estar en ninguno de ellos. Puede que por ahora ya sea un gran 茅xito. 驴Cu谩ntos quedan que no est茅n ni encerrados ni de centinelas en la verja? Me he librado de los campamentos; puede que si procuro no llamar la atenci贸n, tambi茅n me libere de la caridad.鈥�
November 27, 2016
Just a few words, a first step...
completely lived up to what I expected from , after having been overwhelmed by his . It is much more than the slow thinking Michael K. It is about his inner strenght and his search for survival, in a world in which we are eminently alone. But it goes beyond even that, it is about the depths one can reach through the things we value, and their meanings when they are extensions of one鈥檚 true self.
If life is a journey, Life and Times of Michael K is a road-trip of survival in a world enterily set against him.
To escape the downpur the only choice it to vanish, get smaller and smaller鈥�
What is there left, if he could just disappear would he become free of this terrible world?
----------
An update, or a few more steps...
So soon after revealing here my first impressions yesterday, after exchanging comments with my dear friends Seemita and Dolors, I feel compelled to add:
Yes, there's much more. How could I have covered it thoroughly with some rapid thoughts... Indeed, Michael K, alone in a brutal world of roving armies and unable to bear confinement, escapes in search of salvation. This is a life affirming road-trip that reaches what is most worthy: the need for an interior or spiritual life. What can he do within his own limitations or constraints? What can anyone reach for, when faced with a journey of suffering that will inevitably lead to an inconceivable nothingness? Thus, Michael K finds his saving grace in [T]he truth, the truth about me. 'I am gardener,' he said again aloud. Ah, such purity.
completely lived up to what I expected from , after having been overwhelmed by his . It is much more than the slow thinking Michael K. It is about his inner strenght and his search for survival, in a world in which we are eminently alone. But it goes beyond even that, it is about the depths one can reach through the things we value, and their meanings when they are extensions of one鈥檚 true self.
If life is a journey, Life and Times of Michael K is a road-trip of survival in a world enterily set against him.
鈥淗is first step was to hollow out the sides of the crevice till it was wider at the bottom than the top, and to flatten the gravel bed. The narrower end he blocked with a heap of stones. Then he laid the three fence posts across the crevice, and upon them the iron sheet, with slabs of stone to hold it down. He now had a cave or burrow five feet deep.鈥�
To escape the downpur the only choice it to vanish, get smaller and smaller鈥�
鈥淗e 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.鈥�And,
鈥淣o papers, no money; no family, no friends, no sense of who you are. The obscurest of the obscure, so obscure as to be a prodigy.鈥�
What is there left, if he could just disappear would he become free of this terrible world?
----------
An update, or a few more steps...
So soon after revealing here my first impressions yesterday, after exchanging comments with my dear friends Seemita and Dolors, I feel compelled to add:
Yes, there's much more. How could I have covered it thoroughly with some rapid thoughts... Indeed, Michael K, alone in a brutal world of roving armies and unable to bear confinement, escapes in search of salvation. This is a life affirming road-trip that reaches what is most worthy: the need for an interior or spiritual life. What can he do within his own limitations or constraints? What can anyone reach for, when faced with a journey of suffering that will inevitably lead to an inconceivable nothingness? Thus, Michael K finds his saving grace in [T]he truth, the truth about me. 'I am gardener,' he said again aloud. Ah, such purity.
I am more than a earthworm, he thought. Which is a kind of gardener. Or a mole, also a gardener, that does not tell stories because it lives in silence.How could Michael K not remind me of Voltaire's satirical (who after tragedy and violence, finally finds his just-retreat in [W]e must cultivate our garden!)? As to Michael K, simple but not less alive or aware of who he is. Who can be certain to have achieved so much, under such harsh circumstances or so alone? I don't know if I would have, at least without a paralyzing despair.
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 in being simple.He does not seem stupid, after all.
October 22, 2017
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鈥檚 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鈥檚 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鈥檛 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 鈥渟maller, harder and drier鈥� lethargic creature whose consciousness appears more and more fragmented each passing day.
Michael K is captured and sent to a 鈥渞ehabilitation鈥� camp. His mind obeys because his rebellion wouldn鈥檛 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鈥檚 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鈥檚 silence? What is he fighting for? The doctor鈥檚 persistent pondering seeps over and into the reader鈥檚 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鈥檚 scrivener Bartleby and his motto 鈥淚 would prefer not to鈥�. Pacifist revolutionary? Dauntless freethinker?
Coetzee doesn鈥檛 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 鈥渢he obscurest of the obscure becomes a prodigy鈥�. 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.
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鈥檚 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鈥檚 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鈥檛 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 鈥渟maller, harder and drier鈥� lethargic creature whose consciousness appears more and more fragmented each passing day.
Michael K is captured and sent to a 鈥渞ehabilitation鈥� camp. His mind obeys because his rebellion wouldn鈥檛 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鈥檚 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鈥檚 silence? What is he fighting for? The doctor鈥檚 persistent pondering seeps over and into the reader鈥檚 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鈥檚 scrivener Bartleby and his motto 鈥淚 would prefer not to鈥�. Pacifist revolutionary? Dauntless freethinker?
Coetzee doesn鈥檛 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 鈥渢he obscurest of the obscure becomes a prodigy鈥�. 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.
November 15, 2019
Is life a journey? And how to survive when the entire world seems to turn against you?
Even a tiny miserable ant needs home鈥� To escape the storm one must get smaller and smaller鈥�
To become free of the world one must be ready to diminish one's consciousness until it turns into an infinitesimal dot.
His first step was to hollow out the sides of the crevice till it was wider at the bottom than the top, and to flatten the gravel bed. The narrower end he blocked with a heap of stones. Then he laid the three fence posts across the crevice, and upon them the iron sheet, with slabs of stone to hold it down. He now had a cave or burrow five feet deep.
Even a tiny miserable ant needs home鈥� To escape the storm one must get smaller and smaller鈥�
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.
To become free of the world one must be ready to diminish one's consciousness until it turns into an infinitesimal dot.
July 28, 2015
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.
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.
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.
June 29, 2023
Like Disgrace and Waiting for the Barbarians, Life and Times of Michael K certainly left it's mark on me, and of the three, I'd say it was the most intriguing. However, overall, I still think the other two were the better novels, as its simple minded protagonist here felt more like a cloddish plot device than a real man. I really couldn't work him out. Just how much of a dullard was he?
Coetzee is persistently reminding the reader just how much of a borderline simpleton Michael K actually is, and how little he can make sense of the world, and yet, he seems able to easily outwit those who want to capture him, knows irrigation systems, growing crops and building shelters like the back of his hand, talks forcefully, and asks many searching questions.
We first meet him when things appear relatively normal, until in a discomfiting way, Coetzee describes a jeep knocking a youth off a road, a crowd gathering, curfew sirens ignored, a man firing a revolver from a nearby building and the arrival of the military. Things are getting very dangerous in this alternate South Africa. Michael K decides he and his mother simply cannot stay where they are, especially as she is sick and pining for her rural birthplace, so using a trolley he wheels her away and they heads for the hills. But out on the road things aren't any better, to Michael K at the start of this journey, brutality and danger and stiffness of limb and rain seem all the same; tyranny feels as natural an ordeal as the bleak harshness of the road. His mother deteriorates so piteously that Michael must surrender her to a hospital, were he is shunted aside, until he receives the worst possible news. And here begins the parable of Michael K's freedom and resourcefulness; here begins Michael K's brief life of bliss. He is a sort of Robinson Crusoe meets Huckleberry Finn - he is the lord of his own life.
Continuing to an abandoned farm where he begins to cut his remaining ties with the world, he hides away in a self-made dugout, living off little more than water, warm daylight, a few gathered bugs, and some crops. Every so often Michael's quiet existence is disrupted by the war he feels he has no part in, but is constantly told he is part of it whether he likes it or not. He finds himself in and out of prison camps, forced to work, and to answer questions he fails to understand, or simply chooses not to. He defies his captors by rejecting the food they give him, he starts to waste away.
By switching voice later on, the text cleverly evades authority, as we get the first-person notes of the prison-camp doctor who ministers to the starving prisoner. This I thought was a smart move, seeing through the eyes of someone else, and what they make of this oddity of man.
I found some of the scenes throughout deeply moving, and also the ending to be one of those that lingers around in your head for a good while, and despite the book being under 200 pages it felt longer to me. Coetzee is a writer of clarifying inventiveness and translucent conviction, and here get we get a vivid and eloquent tale. His subdued yet urgent lament is for the sadness of a South Africa that has made dependents, parasites, and prisoners of its own children, black or white. Having read three of his novels now, it becomes more clear to me why he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
June 16, 2018
During a civil war in South Africa, Michael K., a simple man born with a harelip, tries to get help for his sick mother; then, after she dies, he attempts to take her ashes to the farm where she grew up.
There鈥檚 something powerful yet elusive about this short novel by Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee. As in his other Booker Prize-winning novel, Disgrace , this fictional world is simultaneously familiar and nightmarish.
The spirit of Franz Kafka hovers over the book: in the protagonist鈥檚 name (think of Josef K. from The Trial); in the way Michael is brutally and inhumanely treated by various people he meets; and in his self-imposed starvation, which suggests Kafka鈥檚 famous story 鈥淎 Hunger Artist.鈥�
Coetzee refrains from providing many specific details about warring factions. Race, interestingly enough, is barely mentioned; soldiers prowl the land, asking for identification papers; at one point Michael finds himself working in a labour camp.
But by keeping the details about the political situation vague, Coetzee creates a timeless allegory about suffering and endurance. Michael just wants to live, grow his own food (he鈥檚 got some gardening skills) and get by. Can he do that in this world?
The prose is at times hypnotic in its understated simplicity: uncluttered and clear, devoid of sentimentality.
Some readers have found the introduction and perspective of another character late in the book to be jarring, but I felt it added an additional layer of complexity to this enigmatic and haunting novel about living with dignity, freedom and a sense of purpose.
There鈥檚 something powerful yet elusive about this short novel by Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee. As in his other Booker Prize-winning novel, Disgrace , this fictional world is simultaneously familiar and nightmarish.
The spirit of Franz Kafka hovers over the book: in the protagonist鈥檚 name (think of Josef K. from The Trial); in the way Michael is brutally and inhumanely treated by various people he meets; and in his self-imposed starvation, which suggests Kafka鈥檚 famous story 鈥淎 Hunger Artist.鈥�
Coetzee refrains from providing many specific details about warring factions. Race, interestingly enough, is barely mentioned; soldiers prowl the land, asking for identification papers; at one point Michael finds himself working in a labour camp.
But by keeping the details about the political situation vague, Coetzee creates a timeless allegory about suffering and endurance. Michael just wants to live, grow his own food (he鈥檚 got some gardening skills) and get by. Can he do that in this world?
The prose is at times hypnotic in its understated simplicity: uncluttered and clear, devoid of sentimentality.
Some readers have found the introduction and perspective of another character late in the book to be jarring, but I felt it added an additional layer of complexity to this enigmatic and haunting novel about living with dignity, freedom and a sense of purpose.
November 25, 2023
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鈥檚 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鈥�. 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鈥檛 feel homeless; where he would belong; where only he knows the way to.
Or so he thinks鈥�
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.
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鈥檚 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鈥�. 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鈥檛 feel homeless; where he would belong; where only he knows the way to.
Or so he thinks鈥�
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.
September 3, 2022
My all-time favorite Coetzee
There are protest novels that protrude a very clear message: an openly rejection of certain political systems, of injustice, discrimination or sheer terror. And then you have a book like this one: very clearly rooted in a moralising story (against apartheid), but at the same time having a much more subtle and much broader message, exhibiting nothing less than a reflection on human condition.
Coetzee does this through the main character, Micha毛l K, a "simple" coloured man living in a town near the sea, a gardener working for the city council. In the background there is a civil war going on, regularly disrupting ordinary life. Michael is seen by others as a simpleton: he has been born with a hare lip, grew up in a youth institution, but is living now with his mother; this mother is getting sick, feels her end approaching and wants to return to her native ground.
At the outset, you can recognize 4 literary references: the K. in the name of the main character is a clear reference to Kafka (the whole novel is drenched in the atmosphere of , the journey Michael makes, first with his mother and than on his own, is like an odyssey, in which Michael develops into an Everyman (like or other variations), and the gardening motive clearly refers to by Voltaire.
But Coetzee has molded this rich material into a very original story. In the eyes of most of the other men Michael just is an idiot, he struggles with structures, regulations and human relations he does not understand, but he keeps on searching for a way to remain upright in life and in time (the experience of time also is a very important theme in this book). And without noticing it, this walking skeleton (as Michael has become in the end), develops into an icon of humanity! I can't say anything more about it without spoiling the story, but this novel really did captivate me. Coetzee certainly keeps on amazing me.
There are protest novels that protrude a very clear message: an openly rejection of certain political systems, of injustice, discrimination or sheer terror. And then you have a book like this one: very clearly rooted in a moralising story (against apartheid), but at the same time having a much more subtle and much broader message, exhibiting nothing less than a reflection on human condition.
Coetzee does this through the main character, Micha毛l K, a "simple" coloured man living in a town near the sea, a gardener working for the city council. In the background there is a civil war going on, regularly disrupting ordinary life. Michael is seen by others as a simpleton: he has been born with a hare lip, grew up in a youth institution, but is living now with his mother; this mother is getting sick, feels her end approaching and wants to return to her native ground.
At the outset, you can recognize 4 literary references: the K. in the name of the main character is a clear reference to Kafka (the whole novel is drenched in the atmosphere of , the journey Michael makes, first with his mother and than on his own, is like an odyssey, in which Michael develops into an Everyman (like or other variations), and the gardening motive clearly refers to by Voltaire.
But Coetzee has molded this rich material into a very original story. In the eyes of most of the other men Michael just is an idiot, he struggles with structures, regulations and human relations he does not understand, but he keeps on searching for a way to remain upright in life and in time (the experience of time also is a very important theme in this book). And without noticing it, this walking skeleton (as Michael has become in the end), develops into an icon of humanity! I can't say anything more about it without spoiling the story, but this novel really did captivate me. Coetzee certainly keeps on amazing me.
September 1, 2016
~ This review dedicated to 'Ya Boy.' I'ma sip this, you do the rest. ~
The Community of Misery
'Misery loves company.' I've always kind of really hated that expression because (rightly or not) I've usually deciphered the unsettling subtext whenever it's employed: i.e., that people -- experiencing misfortunes or enduring profound unhappiness -- prefer that others are likewise afflicted.
When I was younger, for instance, my father, a nouveau riche who absurdly prided himself on the mythologized 'poverty' of his youth, was fond of the saying, 'I used to be sad because I had no shoes, but then I met a man who had no feet.' As a grossly insensitive (that is to say, normal) child, the idea of a footless man was greatly humorous to me, so the moral was lost. I was too busy imagining a sort of idiot-manchild waddling around as if on rounded-off stilts to bother thinking about the relativism of misery. But now, as a highly actualized, compassionate man (quit laughing, you fucker), when I think of these sayings, which seem to pit our own misery in a competition with those of others, I find them disturbingly utilitarian or, worse, sadistic.
In considering Coetzee's exceptionally grim novel Life and Times of Michael K, I am leery of invoking anything that even vaguely stinks of the M.L.C. (Misery loves company) ethos, but at the risk of still calling to mind these allusions, I'd prefer to speak of a community of misery.
Now you Mary Poppins types (yeah, the ones who live in a debilitating state of denial regarding their material and existential plight) will heckle, jump up on tables, maybe burst into song. Who knows? But it is fundamentally wrong and, ergo, stupid to deny that misery is a fundamental part of life. It is. You may call 'misery' by another name, a kinder, gentler, more palatable name; instead of misery, for instance, perhaps you 'encounter challenges' or 'suffer setbacks.' At any rate, let's not fret over semantics, and let's concede that shit happens. Holy shit, does shit ever happen. And it happens more to some people than to other people. And -- perhaps even more interestingly -- some people are better equipped (psychologically, biologically?) to cope with shit than other people are. The latter category of people may, pejoratively, be referred to as 'weak,' but in many cases, where unhappiness appears organic, this is akin to saying that the lazy bastard with the leukemia who lies around all the time is merely shiftless. But that's another discussion altogether.
The community of misery I'm speaking of is the shared experience wherein we realize that our suffering is unexceptional. We discover this, for example, in our day-to-day interactions with So-and-So when he happens to say that he wakes up in the middle of the night sweating and shrieking with terror at the realization that his body is a mechanism, a 'factory' of life, if you will, and it operates precariously, without his supervision or awareness and is subject to unforeseeable defects and irregularities. That it, like a car or a toaster or a fax machine, may suddenly cease to operate correctly -- or to operate at all. And then you say, 'Omigod, I do the same thing! I wake up in the night shrieking about my strangely mechanistic biology!'
The example is exaggerated, of course, but in the prior instance the Hypothetical You have entered a community of misery. You have discovered that you are unexceptional.
Now usually, you understand, when we speak of something being 'unexceptional' it's generally considered either insulting or dismissive. But not so, misery! It's a horrible, horrible, horrible thing to be miserable, but it's exponentially worse to imagine that no one has any insight or empathetic entryway to our pain. We don't necessarily want to bring people down to our level, but we want to be understood and to not be alone. Occasionally, I want to be alone (to read, to masturbate, to scribble down my thoughts about this or that), but I don't believe -- and this is arrogant extrapolation -- that it is in the nature of the human condition to want to be alone in a greater existential sense. We desire community. Maybe not even a literal community, but a community of empathy and understanding.
Michael K: Whipping Boy
This book is about many things (some of them allegorical), but it is also about misery (or whatever we choose to call it in our own vocabularies). Michael K, the protagonist, suffers what most of us would call, in the vernacular, a pretty fucked-up life. He's impoverished. He's harelipped. He's a 'simpleton.' His mother is dying and must be cared for. He is mostly alone (in every sense of the term). He is abused seemingly by everyone around him. He is subject to misunderstanding and misinterpretation by those he meets. He is placed in a work camp. He hides in an underground burrow. His life is undirected; it's just bland endurance -- working toward nothing.
When I read this book, I was reminded of some of the films of Lars Von Trier, such as Dogville and Dancer in the Dark, in which he introduces a noble and innocent but somewhat naive protagonist (Nicole Kidman and Bj枚rk's characters, respectively) into a relentlessly cruel environment and lets the environment fuck her over in the worst way: either corrupting or destroying her.
This is where the comparison ends, however, because while Von Trier is aggressive and manipulative, Coetzee's writing is humane and compassionate. Von Trier always seemed to me interested in the environment, in which the naif character is just a cipher, whereas Coetzee here also appears concerned with the 'victim' (a term I use with great reluctance because of how it is heavily weighted in society today).
Allegorical intent aside, what Coetzee creates in Michael K is the impetus for a community of misery in which the readers are forced to identify with Michael K (and, later, with Michael K's environment, as the narrative shifts from third person to first person). Beyond the social critique of the novel, and at a more fundamental level, it addresses what it means to be alone -- completely, unfathomably alone in the world, in a way that is both moving and unsentimentalized. And this is surely a credit to Coetzee's talent.
Consider the following sentence, in which a doctor at an internment camp speaks of Michael K:
This is what great art does, of course. It's not rocket science to understand this, but what great writers do is something akin to rocket science -- inscrutable to laymen, seemingly mystically effective. They make us feel less alone and leave us with an augmented sense of the world we live in.
So if you suffer in a very particular way, yes, you'll almost always find an uncanny affirmation in literature, music, painting, whatever... And by seeking to explicate and to understand that pain, art lessens it in some miraculous way. And that right there is one of the best reasons to read at all, I think.
The Community of Misery
'Misery loves company.' I've always kind of really hated that expression because (rightly or not) I've usually deciphered the unsettling subtext whenever it's employed: i.e., that people -- experiencing misfortunes or enduring profound unhappiness -- prefer that others are likewise afflicted.
When I was younger, for instance, my father, a nouveau riche who absurdly prided himself on the mythologized 'poverty' of his youth, was fond of the saying, 'I used to be sad because I had no shoes, but then I met a man who had no feet.' As a grossly insensitive (that is to say, normal) child, the idea of a footless man was greatly humorous to me, so the moral was lost. I was too busy imagining a sort of idiot-manchild waddling around as if on rounded-off stilts to bother thinking about the relativism of misery. But now, as a highly actualized, compassionate man (quit laughing, you fucker), when I think of these sayings, which seem to pit our own misery in a competition with those of others, I find them disturbingly utilitarian or, worse, sadistic.
In considering Coetzee's exceptionally grim novel Life and Times of Michael K, I am leery of invoking anything that even vaguely stinks of the M.L.C. (Misery loves company) ethos, but at the risk of still calling to mind these allusions, I'd prefer to speak of a community of misery.
Now you Mary Poppins types (yeah, the ones who live in a debilitating state of denial regarding their material and existential plight) will heckle, jump up on tables, maybe burst into song. Who knows? But it is fundamentally wrong and, ergo, stupid to deny that misery is a fundamental part of life. It is. You may call 'misery' by another name, a kinder, gentler, more palatable name; instead of misery, for instance, perhaps you 'encounter challenges' or 'suffer setbacks.' At any rate, let's not fret over semantics, and let's concede that shit happens. Holy shit, does shit ever happen. And it happens more to some people than to other people. And -- perhaps even more interestingly -- some people are better equipped (psychologically, biologically?) to cope with shit than other people are. The latter category of people may, pejoratively, be referred to as 'weak,' but in many cases, where unhappiness appears organic, this is akin to saying that the lazy bastard with the leukemia who lies around all the time is merely shiftless. But that's another discussion altogether.
The community of misery I'm speaking of is the shared experience wherein we realize that our suffering is unexceptional. We discover this, for example, in our day-to-day interactions with So-and-So when he happens to say that he wakes up in the middle of the night sweating and shrieking with terror at the realization that his body is a mechanism, a 'factory' of life, if you will, and it operates precariously, without his supervision or awareness and is subject to unforeseeable defects and irregularities. That it, like a car or a toaster or a fax machine, may suddenly cease to operate correctly -- or to operate at all. And then you say, 'Omigod, I do the same thing! I wake up in the night shrieking about my strangely mechanistic biology!'
The example is exaggerated, of course, but in the prior instance the Hypothetical You have entered a community of misery. You have discovered that you are unexceptional.
Now usually, you understand, when we speak of something being 'unexceptional' it's generally considered either insulting or dismissive. But not so, misery! It's a horrible, horrible, horrible thing to be miserable, but it's exponentially worse to imagine that no one has any insight or empathetic entryway to our pain. We don't necessarily want to bring people down to our level, but we want to be understood and to not be alone. Occasionally, I want to be alone (to read, to masturbate, to scribble down my thoughts about this or that), but I don't believe -- and this is arrogant extrapolation -- that it is in the nature of the human condition to want to be alone in a greater existential sense. We desire community. Maybe not even a literal community, but a community of empathy and understanding.
Michael K: Whipping Boy
This book is about many things (some of them allegorical), but it is also about misery (or whatever we choose to call it in our own vocabularies). Michael K, the protagonist, suffers what most of us would call, in the vernacular, a pretty fucked-up life. He's impoverished. He's harelipped. He's a 'simpleton.' His mother is dying and must be cared for. He is mostly alone (in every sense of the term). He is abused seemingly by everyone around him. He is subject to misunderstanding and misinterpretation by those he meets. He is placed in a work camp. He hides in an underground burrow. His life is undirected; it's just bland endurance -- working toward nothing.
When I read this book, I was reminded of some of the films of Lars Von Trier, such as Dogville and Dancer in the Dark, in which he introduces a noble and innocent but somewhat naive protagonist (Nicole Kidman and Bj枚rk's characters, respectively) into a relentlessly cruel environment and lets the environment fuck her over in the worst way: either corrupting or destroying her.
This is where the comparison ends, however, because while Von Trier is aggressive and manipulative, Coetzee's writing is humane and compassionate. Von Trier always seemed to me interested in the environment, in which the naif character is just a cipher, whereas Coetzee here also appears concerned with the 'victim' (a term I use with great reluctance because of how it is heavily weighted in society today).
Allegorical intent aside, what Coetzee creates in Michael K is the impetus for a community of misery in which the readers are forced to identify with Michael K (and, later, with Michael K's environment, as the narrative shifts from third person to first person). Beyond the social critique of the novel, and at a more fundamental level, it addresses what it means to be alone -- completely, unfathomably alone in the world, in a way that is both moving and unsentimentalized. And this is surely a credit to Coetzee's talent.
Consider the following sentence, in which a doctor at an internment camp speaks of Michael K:
With Michaels [The doctor doesn't know his correct name.:] it always seemed to me that someone had scuffled together a handful of dust, spat on it, and patted it into the shape of a rudimentary man, making one or two mistakes (the mouth, and without a doubt the contents of the head), omitting one or two details (the sex), but coming up nevertheless in the end with a genuine little man of earth, the kind of little man one sees in peasant art emerging into the world from between the squat thighs of its mother-host with fingers ready hooked and back ready bent for a life of burrowing, a creature that spends its waking life stooped over the soil, that when at last its time comes digs its own grave and slips quietly in and draws the heavy earth over its head like a blanket and cracks a last smile and turns over and descends into sleep, home at last, while unnoticed as ever somewhere far away the grinding of the wheels of history continues.
This is what great art does, of course. It's not rocket science to understand this, but what great writers do is something akin to rocket science -- inscrutable to laymen, seemingly mystically effective. They make us feel less alone and leave us with an augmented sense of the world we live in.
So if you suffer in a very particular way, yes, you'll almost always find an uncanny affirmation in literature, music, painting, whatever... And by seeking to explicate and to understand that pain, art lessens it in some miraculous way. And that right there is one of the best reasons to read at all, I think.
July 30, 2010
***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...
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...
November 11, 2022
讴鬲丕亘 噩丕賱亘蹖 亘賵丿 賮賯胤 蹖讴 賲賯丿丕乇 禺賵丕賳丿賳卮 讴賳丿 倬蹖卮 賲蹖鈥屫辟堌�. ****
芦乇丕賴 爻賵賲蹖 賲蹖丕賳 丨乇賮 夭丿賳 賵 爻讴賵鬲 賵噩賵丿 丿丕乇丿 賵 丌賳 丕丿亘蹖丕鬲 丕爻鬲. 夭亘丕賳蹖 讴賴 賲賳 丨乇賮 賲蹖鈥屫操嗁� 賲賳丕爻亘 賳賵卮鬲賳 丕爻鬲貙 賵 賳賴 诏賮鬲鈥屬堌促嗁堌�.禄 (噩蹖. 丕賲. 讴賵鬲爻蹖丕) 倬蹖卮诏賮鬲丕乇 賲鬲乇噩賲 - 氐賮丨賴 爻蹖夭丿賴 讴鬲丕亘
賲丕蹖讴賱 蹖讴 丕賳爻丕賳 亘讴乇 丕爻鬲 讴賴 噩賴丕賳 乇丕 丕夭 丿蹖丿 禺丕氐 禺賵丿卮 賲蹖鈥屫ㄛ屬嗀�. 亘丕 丕蹖賳讴賴 禺卮賵賳鬲 鬲亘毓蹖囟 賳跇丕丿蹖 乇丕 鬲噩乇亘賴 賲蹖鈥屭┵嗀�- 賵 讴賵鬲爻蹖丕 丿乇 胤賵賱 乇賲丕賳 丨鬲蹖 蹖讴 鈥屫ㄘж� 賴賲 丕卮丕乇賴鈥屫й� 亘賴 乇賳诏 倬賵爻鬲 丕賵 賳賲蹖鈥屭┵嗀�- 丕夭 胤乇蹖賯 卮讴蹖亘丕蹖蹖 亘賴 丌夭丕丿诏蹖蹖 丿爻鬲 賲蹖鈥屰屫жㄘ� 讴賴 賴賲 乇跇蹖賲 丌倬丕乇鬲賴丕蹖丿 賵 賴賲 賳蹖乇賵賴丕蹖 趩乇蹖讴蹖 乇丕 卮诏賮鬲鈥屫藏� 賵 賲亘賴賵鬲 賲蹖鈥屭┵嗀� 夭蹖乇丕 丕賵貙 丿乇賳賴丕蹖鬲 爻丕丿诏蹖貙 賴蹖趩鈥屭嗃屫� 賳賲蹖鈥屫堌з囏�: 賳賴 噩賳诏 賵 賳賴 丕賳賯賱丕亘貙 賳賴 賯丿乇鬲 賵 賳賴 倬賵賱. 賲丕蹖讴賱 讴 賮賯胤 讴乇丕賲鬲 丕賳爻丕賳蹖 乇丕 賲蹖鈥屫堌з囏�. 倬蹖卮诏賮鬲丕乇 賲鬲乇噩賲 - 氐賮丨賴 倬丕賳夭丿賴 讴鬲丕亘
賳賲蹖鈥屫з嗀池� 趩賴 禺賵丕賴丿 卮丿. 丿丕爻鬲丕賳 夭賳丿诏蹖鈥屫ж� 賴蹖趩鈥� 賵賯鬲 噩丕賱亘 賳亘賵丿貨 賲毓賲賵賱丕賸 賴賲蹖卮賴 讴爻蹖 亘賵丿 讴賴 亘賴 丕賵 亘诏賵蹖丿 亘毓丿卮 趩賴 讴丕乇 讴賳丿貨 丨丕賱丕 讴爻蹖 賳亘賵丿貙 賵 亘賴鬲乇蹖賳 讴丕乇 丕蹖賳 亘賵丿 讴賴 氐亘乇 讴賳丿. 氐賮丨賴 鄹鄢 讴鬲丕亘
丿乇 賳馗乇卮 夭賳丿诏蹖 氐丨賳賴 亘賴 氐丨賳賴 噩賱賵 趩卮賲鈥屬囏й屫� 丕噩乇丕 賲蹖鈥屫簇� 賵 鬲賲丕賲 氐丨賳賴鈥屬囏� 乇亘胤蹖 賲賳胤賯蹖 丿丕卮鬲. 賯賱亘卮 诏賵丕賴蹖 賲蹖鈥屫ж� 讴賴 鬲賲丕賲 丕蹖賳 氐丨賳賴鈥屬囏� 讴賴 亘丕 賴賲 鬲賱丕賯蹖 賲蹖鈥屭┴必嗀� 蹖丕 亘蹖賲 鬲賱丕賯蹖 卮丕賳 賲蹖鈥屫辟佖� 亘賴 鈥屬呚官嗀й� 賵丕丨丿蹖 賲蹖鈥屫必迟嗀�. 丕賲丕 賳賲蹖鈥屫з嗀池� 丌賳 賲毓賳丕 趩蹖爻鬲. 氐賮丨賴 郾郯酃 讴鬲丕亘
丨蹖賮 讴賴 亘乇丕蹖 夭賳丿诏蹖 讴乇丿賳 鬲賵 丕蹖賳 丿賵乇賴 賵 夭賲賵賳賴 亘丕蹖丿 賯亘賵賱 讴乇丿 讴賴 賲孬 丨蹖賵賵賳 夭賳丿诏蹖 讴賳蹖賲. 丌丿賲蹖 讴賴 亘禺賵丕丿 夭賳丿賴 亘賲賵賳賴 賳賲蹖鈥屫堎嗁� 鬲賵蹖 禺賵賳賴鈥屫й� 夭賳丿诏蹖 讴賳賴 讴賴 倬賳噩乇賴鈥屬囏ж� 乇賵卮賳賳. 亘丕蹖丿 亘乇賴 鬲賵 蹖賴 爻賵乇丕禺蹖 鬲賲賵賲 乇賵夭 賯丕蹖賲 亘卮賴. 亘丕蹖丿 噩賵乇蹖 夭賳丿诏蹖 讴賳賴 讴賴 乇丿蹖 丕夭 夭賳丿诏蹖卮 賲毓賱賵賲 賳卮賴. 夭賳丿诏蹖 丕蹖賳噩賵乇蹖 卮丿賴. 氐賮丨賴 郾鄄郯 讴鬲丕亘
賴賲蹖卮賴貙 賵賯鬲蹖 賲蹖鈥屫堌ж池� 禺賵丿卮 乇丕 亘乇丕蹖 禺賵丿卮 鬲賵噩蹖賴 讴賳丿 卮讴丕賮蹖 亘丕賯蹖 賲蹖鈥屬呚з嗀� 蹖讴 丨賮乇賴貙 馗賱賲鬲蹖 讴賴 丿乇讴 丕賵 丿乇 亘乇丕亘乇卮 賲鬲賵賯賮 賲蹖鈥屬呚з嗀� 賵 倬乇 讴乇丿賳 丌賳 亘丕 讴賱賲丕鬲 亘蹖鈥屬佖й屫� 亘賵丿. 讴賱賲丕鬲 鬲賲丕賲 賲蹖鈥屫簇嗀� 賵 卮讴丕賮 亘丕賯蹖 賲蹖鈥屬呚з嗀�. 丿丕爻鬲丕賳 丕賵 賴賲蹖卮賴 丨賮乇賴鈥屫й� 丿丕卮鬲: 丿丕爻鬲丕賳蹖 丕卮鬲亘丕賴貙 丿丕爻鬲丕賳蹖 賴賲蹖卮賴 丕卮鬲亘丕賴. 氐賮丨賴 郾鄢鄢 讴鬲丕亘
丌蹖丕 丕丨爻丕爻 賳賲蹖鈥屭┴必� 夭賳丿诏丕賳蹖鈥屫ж� 賲毓賱賯 丕爻鬲貙 賴賲 夭賳丿賴 丕爻鬲 賵 賴賲 夭賳丿賴 賳蹖爻鬲貙 丿乇 噩丕蹖蹖鈥� 讴賴 鬲丕乇蹖禺 丿乇 鬲乇丿蹖丿 丕爻鬲 趩賴 乇丕賴蹖 乇丕 亘乇诏夭蹖賳丿責 氐賮丨賴 郾酃鄄 讴鬲丕亘
芦乇丕賴 爻賵賲蹖 賲蹖丕賳 丨乇賮 夭丿賳 賵 爻讴賵鬲 賵噩賵丿 丿丕乇丿 賵 丌賳 丕丿亘蹖丕鬲 丕爻鬲. 夭亘丕賳蹖 讴賴 賲賳 丨乇賮 賲蹖鈥屫操嗁� 賲賳丕爻亘 賳賵卮鬲賳 丕爻鬲貙 賵 賳賴 诏賮鬲鈥屬堌促嗁堌�.禄 (噩蹖. 丕賲. 讴賵鬲爻蹖丕) 倬蹖卮诏賮鬲丕乇 賲鬲乇噩賲 - 氐賮丨賴 爻蹖夭丿賴 讴鬲丕亘
賲丕蹖讴賱 蹖讴 丕賳爻丕賳 亘讴乇 丕爻鬲 讴賴 噩賴丕賳 乇丕 丕夭 丿蹖丿 禺丕氐 禺賵丿卮 賲蹖鈥屫ㄛ屬嗀�. 亘丕 丕蹖賳讴賴 禺卮賵賳鬲 鬲亘毓蹖囟 賳跇丕丿蹖 乇丕 鬲噩乇亘賴 賲蹖鈥屭┵嗀�- 賵 讴賵鬲爻蹖丕 丿乇 胤賵賱 乇賲丕賳 丨鬲蹖 蹖讴 鈥屫ㄘж� 賴賲 丕卮丕乇賴鈥屫й� 亘賴 乇賳诏 倬賵爻鬲 丕賵 賳賲蹖鈥屭┵嗀�- 丕夭 胤乇蹖賯 卮讴蹖亘丕蹖蹖 亘賴 丌夭丕丿诏蹖蹖 丿爻鬲 賲蹖鈥屰屫жㄘ� 讴賴 賴賲 乇跇蹖賲 丌倬丕乇鬲賴丕蹖丿 賵 賴賲 賳蹖乇賵賴丕蹖 趩乇蹖讴蹖 乇丕 卮诏賮鬲鈥屫藏� 賵 賲亘賴賵鬲 賲蹖鈥屭┵嗀� 夭蹖乇丕 丕賵貙 丿乇賳賴丕蹖鬲 爻丕丿诏蹖貙 賴蹖趩鈥屭嗃屫� 賳賲蹖鈥屫堌з囏�: 賳賴 噩賳诏 賵 賳賴 丕賳賯賱丕亘貙 賳賴 賯丿乇鬲 賵 賳賴 倬賵賱. 賲丕蹖讴賱 讴 賮賯胤 讴乇丕賲鬲 丕賳爻丕賳蹖 乇丕 賲蹖鈥屫堌з囏�. 倬蹖卮诏賮鬲丕乇 賲鬲乇噩賲 - 氐賮丨賴 倬丕賳夭丿賴 讴鬲丕亘
賳賲蹖鈥屫з嗀池� 趩賴 禺賵丕賴丿 卮丿. 丿丕爻鬲丕賳 夭賳丿诏蹖鈥屫ж� 賴蹖趩鈥� 賵賯鬲 噩丕賱亘 賳亘賵丿貨 賲毓賲賵賱丕賸 賴賲蹖卮賴 讴爻蹖 亘賵丿 讴賴 亘賴 丕賵 亘诏賵蹖丿 亘毓丿卮 趩賴 讴丕乇 讴賳丿貨 丨丕賱丕 讴爻蹖 賳亘賵丿貙 賵 亘賴鬲乇蹖賳 讴丕乇 丕蹖賳 亘賵丿 讴賴 氐亘乇 讴賳丿. 氐賮丨賴 鄹鄢 讴鬲丕亘
丿乇 賳馗乇卮 夭賳丿诏蹖 氐丨賳賴 亘賴 氐丨賳賴 噩賱賵 趩卮賲鈥屬囏й屫� 丕噩乇丕 賲蹖鈥屫簇� 賵 鬲賲丕賲 氐丨賳賴鈥屬囏� 乇亘胤蹖 賲賳胤賯蹖 丿丕卮鬲. 賯賱亘卮 诏賵丕賴蹖 賲蹖鈥屫ж� 讴賴 鬲賲丕賲 丕蹖賳 氐丨賳賴鈥屬囏� 讴賴 亘丕 賴賲 鬲賱丕賯蹖 賲蹖鈥屭┴必嗀� 蹖丕 亘蹖賲 鬲賱丕賯蹖 卮丕賳 賲蹖鈥屫辟佖� 亘賴 鈥屬呚官嗀й� 賵丕丨丿蹖 賲蹖鈥屫必迟嗀�. 丕賲丕 賳賲蹖鈥屫з嗀池� 丌賳 賲毓賳丕 趩蹖爻鬲. 氐賮丨賴 郾郯酃 讴鬲丕亘
丨蹖賮 讴賴 亘乇丕蹖 夭賳丿诏蹖 讴乇丿賳 鬲賵 丕蹖賳 丿賵乇賴 賵 夭賲賵賳賴 亘丕蹖丿 賯亘賵賱 讴乇丿 讴賴 賲孬 丨蹖賵賵賳 夭賳丿诏蹖 讴賳蹖賲. 丌丿賲蹖 讴賴 亘禺賵丕丿 夭賳丿賴 亘賲賵賳賴 賳賲蹖鈥屫堎嗁� 鬲賵蹖 禺賵賳賴鈥屫й� 夭賳丿诏蹖 讴賳賴 讴賴 倬賳噩乇賴鈥屬囏ж� 乇賵卮賳賳. 亘丕蹖丿 亘乇賴 鬲賵 蹖賴 爻賵乇丕禺蹖 鬲賲賵賲 乇賵夭 賯丕蹖賲 亘卮賴. 亘丕蹖丿 噩賵乇蹖 夭賳丿诏蹖 讴賳賴 讴賴 乇丿蹖 丕夭 夭賳丿诏蹖卮 賲毓賱賵賲 賳卮賴. 夭賳丿诏蹖 丕蹖賳噩賵乇蹖 卮丿賴. 氐賮丨賴 郾鄄郯 讴鬲丕亘
賴賲蹖卮賴貙 賵賯鬲蹖 賲蹖鈥屫堌ж池� 禺賵丿卮 乇丕 亘乇丕蹖 禺賵丿卮 鬲賵噩蹖賴 讴賳丿 卮讴丕賮蹖 亘丕賯蹖 賲蹖鈥屬呚з嗀� 蹖讴 丨賮乇賴貙 馗賱賲鬲蹖 讴賴 丿乇讴 丕賵 丿乇 亘乇丕亘乇卮 賲鬲賵賯賮 賲蹖鈥屬呚з嗀� 賵 倬乇 讴乇丿賳 丌賳 亘丕 讴賱賲丕鬲 亘蹖鈥屬佖й屫� 亘賵丿. 讴賱賲丕鬲 鬲賲丕賲 賲蹖鈥屫簇嗀� 賵 卮讴丕賮 亘丕賯蹖 賲蹖鈥屬呚з嗀�. 丿丕爻鬲丕賳 丕賵 賴賲蹖卮賴 丨賮乇賴鈥屫й� 丿丕卮鬲: 丿丕爻鬲丕賳蹖 丕卮鬲亘丕賴貙 丿丕爻鬲丕賳蹖 賴賲蹖卮賴 丕卮鬲亘丕賴. 氐賮丨賴 郾鄢鄢 讴鬲丕亘
丌蹖丕 丕丨爻丕爻 賳賲蹖鈥屭┴必� 夭賳丿诏丕賳蹖鈥屫ж� 賲毓賱賯 丕爻鬲貙 賴賲 夭賳丿賴 丕爻鬲 賵 賴賲 夭賳丿賴 賳蹖爻鬲貙 丿乇 噩丕蹖蹖鈥� 讴賴 鬲丕乇蹖禺 丿乇 鬲乇丿蹖丿 丕爻鬲 趩賴 乇丕賴蹖 乇丕 亘乇诏夭蹖賳丿責 氐賮丨賴 郾酃鄄 讴鬲丕亘
July 29, 2010
I have been thinking how much a good book is like an organic thing. When the proper level of alchemical transformation is reached between a skilled author at the top of his game and a reader with the proper level of receptivity and empathy then something new and wonderful is birthed. You are no longer dealing with some pulped paper glued together with some artful(or not) cover protecting its frail glyphs but you are in the presence of something larger, vaster and infinitely more sacred than just a `good yarn鈥� designed to kill some time. You actually are allowed to see the world through another pair of eyes, observe, act, fail to act, feel, watch an entire life spool out with Technicolor vividness, rest firmly embedded in another for the length of the journey that is the book. That is something rare and wonderful that isn鈥檛 often to be found, but I think it is close to the root of why certain readers trumpet certain authors and books with the fervor of one who has found The Grail or some other talisman of sacred import.
The Life and Times of Michael K is my most recent experience where I closed a book at its end and felt I had been exposed completely to a real, living soul; where I felt the alchemy of a life lived thorough another take place. The book is the journey of one frail, physically malformed and mentally challenged man through the horrors of South African during the apartheid era. Michael K.鈥檚 journey is one that begins in poverty and oppression, travels outwards into greater malignancies and terrors, and ends in a cruel stasis that might be synonymous with death. And yet鈥his book never once struck me as being, depressed, morbid or overly sad. Through the strength of the writing I was so utterly with Michael most of the time, I could not stand outside dispassionately and think about what a terrible lot in life he had. And while the arc of Michael鈥檚 journey is pitiful, one of mere subsistence for the greater part, there are also scenes of corresponding beauty that make you realize that even though Michael is a simpleton his connection to the land, to the earth, is something much more subtle and deep. Michael is a planter and a gardener and he finds what redemption he can from his hands delving into the red clay that is the body of South Africa and though he wouldn鈥檛 know how to express it, there is sense of completeness and soul-solace he achieves there, that makes his life seem not wholly pitiful.
By letting this half-starved , hair-lipped, street urchin be the recipient of these small instances of grace, Coetzee is really delivering a quite pass茅 and subversive message: the most sordid lives might still seem to the ones experiencing them eminently worth living. And by letting Michael K. remain his plodding, dim and unaware self throughout this book, after numerous exposures to the brutal injustices of apartheid, war and exile, Coetzee has also delivered a stirring paean to the capacity of the individual, no matter how slight and flawed, to stand and prevail against anything.
The Life and Times of Michael K is my most recent experience where I closed a book at its end and felt I had been exposed completely to a real, living soul; where I felt the alchemy of a life lived thorough another take place. The book is the journey of one frail, physically malformed and mentally challenged man through the horrors of South African during the apartheid era. Michael K.鈥檚 journey is one that begins in poverty and oppression, travels outwards into greater malignancies and terrors, and ends in a cruel stasis that might be synonymous with death. And yet鈥his book never once struck me as being, depressed, morbid or overly sad. Through the strength of the writing I was so utterly with Michael most of the time, I could not stand outside dispassionately and think about what a terrible lot in life he had. And while the arc of Michael鈥檚 journey is pitiful, one of mere subsistence for the greater part, there are also scenes of corresponding beauty that make you realize that even though Michael is a simpleton his connection to the land, to the earth, is something much more subtle and deep. Michael is a planter and a gardener and he finds what redemption he can from his hands delving into the red clay that is the body of South Africa and though he wouldn鈥檛 know how to express it, there is sense of completeness and soul-solace he achieves there, that makes his life seem not wholly pitiful.
By letting this half-starved , hair-lipped, street urchin be the recipient of these small instances of grace, Coetzee is really delivering a quite pass茅 and subversive message: the most sordid lives might still seem to the ones experiencing them eminently worth living. And by letting Michael K. remain his plodding, dim and unaware self throughout this book, after numerous exposures to the brutal injustices of apartheid, war and exile, Coetzee has also delivered a stirring paean to the capacity of the individual, no matter how slight and flawed, to stand and prevail against anything.
June 9, 2022
丨蹖賮 讴賴 亘乇丕蹖 夭賳丿诏蹖 讴乇丿賳 鬲賵 丕蹖賳 丿賵乇賴 賵 夭賲賵賳賴 亘丕蹖丿 賯亘賵賱 讴乇丿 讴賴 賲孬 丨蹖賵賵賳 夭賳丿诏蹖 讴賳蹖賲. 丌丿賲蹖 讴賴 亘禺賵丕丿 夭賳丿賴 亘賲賵賳賴 賳賲蹖鬲賵賳賴 鬲賵蹖 禺賵賳賴鈥屫й� 夭賳丿诏蹖 讴賳賴 讴賴 倬賳噩乇賴鈥屬囏ж� 乇賵卮賳賳. 亘丕蹖丿 亘乇賴 鬲賵 蹖賴 爻賵乇丕禺蹖 鬲賲賵賲 乇賵夭 賯丕蹖賲 亘卮賴. 亘丕蹖丿 噩賵乇蹖 夭賳丿诏蹖 讴賳賴 讴賴 乇丿蹖 丕夭 夭賳丿诏蹖卮 賲毓賱賵賲 賳卮賴. 夭賳丿诏蹖 丕蹖賳噩賵乇蹖 卮丿賴.
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讴鬲丕亘 丿丕爻鬲丕賳 夭賳丿诏蹖 賮乇丿蹖 亘賴 賳丕賲 賲丕蹖讴賱 丕爻鬲. 丕夭 讴賵丿讴蹖 亘禺丕胤乇 賴賵卮 讴賲 賵 馗丕賴乇卮 賵 賴賲蹖賳鈥屫焚堌� 賮賯乇 禺丕賳賵丕丿卮 趩賳丿丕賳 賲賵乇丿 鬲賵噩賴 賳亘賵丿賴. 丕賵 亘丕 賲丕丿乇卮 夭賳丿诏蹖 賲蹖讴賳賴 賵 賲丕丿乇卮 丕夭 馗丕賴乇 丕賵 卮乇賲賳丿賴 賴爻鬲 賵 爻毓蹖 賲蹖讴賳賴 丕賵賳 乇賵 禺蹖賱蹖 賵丕乇丿 丕噩鬲賲丕毓 賳讴賳賴. 賵賱蹖 賴蹖趩讴丿賵賲 丕夭 丕蹖賳 丕鬲賮丕賯丕鬲 鬲賱禺 丿賵乇丕賳 讴賵丿讴蹖 賲丕蹖讴賱 亘丕毓孬 賳賲蹖卮賴 讴賴 丿乇 亘夭乇诏爻丕賱蹖 夭賳丿诏蹖 卮乇丕賮鬲賲賳丿丕賳賴鈥屫й� 乇賵 賱丕蹖賯 禺賵丿卮 賳丿賵賳賴... 丿乇诏蹖乇 卮丿賳 丿乇 噩賳诏貙 丕爻丕乇鬲貙 鬲亘毓蹖囟 賳跇丕丿蹖 賵 ... 亘丕毓孬 讴賲 卮丿賳 賲賯丕賵賲鬲卮 賳賲蹖鈥屫促堎嗀�.
讴賱丕 讴鬲丕亘 禺賵亘蹖 亘賵丿. 鬲乇噩賲賴鈥屰� 禺賵亘蹖 丿丕卮鬲.
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讴鬲丕亘 丿丕爻鬲丕賳 夭賳丿诏蹖 賮乇丿蹖 亘賴 賳丕賲 賲丕蹖讴賱 丕爻鬲. 丕夭 讴賵丿讴蹖 亘禺丕胤乇 賴賵卮 讴賲 賵 馗丕賴乇卮 賵 賴賲蹖賳鈥屫焚堌� 賮賯乇 禺丕賳賵丕丿卮 趩賳丿丕賳 賲賵乇丿 鬲賵噩賴 賳亘賵丿賴. 丕賵 亘丕 賲丕丿乇卮 夭賳丿诏蹖 賲蹖讴賳賴 賵 賲丕丿乇卮 丕夭 馗丕賴乇 丕賵 卮乇賲賳丿賴 賴爻鬲 賵 爻毓蹖 賲蹖讴賳賴 丕賵賳 乇賵 禺蹖賱蹖 賵丕乇丿 丕噩鬲賲丕毓 賳讴賳賴. 賵賱蹖 賴蹖趩讴丿賵賲 丕夭 丕蹖賳 丕鬲賮丕賯丕鬲 鬲賱禺 丿賵乇丕賳 讴賵丿讴蹖 賲丕蹖讴賱 亘丕毓孬 賳賲蹖卮賴 讴賴 丿乇 亘夭乇诏爻丕賱蹖 夭賳丿诏蹖 卮乇丕賮鬲賲賳丿丕賳賴鈥屫й� 乇賵 賱丕蹖賯 禺賵丿卮 賳丿賵賳賴... 丿乇诏蹖乇 卮丿賳 丿乇 噩賳诏貙 丕爻丕乇鬲貙 鬲亘毓蹖囟 賳跇丕丿蹖 賵 ... 亘丕毓孬 讴賲 卮丿賳 賲賯丕賵賲鬲卮 賳賲蹖鈥屫促堎嗀�.
讴賱丕 讴鬲丕亘 禺賵亘蹖 亘賵丿. 鬲乇噩賲賴鈥屰� 禺賵亘蹖 丿丕卮鬲.
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July 23, 2022
丿乇 爻鬲丕蹖卮 丌夭丕丿蹖 貙 丿乇 爻鬲丕蹖卮 胤亘蹖毓鬲
噩丕賳 賲丕讴爻賵賱 讴賵鬲爻蹖 賳賵蹖爻賳丿賴 丕賴賱 丌賮乇蹖賯丕 噩賳賵亘蹖 丕賮夭賵賳 亘乇 倬乇丿丕禺鬲賳 亘賴 噩賳诏 丿丕禺賱蹖 賵 丌倬丕乇鬲丕蹖丿 丕夭 賳诏丕賴 賲丕蹖讴賱 讴 賯賴乇賲丕賳 賳賴 趩賳丿丕賳 丿賵爻鬲 丿丕卮鬲賳蹖 讴鬲丕亘 亘賴 鬲賱丕卮 丕賳爻丕賳 亘乇丕蹖 噩爻鬲噩賵蹖 丌夭丕丿蹖 賵 賳蹖夭 讴賵卮卮 丕賵 亘乇丕蹖 夭賳丿賴 賲丕賳丿賳 亘賴 賴乇 賯蹖賲鬲蹖 丕賲丕 丿乇 夭蹖乇 趩鬲乇 丌夭丕丿蹖 倬乇丿丕禺鬲賴 丕爻鬲 .
賯賴乇賲丕賳 讴鬲丕亘 丕賵 賲丕蹖讴賱 讴 貙 讴賴 毓賱丕賵賴 亘乇 讴賲 賴賵卮蹖 賵 賮賯乇 丿趩丕乇 賳賯氐蹖 丿乇 氐賵乇鬲 丕爻鬲 丿乇 賲丕賲賵乇蹖鬲蹖 丿賳 讴蹖卮賵鬲 賵丕乇 鬲賱丕卮 賲蹖 讴賳丿 鬲丕 賲丕丿乇 倬蹖乇 禺賵丿 乇丕 亘賴 夭丕丿诏丕賴卮 亘亘乇丿 貙 鬲賱丕卮 丕賵 亘丿賵賳 丌诏丕賴蹖 丕夭 噩賳诏 丿丕禺賱蹖 賵 丌賳趩賴 讴賴 丿乇 噩乇蹖丕賳 丕爻鬲 亘賴 賮丕噩毓賴 禺鬲賲 賲蹖 卮賵丿 .
賲蹖 鬲賵丕賳 卮亘丕賴鬲賴丕蹖蹖 賲蹖丕賳 賲丕蹖讴賱 讴 丿丕爻鬲丕賳 讴鬲丕亘 讴賵鬲爻蹖 賵 賮丕乇爻鬲 诏丕賲倬 讴鬲丕亘 賵蹖爻賳爻鬲賵賳 诏乇賵賲 倬蹖丿丕 讴乇丿 貙 丕诏乇趩賴 賲丕蹖讴賱 丕爻鬲賯丕賲鬲 賵 丕乇丕丿賴 賮丕乇爻鬲 诏丕賲倬 乇丕 丿乇 倬蹖賳诏 倬賳诏 蹖丕 氐蹖丿 賲蹖诏賵 賵 蹖丕 丿乇 丿賵蹖丿賳 賳丿丕乇丿 ( 丕賱亘鬲賴 丌賮乇蹖賯丕噩賳賵亘蹖 賴賲 賲丕賳賳丿 丌賲乇蹖讴丕 爻乇夭賲蹖賳 賮乇氐鬲賴丕 賳蹖爻鬲 )貙 丕賲丕 賴乇 丿賵 丌賳賴丕 鬲賱丕卮 亘乇丕蹖 夭蹖爻鬲賳 丿賵乇 丕夭 丌丿賲蹖丕賳 賵 丿乇 倬賳丕賴 胤亘蹖毓鬲 丿丕乇賳丿 .
丕賲丕 亘丕 賵噩賵丿 丿丕爻鬲丕賳 賳爻亘鬲丕 賲鬲賲丕蹖夭 賵 卮禺氐蹖鬲 賲鬲賮丕賵鬲 賲丕蹖讴賱 讴 貙 讴鬲丕亘 乇賵賳丿 蹖讴賳賵丕禺鬲 貙 讴賳丿 賵 讴爻賱 讴賳賳丿賴 賵 賯丕亘賱 倬蹖卮 亘蹖賳蹖 丿丕乇丿 貙 賲爻蹖乇蹖 讴賴 賲丕蹖讴賱 讴 賲蹖 乇賵丿 賮乇噩丕賲 賵 毓丕賯亘鬲 丌賳 乇賵卮賳 丕爻鬲 .
噩丕賳 賲丕讴爻賵賱 讴賵鬲爻蹖 賳賵蹖爻賳丿賴 丕賴賱 丌賮乇蹖賯丕 噩賳賵亘蹖 丕賮夭賵賳 亘乇 倬乇丿丕禺鬲賳 亘賴 噩賳诏 丿丕禺賱蹖 賵 丌倬丕乇鬲丕蹖丿 丕夭 賳诏丕賴 賲丕蹖讴賱 讴 賯賴乇賲丕賳 賳賴 趩賳丿丕賳 丿賵爻鬲 丿丕卮鬲賳蹖 讴鬲丕亘 亘賴 鬲賱丕卮 丕賳爻丕賳 亘乇丕蹖 噩爻鬲噩賵蹖 丌夭丕丿蹖 賵 賳蹖夭 讴賵卮卮 丕賵 亘乇丕蹖 夭賳丿賴 賲丕賳丿賳 亘賴 賴乇 賯蹖賲鬲蹖 丕賲丕 丿乇 夭蹖乇 趩鬲乇 丌夭丕丿蹖 倬乇丿丕禺鬲賴 丕爻鬲 .
賯賴乇賲丕賳 讴鬲丕亘 丕賵 賲丕蹖讴賱 讴 貙 讴賴 毓賱丕賵賴 亘乇 讴賲 賴賵卮蹖 賵 賮賯乇 丿趩丕乇 賳賯氐蹖 丿乇 氐賵乇鬲 丕爻鬲 丿乇 賲丕賲賵乇蹖鬲蹖 丿賳 讴蹖卮賵鬲 賵丕乇 鬲賱丕卮 賲蹖 讴賳丿 鬲丕 賲丕丿乇 倬蹖乇 禺賵丿 乇丕 亘賴 夭丕丿诏丕賴卮 亘亘乇丿 貙 鬲賱丕卮 丕賵 亘丿賵賳 丌诏丕賴蹖 丕夭 噩賳诏 丿丕禺賱蹖 賵 丌賳趩賴 讴賴 丿乇 噩乇蹖丕賳 丕爻鬲 亘賴 賮丕噩毓賴 禺鬲賲 賲蹖 卮賵丿 .
賲蹖 鬲賵丕賳 卮亘丕賴鬲賴丕蹖蹖 賲蹖丕賳 賲丕蹖讴賱 讴 丿丕爻鬲丕賳 讴鬲丕亘 讴賵鬲爻蹖 賵 賮丕乇爻鬲 诏丕賲倬 讴鬲丕亘 賵蹖爻賳爻鬲賵賳 诏乇賵賲 倬蹖丿丕 讴乇丿 貙 丕诏乇趩賴 賲丕蹖讴賱 丕爻鬲賯丕賲鬲 賵 丕乇丕丿賴 賮丕乇爻鬲 诏丕賲倬 乇丕 丿乇 倬蹖賳诏 倬賳诏 蹖丕 氐蹖丿 賲蹖诏賵 賵 蹖丕 丿乇 丿賵蹖丿賳 賳丿丕乇丿 ( 丕賱亘鬲賴 丌賮乇蹖賯丕噩賳賵亘蹖 賴賲 賲丕賳賳丿 丌賲乇蹖讴丕 爻乇夭賲蹖賳 賮乇氐鬲賴丕 賳蹖爻鬲 )貙 丕賲丕 賴乇 丿賵 丌賳賴丕 鬲賱丕卮 亘乇丕蹖 夭蹖爻鬲賳 丿賵乇 丕夭 丌丿賲蹖丕賳 賵 丿乇 倬賳丕賴 胤亘蹖毓鬲 丿丕乇賳丿 .
丕賲丕 亘丕 賵噩賵丿 丿丕爻鬲丕賳 賳爻亘鬲丕 賲鬲賲丕蹖夭 賵 卮禺氐蹖鬲 賲鬲賮丕賵鬲 賲丕蹖讴賱 讴 貙 讴鬲丕亘 乇賵賳丿 蹖讴賳賵丕禺鬲 貙 讴賳丿 賵 讴爻賱 讴賳賳丿賴 賵 賯丕亘賱 倬蹖卮 亘蹖賳蹖 丿丕乇丿 貙 賲爻蹖乇蹖 讴賴 賲丕蹖讴賱 讴 賲蹖 乇賵丿 賮乇噩丕賲 賵 毓丕賯亘鬲 丌賳 乇賵卮賳 丕爻鬲 .
August 17, 2022
This is an oddly compelling book about Michael K's journey from Cape Town to the place of his mother's childhood. Interestingly, Coetzee doesn't label his characters Black or white or mention the word apartheid - yet Michael K encounters constant conflict with authorities as a war drones on. He is a passive, opaque man - sometimes more symbolic than flesh and blood.
Michael K has been overlooked his entire life and has spent it mostly in isolation. His simple-minded demeanor cloaks a fierce determination to survive on his terms. He moves randomly about, not sure what he wants, but seems to find contentment on the land, where he can grow pumpkins secretly. Along the way, he encounters strangers who treat him both cruelly and with kindness. This is a thought provoking novel and would be great to discuss as I'm sure there are layers of meaning here that I missed.
Michael K has been overlooked his entire life and has spent it mostly in isolation. His simple-minded demeanor cloaks a fierce determination to survive on his terms. He moves randomly about, not sure what he wants, but seems to find contentment on the land, where he can grow pumpkins secretly. Along the way, he encounters strangers who treat him both cruelly and with kindness. This is a thought provoking novel and would be great to discuss as I'm sure there are layers of meaning here that I missed.
May 9, 2024
Cuenta la historia que estando el fil贸sofo Di贸genes sentado frente al tonel donde viv铆a con su perro, se le present贸 Alejandro Magno: 鈥淢is respetos, Di贸genes. Soy el hombre m谩s poderoso de la tierra; decime que puedo hacer por vos". Y Di贸genes le respondi贸: 鈥淐orrete un poco que me tapas el sol鈥�: Di贸genes era un hombre libre, porque hab铆a 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 hist贸rico de ser un negro pobre en la Sud谩frica del Apartheid.
Y a lo largo de la novela podremos acompa帽arlo en su deriva, como un hombre libre, con necesidades m铆nimas; una deriva que me result贸 谩gil, atrapante y fascinante gracias al arte y la sensibilidad de Coetzee.
Una novela que me cambi贸: me hizo valorar mucho m谩s la importancia de ser una persona realmente libre, y me permiti贸 desarrollar una sensibilidad para identificar y comprender en otros esta libertad, esta falta de necesidades, en mi vida cotidiana.
Hasta ahora no ten铆a dudas de que la mejor obra de Coetzee era ; ahora no estoy tan seguro.
Una obra de arte.
John Maxwell Coetzee naci贸 y vivi贸 gran parte de su vida en Sud谩frica, hasta de la condena social que recibi贸 tras su novela (en la era de la euforia post apartheid tuvo la impertinencia escribir una novela en la que el malo es negro; una falta de correcci贸n pol铆tica inaceptable); actualmente vive en Australia. De cierta manera, m谩s all谩 de que parece ser arrogante y antip谩tico, Coetzee es posiblemente un hombre libre.
Michael K es un hombre que tiene todos los factores de la vida en su contra, desde un defecto de nacimiento hasta el contexto hist贸rico de ser un negro pobre en la Sud谩frica del Apartheid.
Y a lo largo de la novela podremos acompa帽arlo en su deriva, como un hombre libre, con necesidades m铆nimas; una deriva que me result贸 谩gil, atrapante y fascinante gracias al arte y la sensibilidad de Coetzee.
Una novela que me cambi贸: me hizo valorar mucho m谩s la importancia de ser una persona realmente libre, y me permiti贸 desarrollar una sensibilidad para identificar y comprender en otros esta libertad, esta falta de necesidades, en mi vida cotidiana.
Hasta ahora no ten铆a dudas de que la mejor obra de Coetzee era ; ahora no estoy tan seguro.
Una obra de arte.
John Maxwell Coetzee naci贸 y vivi贸 gran parte de su vida en Sud谩frica, hasta de la condena social que recibi贸 tras su novela (en la era de la euforia post apartheid tuvo la impertinencia escribir una novela en la que el malo es negro; una falta de correcci贸n pol铆tica inaceptable); actualmente vive en Australia. De cierta manera, m谩s all谩 de que parece ser arrogante y antip谩tico, Coetzee es posiblemente un hombre libre.
April 3, 2015
"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."
But how does one differentiate between The Slave and The Free? Is that Man a slave, whose captivity by the victor frees him of his worldly expectations? Or should we call that Man, free who has no kin to bother about since they have all been enslaved in the war fire? Is it possible to live a life without succumbing to either side? Or is it inevitable to be one without being the other?
Coetzee doesn鈥檛 answer these questions since it would be too insulting for a war survivor. But he lifts us up to a devastating height from where we can see the merciless resilience that survival demands from a Man under the darkest clouds of war and death, by focussing our attention to Michael K. Michael K is a humble gardener with the local authority and is staying with his aged mother in Cape Town. But in the aftermath of the Civil War, when his mother, through fits of falling health, expresses her desire to move back to her childhood place across the countryside, the filial Michael doesn鈥檛 refuse for long. Discouraged by a train reservation not before two months and non-issuance of travel permit from authorities, Michael decides to ferry his mother by road on a make-shift barrow that he makes indigenously.
But the journey soon turns out to be his most fatal curse, during which, he not only loses his mother but also loses his many virtues, passions, dreams and even, sensibilities. In the war torn land, he is left to fend for himself, getting driven from hospitals to rehabilitation camps. But Michael surprises himself when he snatches a brief period of independence from the clutch of his destiny in the form of an abandoned, yet fertile land which he comes to love as his own child and tends to it with renewed purpose. But when strangers infiltrate into his little utopia, he once again finds himself at the cusp of decision.
"鈥� he watched the water wash slowly across the field, turning the earth dark. Now when I am most needed, he thought, I abandon my children."
He finds drawing different versions of himself from his innards, much to his shock and occasional pride, to counter them. His decisions, no matter how inconsequential, stare at him, with a thousand questions in their eyes: that to eat, he can kill as well as produce; that to sleep, he can befriend day as well as night; that to comprehend, he can be mute as well as blind; that to survive, he can stuff as well as fast.
He gains new perspectives, hopes and emotions while the origin of these new possessions continue to elude him.
"He awoke and squinted into the sun. Striking all the colours of the rainbow from his eyelashes, it filled the sky. I am like an ant that does not know where its hole is, he thought."
Wading through captors, dodging policemen, escaping camps, at last, he falls into the hands of a genial Medical Officer who offers him guidance to start all over again. This Officer, although bears the brunt of a silent illegal suspect on his infirmary walls every day, confers him the benefit of doubt that every human deserves at least once in his lifetime. But Michael, by now, has learnt one of the biggest truths of life: it is far more worthwhile to die with intensity than to live without it.
"Not being iron was his greatest virtue."
And so, Coetzee brings us down to that one night into whose stillness Michael walks finally, leaving behind the Slave Michaels that were lost to War and taking along the Free Michaels who might help him weather another War.
But how does one differentiate between The Slave and The Free? Is that Man a slave, whose captivity by the victor frees him of his worldly expectations? Or should we call that Man, free who has no kin to bother about since they have all been enslaved in the war fire? Is it possible to live a life without succumbing to either side? Or is it inevitable to be one without being the other?
Coetzee doesn鈥檛 answer these questions since it would be too insulting for a war survivor. But he lifts us up to a devastating height from where we can see the merciless resilience that survival demands from a Man under the darkest clouds of war and death, by focussing our attention to Michael K. Michael K is a humble gardener with the local authority and is staying with his aged mother in Cape Town. But in the aftermath of the Civil War, when his mother, through fits of falling health, expresses her desire to move back to her childhood place across the countryside, the filial Michael doesn鈥檛 refuse for long. Discouraged by a train reservation not before two months and non-issuance of travel permit from authorities, Michael decides to ferry his mother by road on a make-shift barrow that he makes indigenously.
But the journey soon turns out to be his most fatal curse, during which, he not only loses his mother but also loses his many virtues, passions, dreams and even, sensibilities. In the war torn land, he is left to fend for himself, getting driven from hospitals to rehabilitation camps. But Michael surprises himself when he snatches a brief period of independence from the clutch of his destiny in the form of an abandoned, yet fertile land which he comes to love as his own child and tends to it with renewed purpose. But when strangers infiltrate into his little utopia, he once again finds himself at the cusp of decision.
"鈥� he watched the water wash slowly across the field, turning the earth dark. Now when I am most needed, he thought, I abandon my children."
He finds drawing different versions of himself from his innards, much to his shock and occasional pride, to counter them. His decisions, no matter how inconsequential, stare at him, with a thousand questions in their eyes: that to eat, he can kill as well as produce; that to sleep, he can befriend day as well as night; that to comprehend, he can be mute as well as blind; that to survive, he can stuff as well as fast.
He gains new perspectives, hopes and emotions while the origin of these new possessions continue to elude him.
"He awoke and squinted into the sun. Striking all the colours of the rainbow from his eyelashes, it filled the sky. I am like an ant that does not know where its hole is, he thought."
Wading through captors, dodging policemen, escaping camps, at last, he falls into the hands of a genial Medical Officer who offers him guidance to start all over again. This Officer, although bears the brunt of a silent illegal suspect on his infirmary walls every day, confers him the benefit of doubt that every human deserves at least once in his lifetime. But Michael, by now, has learnt one of the biggest truths of life: it is far more worthwhile to die with intensity than to live without it.
"Not being iron was his greatest virtue."
And so, Coetzee brings us down to that one night into whose stillness Michael walks finally, leaving behind the Slave Michaels that were lost to War and taking along the Free Michaels who might help him weather another War.
June 7, 2023
The best Coetzee yet.
October 4, 2018
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.
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.
April 16, 2020
God damn it, that was close!
I had high hopes about this novel but I finished it feeling slightly disappointed. Oh well, Coetzee couldn鈥檛 have guessed how different wars were going to be in the 21st century, could he? If only he could I鈥檓 sure he wouldn鈥檛 have included all the 鈥榩reaching鈥� which turned this from an amazing five star read to a strong four star one.
It鈥檚 been quite a few days since I finished this novel and the more I thought about it (at work, obviously, because that鈥檚 where I seem to spend all my time nowadays) the more certain I am that the second part of the book is pointless and in my view outdated. A timeless classic this ain鈥檛! I really tried to find a purpose for it but I just couldn鈥檛.
I don鈥檛 know a lot about the apartheid besides the basics and what its name suggests but I have a feeling that the second part of the book was written with the objective of trying to create more empathy; not about the main character but the generality of the victims of the political system(?).
Now, time to focus on the good, and there was so much to love about it. First of all the first class writing. Coetzee really doesn鈥檛 waste a word (we鈥檙e not talking about that second part now) and the imagery he creates using only a few words is outstanding. The way the story unfolds is remarkably quick and although this is a very short novel it never loses impact and Michael K 鈥渏umps鈥� out of the pages. And you鈥檒l have to love him. You鈥檙e going to.
鈥淎lways, when he tried to explain himself to himself, there remained a gap, a hole, a darkness before which his understanding baulked, 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.鈥�
Like Disgrace, this novel, with its violence, graphic imagery and his strong main character are going to haunt me for a long long time. Maybe forever if such a thing is possible.
I had high hopes about this novel but I finished it feeling slightly disappointed. Oh well, Coetzee couldn鈥檛 have guessed how different wars were going to be in the 21st century, could he? If only he could I鈥檓 sure he wouldn鈥檛 have included all the 鈥榩reaching鈥� which turned this from an amazing five star read to a strong four star one.
It鈥檚 been quite a few days since I finished this novel and the more I thought about it (at work, obviously, because that鈥檚 where I seem to spend all my time nowadays) the more certain I am that the second part of the book is pointless and in my view outdated. A timeless classic this ain鈥檛! I really tried to find a purpose for it but I just couldn鈥檛.
I don鈥檛 know a lot about the apartheid besides the basics and what its name suggests but I have a feeling that the second part of the book was written with the objective of trying to create more empathy; not about the main character but the generality of the victims of the political system(?).
Now, time to focus on the good, and there was so much to love about it. First of all the first class writing. Coetzee really doesn鈥檛 waste a word (we鈥檙e not talking about that second part now) and the imagery he creates using only a few words is outstanding. The way the story unfolds is remarkably quick and although this is a very short novel it never loses impact and Michael K 鈥渏umps鈥� out of the pages. And you鈥檒l have to love him. You鈥檙e going to.
鈥淎lways, when he tried to explain himself to himself, there remained a gap, a hole, a darkness before which his understanding baulked, 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.鈥�
Like Disgrace, this novel, with its violence, graphic imagery and his strong main character are going to haunt me for a long long time. Maybe forever if such a thing is possible.
September 2, 2021
They want me to open my heart and tell them the story of a
life lived in cages. They want to hear about all the cages
I have lived in, as if I were a budgie or a
white mouse or a monkey.
In the days of apartheid in Capetown, South Africa, Coetzee gives us the story of Michael K, a bullied, downtrodden young man, who finds himself in the middle of a civil war he does not understand. His mother, who is dying, wants to return to her home in Prince Albert, and Michael rigs a cart and sets out to take her there, navigating his way through checkpoints and troops without the necessary papers. The mother dies en route, but that is just the beginning of Michael鈥檚 struggles to survive in a society that makes no sense and will not allow anyone of Michael鈥檚 ilk to live a simple or happy life.
This is a story of isolation and loneliness. Michael becomes so much the secluded individual that he loses any desire or ability to co-exist with other people. The dangers are innumerable and unidentifiable. They come from both sides of the conflict, and no one is likely to be allowed to exist without choosing a side, but Michael is slow and naive, almost childlike, and he cannot even understand the dynamics of the conflict. Even the kind people he encounters befuddle him.
As we begin to wonder if any individual has purpose in such a society, Michael also grapples with what his existence means, and Coetzee asks the question in captivating prose:
Every grain of this earth will be washed clean by the rain, he told himself, and dried by the sun and scoured by the wind, before the seasons turn again. There will be not a grain left bearing my marks, just as my mother has now, after her season in the earth, been washed clean, blown about, and drawn up into the leaves of grass.
A little more than halfway through the novel, Coetzee switches from the story we have been seeing exclusively in a third person voice from Michael鈥檚 viewpoint, to a first person voice of a medical officer tasked with Michael鈥檚 care in an internment camp. It seems to me that Coetzee wished to show us the human face of the opposition and demonstrate how difficult it would be to separate the players into strictly good and evil camps. This doctor is struggling, as well, with making sense of the system he serves.
I wanted to say, 鈥測ou ask why you are important Michaels. The answer is that you are not important. But that does not mean you are forgotten. No one is forgotten. Remember the sparrows. Five sparrows are sold for a farthing, and even they are not forgotten.鈥�
I felt acutely the helplessness of Michael鈥檚 situation and the attempt at self-preservation that takes the form of self-destruction. Michael rejects any interaction with society, either those who share his position or those who claim authority over him. While we are never told that Michael is black, or for that matter that the doctor or soldiers are white, we instinctively know this to be so. Michael鈥檚 deformity that is the source of ridicule and derision, we are told, is his harelip that he has had from birth, but it is clear to me that we are meant to see that it is in truth his color, his class, his position in society that are his handicaps, and just like his physical deformity, they are not of his making or in his control. I found it interesting that more than one character in the novel asks if any attempt was ever made to correct Michael鈥檚 deformity, and when told 鈥渘o鈥�, they each remark how easily the correction could have been made.
Profound writing.
life lived in cages. They want to hear about all the cages
I have lived in, as if I were a budgie or a
white mouse or a monkey.
In the days of apartheid in Capetown, South Africa, Coetzee gives us the story of Michael K, a bullied, downtrodden young man, who finds himself in the middle of a civil war he does not understand. His mother, who is dying, wants to return to her home in Prince Albert, and Michael rigs a cart and sets out to take her there, navigating his way through checkpoints and troops without the necessary papers. The mother dies en route, but that is just the beginning of Michael鈥檚 struggles to survive in a society that makes no sense and will not allow anyone of Michael鈥檚 ilk to live a simple or happy life.
This is a story of isolation and loneliness. Michael becomes so much the secluded individual that he loses any desire or ability to co-exist with other people. The dangers are innumerable and unidentifiable. They come from both sides of the conflict, and no one is likely to be allowed to exist without choosing a side, but Michael is slow and naive, almost childlike, and he cannot even understand the dynamics of the conflict. Even the kind people he encounters befuddle him.
As we begin to wonder if any individual has purpose in such a society, Michael also grapples with what his existence means, and Coetzee asks the question in captivating prose:
Every grain of this earth will be washed clean by the rain, he told himself, and dried by the sun and scoured by the wind, before the seasons turn again. There will be not a grain left bearing my marks, just as my mother has now, after her season in the earth, been washed clean, blown about, and drawn up into the leaves of grass.
A little more than halfway through the novel, Coetzee switches from the story we have been seeing exclusively in a third person voice from Michael鈥檚 viewpoint, to a first person voice of a medical officer tasked with Michael鈥檚 care in an internment camp. It seems to me that Coetzee wished to show us the human face of the opposition and demonstrate how difficult it would be to separate the players into strictly good and evil camps. This doctor is struggling, as well, with making sense of the system he serves.
I wanted to say, 鈥測ou ask why you are important Michaels. The answer is that you are not important. But that does not mean you are forgotten. No one is forgotten. Remember the sparrows. Five sparrows are sold for a farthing, and even they are not forgotten.鈥�
I felt acutely the helplessness of Michael鈥檚 situation and the attempt at self-preservation that takes the form of self-destruction. Michael rejects any interaction with society, either those who share his position or those who claim authority over him. While we are never told that Michael is black, or for that matter that the doctor or soldiers are white, we instinctively know this to be so. Michael鈥檚 deformity that is the source of ridicule and derision, we are told, is his harelip that he has had from birth, but it is clear to me that we are meant to see that it is in truth his color, his class, his position in society that are his handicaps, and just like his physical deformity, they are not of his making or in his control. I found it interesting that more than one character in the novel asks if any attempt was ever made to correct Michael鈥檚 deformity, and when told 鈥渘o鈥�, they each remark how easily the correction could have been made.
Profound writing.
January 18, 2009
Obviously there're a lot of people out there who write much better than I do, and in this way I feel writing's similar to distance running. I can run a passable marathon, though of course a lot of amateur runners out there run a much faster one. I'm impressed by people who run faster than I can, just as I am by those who write better than me. These people are humbling, but they're also inspiring: reading good writing or watching good running makes me want to write better and run faster. It's healthy to see the thousands of names before my own in the race finishers' list, just as it's exciting to read what talented writers have written. I like looking at them and thinking that someday by training harder , or working to improve my writing skills, perhaps I might rise a little higher in the ranks. And that's nice, right? That's a nice little thing!
Then, though, there are the Paula Radcliffes and Haile Gebrselassies of the world. Elite athletes' two-hour-and-change marathons aren't exactly inspiring to me in any normal or useful sense, and describing them as humbling is so understated as to be meaningless. What these runners do doesn't fall under the same classification as what I and most other people do when we run. These runners' bodies do not seem human: they accomplish feats that aren't physically possible. There is barely a relationship between their "running" and my "running," and that's where inspiration in its normal sense stops, and beyond even just being impressed with the individuals themselves, there's not much left to do except sit there and marvel that such things occur.
Anyway, sometimes I feel like this when I'm reading. In the same way that I can't actually believe Radcliffe's human legs are capable of what they have done, I don't quite understand how Coetzee's brain manufactured this book.
In my professional capacity, I've come to know some people who one might describe as being among the wretched of New York City. I'm talking about impoverished, chronically homeless, physically and mentally ill, largely powerless, pitied, and despised people who spend decades being shuffled through systems and slipping through cracks, sleeping in Port Authority tunnels and on trains and sidewalks, living under conditions that most other people can barely imagine. For a long time I've been impressed by how infrequently I come across good representations of these kinds of experiences in literature and other art forms, but I guess this makes sense. Illiterate people with little power or resources don't have much opportunity to create their own literature, and there are clear limits to knowledge of and empathy for these experiences by people who haven't lived through them. Okay, so to be fair I probably miss some good books about this, since I don't seek out that kind of literature and even consciously avoid it most of the time. This is in part because by the end of the day I'm a bit sick of the topic, but also because I do feel many treatments of this subject seem naive, insincere, idealized, unrealistic, or condescending.
Not this book!
I've known some guys over the years whose existences seem so fascinatingly horrible, but also almost miraculous and even kind of (uh, sorry) weirdly beautiful. I'm not generalizing here about the majority of my homeless clients, but thinking specifically of a few who just clearly weren't made for this earth. Like the HIV+ homeless schizophrenic who heard the voice of angels and looked like a saint, and it was just so unfathomable that he lived in a shelter among all this awful, sickening, dirty sad stuff that just had no relevance to him, dressed in gorgeous, outlandish outfits and cheeking his antipsychotics and antiretroviral drugs and talking to God.... Then those other ones, street-homeless for years, guys with mild mental retardation or traumatic brain injury and serious drug problems, who just don't have anything and there's no one who cares about them, and they wander through all these hells and horrors that you've got to think no one could ever survive, let alone someone with the mental capacity of a kindergartener.
But really, it turns out, the world's full of these people, out there navigating streets filled with drugs and violence or being shuttled in and out of mental hospitals and jails and other institutions. It's pretty wild and disturbing stuff, and it seems almost impossible to imagine what kind of sense they make of these experiences that I could never fathom undergoing myself. This book pushed me further than my own imagination could towards a theory of what it might be like to exist while maintaining some part of oneself amidst levels of chaos and cruelty beyond my comprehension. I mean, this from a girl who gets pushed near complete mental breakdown by rude public cellphone use, or girls who spread their stuff out all over the bench in the gym locker room and won't share the space, or people getting uncivil on Bookface -- I mean, I've got an extremely low tolerance for any evidence of man's inhumanity (a questionable term -- "brutality" being similarly problematic) to man, and thinking about what it might be like to exist in war-torn, apartheid South Africa really does strain the limits of my gentle mind.
But Coetzee sent me there, and pushed me through it.
The Life and Times of Michael K hooked me at the beginning with its chillingly plausible description of homelessness. It's rare that reading a novel now, as an adult, can become the completely immersive, empathic experience that reading was for me as a child, but this book did that, and it did it starting in a situation I've spent a lot of time thinking about, but never lived through myself. Michael K follows the journey of a man who was born at the bottom, once the bottom falls out, and even though his situation's much worse than any of my clients', that was one place where it gave a possible answer to some long-standing questions I've had about the people I mentioned above. The book gave me an idea of what it might be like to experience things that are nearly impossible to convey in words. But as far as I'm concerned, Coetzee conveyed them!
Another place it resonated with my professional experience was the second part of the book, which is from the perspective of a doctor who tries to care for Michael K in a work camp. Relating this to my own position as a social worker was such an intensely personal experience that I don't know if I can really get into it here. I'll just say that I'm really astounded by Coetzee's ability first to cultivate empathy like crazy, then to smash the reader brutally into its limitations. At least, that was one way I experienced it.
This book presented a vision of individuals, systems, and societies that really is beyond the grasp of my own language abilities to describe or even comment on in a meaningful way. It also was just so successful in transporting me into another person and a different world, which is on the most basic level what any successful novel should do. I can't begin to guess at how this guy Coetzee's mind works; meanwhile, though, I'm intimately familiar with how his character Michael K's does! Yeah, so it wasn't vastly entertaining or necessarily a lot of fun all the time, but this book was pretty good, all right. Its author is, IMHO, among writers what Catherine Ndereba is among marathoners. That is to say, I can't pronounce either one of their names, and I have no idea how they do what they do, but I gotta admit that it's pretty amazing.
Then, though, there are the Paula Radcliffes and Haile Gebrselassies of the world. Elite athletes' two-hour-and-change marathons aren't exactly inspiring to me in any normal or useful sense, and describing them as humbling is so understated as to be meaningless. What these runners do doesn't fall under the same classification as what I and most other people do when we run. These runners' bodies do not seem human: they accomplish feats that aren't physically possible. There is barely a relationship between their "running" and my "running," and that's where inspiration in its normal sense stops, and beyond even just being impressed with the individuals themselves, there's not much left to do except sit there and marvel that such things occur.
Anyway, sometimes I feel like this when I'm reading. In the same way that I can't actually believe Radcliffe's human legs are capable of what they have done, I don't quite understand how Coetzee's brain manufactured this book.
In my professional capacity, I've come to know some people who one might describe as being among the wretched of New York City. I'm talking about impoverished, chronically homeless, physically and mentally ill, largely powerless, pitied, and despised people who spend decades being shuffled through systems and slipping through cracks, sleeping in Port Authority tunnels and on trains and sidewalks, living under conditions that most other people can barely imagine. For a long time I've been impressed by how infrequently I come across good representations of these kinds of experiences in literature and other art forms, but I guess this makes sense. Illiterate people with little power or resources don't have much opportunity to create their own literature, and there are clear limits to knowledge of and empathy for these experiences by people who haven't lived through them. Okay, so to be fair I probably miss some good books about this, since I don't seek out that kind of literature and even consciously avoid it most of the time. This is in part because by the end of the day I'm a bit sick of the topic, but also because I do feel many treatments of this subject seem naive, insincere, idealized, unrealistic, or condescending.
Not this book!
I've known some guys over the years whose existences seem so fascinatingly horrible, but also almost miraculous and even kind of (uh, sorry) weirdly beautiful. I'm not generalizing here about the majority of my homeless clients, but thinking specifically of a few who just clearly weren't made for this earth. Like the HIV+ homeless schizophrenic who heard the voice of angels and looked like a saint, and it was just so unfathomable that he lived in a shelter among all this awful, sickening, dirty sad stuff that just had no relevance to him, dressed in gorgeous, outlandish outfits and cheeking his antipsychotics and antiretroviral drugs and talking to God.... Then those other ones, street-homeless for years, guys with mild mental retardation or traumatic brain injury and serious drug problems, who just don't have anything and there's no one who cares about them, and they wander through all these hells and horrors that you've got to think no one could ever survive, let alone someone with the mental capacity of a kindergartener.
But really, it turns out, the world's full of these people, out there navigating streets filled with drugs and violence or being shuttled in and out of mental hospitals and jails and other institutions. It's pretty wild and disturbing stuff, and it seems almost impossible to imagine what kind of sense they make of these experiences that I could never fathom undergoing myself. This book pushed me further than my own imagination could towards a theory of what it might be like to exist while maintaining some part of oneself amidst levels of chaos and cruelty beyond my comprehension. I mean, this from a girl who gets pushed near complete mental breakdown by rude public cellphone use, or girls who spread their stuff out all over the bench in the gym locker room and won't share the space, or people getting uncivil on Bookface -- I mean, I've got an extremely low tolerance for any evidence of man's inhumanity (a questionable term -- "brutality" being similarly problematic) to man, and thinking about what it might be like to exist in war-torn, apartheid South Africa really does strain the limits of my gentle mind.
But Coetzee sent me there, and pushed me through it.
The Life and Times of Michael K hooked me at the beginning with its chillingly plausible description of homelessness. It's rare that reading a novel now, as an adult, can become the completely immersive, empathic experience that reading was for me as a child, but this book did that, and it did it starting in a situation I've spent a lot of time thinking about, but never lived through myself. Michael K follows the journey of a man who was born at the bottom, once the bottom falls out, and even though his situation's much worse than any of my clients', that was one place where it gave a possible answer to some long-standing questions I've had about the people I mentioned above. The book gave me an idea of what it might be like to experience things that are nearly impossible to convey in words. But as far as I'm concerned, Coetzee conveyed them!
Another place it resonated with my professional experience was the second part of the book, which is from the perspective of a doctor who tries to care for Michael K in a work camp. Relating this to my own position as a social worker was such an intensely personal experience that I don't know if I can really get into it here. I'll just say that I'm really astounded by Coetzee's ability first to cultivate empathy like crazy, then to smash the reader brutally into its limitations. At least, that was one way I experienced it.
This book presented a vision of individuals, systems, and societies that really is beyond the grasp of my own language abilities to describe or even comment on in a meaningful way. It also was just so successful in transporting me into another person and a different world, which is on the most basic level what any successful novel should do. I can't begin to guess at how this guy Coetzee's mind works; meanwhile, though, I'm intimately familiar with how his character Michael K's does! Yeah, so it wasn't vastly entertaining or necessarily a lot of fun all the time, but this book was pretty good, all right. Its author is, IMHO, among writers what Catherine Ndereba is among marathoners. That is to say, I can't pronounce either one of their names, and I have no idea how they do what they do, but I gotta admit that it's pretty amazing.
February 16, 2010
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鈥檛 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鈥檚 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.
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.
August 6, 2016
賱丨賳 賵 賮囟丕蹖 丿丕爻鬲丕賳 丕賵賳 賯丿乇 蹖讴賳賵丕禺鬲 賵 蹖讴丿爻鬲賴 讴賴 亘丕 賵噩賵丿 賴賲賴 蹖 丕鬲賮丕賯丕鬲 乇蹖夭 賵 丿乇卮鬲 賵 賴賲賴 蹖 賮乇丕夭 賵 賮乇賵丿 賴丕蹖蹖 讴賴 亘賴 爻乇 賲丕蹖讴賱 賲蹖丕丿 丨蹖賳 禺賵賳丿賳 趩蹖夭蹖 丨爻 賳禺賵丕賴蹖丿 讴乇丿. 賴賲賴 趩蹖夭 毓丕丿蹖 亘賴 賳馗乇 賲蹖丕丿 賵 丕夭 賴蹖趩 趩蹖夭 卮诏賮鬲 夭丿賴 賳禺賵丕賴蹖丿 卮丿. 賮囟丕蹖蹖 讴賴 卮丕蹖丿 亘乇丕蹖 禺蹖賱蹖 賴丕 禺爻鬲賴 讴賳賳丿賴 亘賴 賳馗乇 亘蹖丕丿
丕賵丕蹖賱 丿丕爻鬲丕賳 亘禺氐賵氐 讴賱 賮氐賱 丕賵賱 賲賳 乇賵 亘賴 卮丿鬲 蹖丕丿 "噩丕丿賴" 賳賵卮鬲賴 蹖"讴賵乇賲讴丕乇鬲蹖" 賲蹖賳丿丕禺鬲. 爻賮乇 賵 噩丕丿賴 賵 鬲賱丕卮 亘乇丕蹖 亘賯丕 賵 鬲讴 卮禺氐蹖鬲蹖 亘賵丿賳 丿丕爻鬲丕賳 賵 賲賴賲 賳亘賵丿賳 爻丕蹖乇 丕賮乇丕丿. 亘丕 丕蹖賳 鬲賮丕賵鬲 讴賴 丿賳蹖丕蹖 丿丕爻鬲丕賳 噩丕丿賴 亘賴 丕禺乇 乇爻蹖丿賴 賵 丿賳蹖丕蹖 丿丕爻鬲丕賳 賲丕蹖讴賱 丕爻蹖乇 噩賳诏 卮丿賴 賵 賲丨丿賵丿蹖鬲 賴丕 賵 賲卮讴賱丕鬲 賳賴 鬲賳賴丕 丕夭 賳賯氐 賴丕蹖 賴賵卮蹖 賵 馗丕賴乇蹖 賲丕蹖讴賱 讴賴 丕夭 噩賳诏 夭丿賴 亘賵丿賳 賴賲 賳丕卮蹖 賲蹖卮賴
蹖賴 噩賵乇 亘蹖 丕毓鬲賳丕蹖蹖 亘賴 丌丿賲 賴丕蹖 丕胤乇丕賮 賵 賯賵丕賳蹖賳 賵 賲丨丿賵丿蹖鬲 賴丕卮貙毓丿賲 賵丕亘爻鬲诏蹖 賵 讴爻亘 丕爻鬲賯賱丕賱 讴賴 賲賳噩乇 亘賴 鬲賳賴丕蹖蹖 賴賲 賲蹖卮賴 丕夭 賴賲賵賳 丕亘鬲丿丕蹖 賯氐丿 爻賮乇 讴乇丿賳 賲丕蹖讴賱 卮乇賵毓 賲蹖卮賴 賵 鬲賵 賮丕夭賴丕蹖 賲禺鬲賱賮 亘賴 氐賵乇鬲 賴丕蹖 賲禺鬲賱賮 禺賵丿卮 乇賵 賳卮賵賳 賲蹖丿賴. 賲丕蹖讴賱 賲噩賵夭 毓亘賵乇 賳丿丕乇賴 賵賱蹖 乇丕賴蹖 賲蹖卮賴. 賲丕丿乇卮 賵爻胤 乇丕賴 賲蹖 賲蹖乇賴 賵賱蹖 賲丕蹖讴賱 亘賴 爻賮乇卮 丕丿丕賲賴 賲蹖丿賴. 賵爻丕蹖賱 夭賳丿诏蹖 賵 丨鬲蹖 賱亘丕爻 賳丿丕乇賴. 睾匕丕蹖蹖 賳蹖爻鬲 賵賱蹖 丕丿丕賲賴 賲蹖丿賴. 丿爻鬲诏蹖乇 賲蹖卮賴 亘賴 丕乇丿賵诏丕賴 賵 爻倬爻 亘賴 亘蹖賲丕乇爻鬲丕賳 賮乇爻鬲丕丿賴 賲蹖卮賴 賵賱蹖 丿賵亘丕乇賴 亘賴 爻乇夭賲蹖賳 賵丨卮蹖 乇噩毓鬲 賲蹖讴賳賴. 亘賴 賲丕丿乇 丕氐賱蹖卮 亘賴 夭賲蹖賳...趩乇丕 讴賴 丌夭丕丿蹖 賵 乇賴丕蹖蹖 卮丕蹖丿 鬲賳賴丕 丿睾丿睾賴 蹖 匕賴賳蹖 賲丕蹖讴賱賴 賵 丿乇 丕賳鬲賴丕蹖 賮氐賱 丿賵賲 丨鬲蹖 丿乇 禺蹖丕賱 賵 鬲賵賴賲丕鬲 倬夭卮讴 丿丕爻鬲丕賳貙 鬲亘丿蹖賱 亘賴 乇賴亘乇蹖 亘乇丕蹖 卮丕蹖丿 賳賵毓 亘卮乇蹖鬲 丿乇 噩爻鬲噩賵蹖 丌夭丕丿蹖 賲蹖卮賴
毓賱丕賯賴 蹖 賳賵蹖爻賳丿賴 亘賴 夭賲蹖賳 亘丕 亘丕睾亘丕賳 亘賵丿賳 賲丕蹖讴賱 賵 毓賱丕賯賴 蹖 賲賮乇胤卮 亘賴 夭乇丕毓鬲 賵 亘匕乇 賵 賲丨氐賵賱丕鬲卮 賯卮賳诏 賳賲丕蹖卮 丿丕丿賴 卮丿賴. 丕賳诏丕乇 讴賴 賵丕賯毓賳 夭賲蹖賳 丿丕乇賴 賲丕丿乇蹖 賲丕蹖讴賱 乇賵 賲蹖讴賳賴.丕賵賳 乇賵 丿乇 睾丕乇蹖 丿乇 丕睾賵卮 禺賵丿卮 诏乇賮鬲賴 賵 禺丕讴 禺賵丿卮 賵 丨蹖賵丕賳丕鬲 爻丕讴賳 乇賵蹖 禺賵丿卮 乇賵 亘乇丕蹖 夭乇丕毓鬲 賵 鬲睾匕蹖賴 丿乇 丕禺鬲蹖丕乇卮 賯乇丕乇 丿丕丿賴.
賯爻賲鬲蹖 讴賴 賲丕蹖讴賱 丿乇氐丿丿 鬲賴蹖賴 爻乇倬賳丕賴 亘賵丿 賵 賴賲賴 趩蹖夭 乇賵 亘丕 賲賵丕丿 胤亘蹖毓蹖 爻丕禺鬲 鬲丕 亘毓丿 丕夭 賲乇诏卮 丕孬乇蹖 丕夭 賴蹖趩 趩蹖夭 賳賲蹖 賲賵賳賴 賵 賴賲賴 卮 亘賴 夭賲蹖賳 亘乇诏乇丿賴 賴賲 亘賴 毓賳賵丕賳 賳卮丕賳賴 丕蹖 夭賲蹖賳 丿賵爻鬲蹖 賲丕蹖讴賱 蹖丕 卮丕蹖丿 賳賵蹖爻賳丿賴 賳馗乇賲 乇賵 噩丕賱亘 讴乇丿
丕賳诏丕乇 丕蹖賳 夭賲蹖賳 丿賵爻鬲 亘賵丿賳 賯丿乇鬲 亘禺卮 賴賲 賴爻鬲. 丕卮丕乇賴 賲蹖讴賳賲 亘賴 睾賱亘賴 蹖 賴賲賴 噩丕賳亘賴 蹖 賲丕蹖讴賱 乇賵蹖 卮乇丕蹖胤 噩爻賲蹖 賵 乇賵丕賳蹖卮 亘丕 賵噩賵丿 賴賲賴 爻禺鬲蹖 賴丕 賵 丕毓鬲氐丕亘 睾匕丕蹖蹖 賴丕蹖 胤賵賱丕賳蹖 賲丿鬲 賵 賴賲趩賳丕賳 夭賳丿賴 賵 爻乇倬丕 亘賵丿賳
噩賳诏 賵 鬲賵禺丕賱蹖 賵 亘蹖 賴丿賮 亘賵丿賳卮 賴賲 禺蹖賱蹖 噩丕賴丕 亘禺氐賵氐 鬲賵 賮氐賱 丿賵賲 賵 賱丕亘賱丕蹖 賲讴丕賱賲丕鬲 丿賵 倬夭卮讴 亘蹖賲丕乇爻鬲丕賳 賴丿賮 賯乇丕乇 賲蹖 诏蹖乇賴
讴鬲丕亘 禺蹖賱蹖 亘蹖卮 丕夭 丕蹖賳賴丕 丨乇賮 亘乇丕蹖 诏賮鬲賳 丿丕乇賴.賮賯胤 亘丕蹖丿 氐亘賵乇 亘賵丿 賵 丿乇 賲賯丕亘賱 乇賵賳丿 丿丕爻鬲丕賳蹖 蹖讴賳賵丕禺鬲 賳賵蹖爻賳丿賴 鬲爻賱蹖賲 賳卮丿 鬲丕 亘賴 賱匕鬲 賳賴丕蹖蹖 乇爻蹖丿
丕賵丕蹖賱 丿丕爻鬲丕賳 亘禺氐賵氐 讴賱 賮氐賱 丕賵賱 賲賳 乇賵 亘賴 卮丿鬲 蹖丕丿 "噩丕丿賴" 賳賵卮鬲賴 蹖"讴賵乇賲讴丕乇鬲蹖" 賲蹖賳丿丕禺鬲. 爻賮乇 賵 噩丕丿賴 賵 鬲賱丕卮 亘乇丕蹖 亘賯丕 賵 鬲讴 卮禺氐蹖鬲蹖 亘賵丿賳 丿丕爻鬲丕賳 賵 賲賴賲 賳亘賵丿賳 爻丕蹖乇 丕賮乇丕丿. 亘丕 丕蹖賳 鬲賮丕賵鬲 讴賴 丿賳蹖丕蹖 丿丕爻鬲丕賳 噩丕丿賴 亘賴 丕禺乇 乇爻蹖丿賴 賵 丿賳蹖丕蹖 丿丕爻鬲丕賳 賲丕蹖讴賱 丕爻蹖乇 噩賳诏 卮丿賴 賵 賲丨丿賵丿蹖鬲 賴丕 賵 賲卮讴賱丕鬲 賳賴 鬲賳賴丕 丕夭 賳賯氐 賴丕蹖 賴賵卮蹖 賵 馗丕賴乇蹖 賲丕蹖讴賱 讴賴 丕夭 噩賳诏 夭丿賴 亘賵丿賳 賴賲 賳丕卮蹖 賲蹖卮賴
蹖賴 噩賵乇 亘蹖 丕毓鬲賳丕蹖蹖 亘賴 丌丿賲 賴丕蹖 丕胤乇丕賮 賵 賯賵丕賳蹖賳 賵 賲丨丿賵丿蹖鬲 賴丕卮貙毓丿賲 賵丕亘爻鬲诏蹖 賵 讴爻亘 丕爻鬲賯賱丕賱 讴賴 賲賳噩乇 亘賴 鬲賳賴丕蹖蹖 賴賲 賲蹖卮賴 丕夭 賴賲賵賳 丕亘鬲丿丕蹖 賯氐丿 爻賮乇 讴乇丿賳 賲丕蹖讴賱 卮乇賵毓 賲蹖卮賴 賵 鬲賵 賮丕夭賴丕蹖 賲禺鬲賱賮 亘賴 氐賵乇鬲 賴丕蹖 賲禺鬲賱賮 禺賵丿卮 乇賵 賳卮賵賳 賲蹖丿賴. 賲丕蹖讴賱 賲噩賵夭 毓亘賵乇 賳丿丕乇賴 賵賱蹖 乇丕賴蹖 賲蹖卮賴. 賲丕丿乇卮 賵爻胤 乇丕賴 賲蹖 賲蹖乇賴 賵賱蹖 賲丕蹖讴賱 亘賴 爻賮乇卮 丕丿丕賲賴 賲蹖丿賴. 賵爻丕蹖賱 夭賳丿诏蹖 賵 丨鬲蹖 賱亘丕爻 賳丿丕乇賴. 睾匕丕蹖蹖 賳蹖爻鬲 賵賱蹖 丕丿丕賲賴 賲蹖丿賴. 丿爻鬲诏蹖乇 賲蹖卮賴 亘賴 丕乇丿賵诏丕賴 賵 爻倬爻 亘賴 亘蹖賲丕乇爻鬲丕賳 賮乇爻鬲丕丿賴 賲蹖卮賴 賵賱蹖 丿賵亘丕乇賴 亘賴 爻乇夭賲蹖賳 賵丨卮蹖 乇噩毓鬲 賲蹖讴賳賴. 亘賴 賲丕丿乇 丕氐賱蹖卮 亘賴 夭賲蹖賳...趩乇丕 讴賴 丌夭丕丿蹖 賵 乇賴丕蹖蹖 卮丕蹖丿 鬲賳賴丕 丿睾丿睾賴 蹖 匕賴賳蹖 賲丕蹖讴賱賴 賵 丿乇 丕賳鬲賴丕蹖 賮氐賱 丿賵賲 丨鬲蹖 丿乇 禺蹖丕賱 賵 鬲賵賴賲丕鬲 倬夭卮讴 丿丕爻鬲丕賳貙 鬲亘丿蹖賱 亘賴 乇賴亘乇蹖 亘乇丕蹖 卮丕蹖丿 賳賵毓 亘卮乇蹖鬲 丿乇 噩爻鬲噩賵蹖 丌夭丕丿蹖 賲蹖卮賴
毓賱丕賯賴 蹖 賳賵蹖爻賳丿賴 亘賴 夭賲蹖賳 亘丕 亘丕睾亘丕賳 亘賵丿賳 賲丕蹖讴賱 賵 毓賱丕賯賴 蹖 賲賮乇胤卮 亘賴 夭乇丕毓鬲 賵 亘匕乇 賵 賲丨氐賵賱丕鬲卮 賯卮賳诏 賳賲丕蹖卮 丿丕丿賴 卮丿賴. 丕賳诏丕乇 讴賴 賵丕賯毓賳 夭賲蹖賳 丿丕乇賴 賲丕丿乇蹖 賲丕蹖讴賱 乇賵 賲蹖讴賳賴.丕賵賳 乇賵 丿乇 睾丕乇蹖 丿乇 丕睾賵卮 禺賵丿卮 诏乇賮鬲賴 賵 禺丕讴 禺賵丿卮 賵 丨蹖賵丕賳丕鬲 爻丕讴賳 乇賵蹖 禺賵丿卮 乇賵 亘乇丕蹖 夭乇丕毓鬲 賵 鬲睾匕蹖賴 丿乇 丕禺鬲蹖丕乇卮 賯乇丕乇 丿丕丿賴.
賯爻賲鬲蹖 讴賴 賲丕蹖讴賱 丿乇氐丿丿 鬲賴蹖賴 爻乇倬賳丕賴 亘賵丿 賵 賴賲賴 趩蹖夭 乇賵 亘丕 賲賵丕丿 胤亘蹖毓蹖 爻丕禺鬲 鬲丕 亘毓丿 丕夭 賲乇诏卮 丕孬乇蹖 丕夭 賴蹖趩 趩蹖夭 賳賲蹖 賲賵賳賴 賵 賴賲賴 卮 亘賴 夭賲蹖賳 亘乇诏乇丿賴 賴賲 亘賴 毓賳賵丕賳 賳卮丕賳賴 丕蹖 夭賲蹖賳 丿賵爻鬲蹖 賲丕蹖讴賱 蹖丕 卮丕蹖丿 賳賵蹖爻賳丿賴 賳馗乇賲 乇賵 噩丕賱亘 讴乇丿
丕賳诏丕乇 丕蹖賳 夭賲蹖賳 丿賵爻鬲 亘賵丿賳 賯丿乇鬲 亘禺卮 賴賲 賴爻鬲. 丕卮丕乇賴 賲蹖讴賳賲 亘賴 睾賱亘賴 蹖 賴賲賴 噩丕賳亘賴 蹖 賲丕蹖讴賱 乇賵蹖 卮乇丕蹖胤 噩爻賲蹖 賵 乇賵丕賳蹖卮 亘丕 賵噩賵丿 賴賲賴 爻禺鬲蹖 賴丕 賵 丕毓鬲氐丕亘 睾匕丕蹖蹖 賴丕蹖 胤賵賱丕賳蹖 賲丿鬲 賵 賴賲趩賳丕賳 夭賳丿賴 賵 爻乇倬丕 亘賵丿賳
噩賳诏 賵 鬲賵禺丕賱蹖 賵 亘蹖 賴丿賮 亘賵丿賳卮 賴賲 禺蹖賱蹖 噩丕賴丕 亘禺氐賵氐 鬲賵 賮氐賱 丿賵賲 賵 賱丕亘賱丕蹖 賲讴丕賱賲丕鬲 丿賵 倬夭卮讴 亘蹖賲丕乇爻鬲丕賳 賴丿賮 賯乇丕乇 賲蹖 诏蹖乇賴
讴鬲丕亘 禺蹖賱蹖 亘蹖卮 丕夭 丕蹖賳賴丕 丨乇賮 亘乇丕蹖 诏賮鬲賳 丿丕乇賴.賮賯胤 亘丕蹖丿 氐亘賵乇 亘賵丿 賵 丿乇 賲賯丕亘賱 乇賵賳丿 丿丕爻鬲丕賳蹖 蹖讴賳賵丕禺鬲 賳賵蹖爻賳丿賴 鬲爻賱蹖賲 賳卮丿 鬲丕 亘賴 賱匕鬲 賳賴丕蹖蹖 乇爻蹖丿
August 3, 2020
"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 not貌 di Michael K quando lo aiut貌 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.
Citt脿 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 猫 nata.
Un progetto banale che, per貌, 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 semplicit脿 di un granello di polvere al primo alito di vento.
La madre,
la veglia,
la fame,
la libert脿:
tutto pian piano scompare.
"Senza documenti, senza soldi, senza famiglia, senza amici, senza la minima idea di chi tu sia. Il pi霉 oscuro degli oscuri, cos矛 oscuro da essere un prodigio."
"La prima cosa che la levatrice not貌 di Michael K quando lo aiut貌 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.
Citt脿 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 猫 nata.
Un progetto banale che, per貌, 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 semplicit脿 di un granello di polvere al primo alito di vento.
La madre,
la veglia,
la fame,
la libert脿:
tutto pian piano scompare.
"Senza documenti, senza soldi, senza famiglia, senza amici, senza la minima idea di chi tu sia. Il pi霉 oscuro degli oscuri, cos矛 oscuro da essere un prodigio."
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