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The Life and Times of Michael K Paperback – International Edition, March 28, 2005

by J. M. Coetzee (Author)

4.0 961 ratings

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In a South Africa torn by civil war, Michael K sets out to take his mother back to her rural home. On the way there she dies, leaving him alone in an anarchic world of brutal roving armies. Imprisoned, Michael is unable to bear confinement and escapes, determined to live with dignity. Life and Times of Michael K goes to the centre of human experience -- the need for an interior, spiritual life, for some connections to the world in which we live, and for purity of vision.

Print length

192 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Vintage Books
Publication date

March 28, 2005
Dimensions

5.08 x 0.5 x 7.81 inches
ISBN-10

009947915X
ISBN-13

978-0099479154
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Editorial Reviews

About the Author

J.M. Coetzee is a professor of general literature at the University of Cape Town. He is the author of seven novels, including The Master of Petersburg, and of the memoir Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life. His many awards include the Booker Prize in 1983 for The Life & Times of Michael K, the Prix Femina and the Irish Times International Fiction Prize. J.M. Coetzee is the first author ever to be awarded two Booker Prizes.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Vintage Books (March 28, 2005)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 192 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 009947915X
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0099479154
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 4.9 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.08 x 0.5 x 7.81 inches

Customer Reviews:
4.0 961 ratings

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J. M. Coetzee

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J.M. Coetzee's work includes Waiting For the Barbarians, Life & Times of Michael K, Boyhood, Youth, Disgrace and Diary of a Bad Year. He was the first author to win the Booker Prize twice and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003.

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BrianS

page turner

Reviewed in the United States on August 29, 2012

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I was pleasantly surprised by this book. I so seldom find anything that makes me want to keep reading. I push myself to finish most books. However, Michael K. is a wonderful exploration into the mind of a mentally limited man. It's a great spiritual insight into the space we often try to achieve when camping or sitting in the sand at the ocean -- to separate ourselves from the everyday things that we seem to need for survival and sociability. This is a compelling and easy read. I recommend it to anyone.

2 people found this helpful

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Duane Schneider

Fascinating Character Study

Reviewed in the United States on January 20, 2019

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I won’t say that “Life and Times” is plotless, but plot is not the central facet of the book. In its roughest terms, the action goes like this: Michael’s mother is ill. She would like to live out her remaining days in the country where she grew up rather than the city where she’s been working as domestic help. There’s a war on, so it’s difficult getting papers to travel. Michael goes through the bureaucratic steps to obtain the papers without success, so he decides to take his mother home despite the lack of credentials. He rigs a cart to transport her, and they sneak on foot past checkpoints. This is what’s so interesting about a Coetzee novel. One thinks it’s going to begin and end with this travel narrative, but then it changes course. Michael lives for awhile as a squatter on an abandoned farm, then as a prisoner in a pair of camps before escaping. He has always been a passive individual. He was born with a cleft lip his mother chose not to have corrected, which made him shy. He was regarded as stupid by teachers and classmates, and after he finished his schooling he became a gardener for the state. Michael reminded me most strongly of Melville’s Bartleby or Camus’ Meursault. His passivity becomes almost absolute, to the point where he barely bothers to feed himself. When asked to explain his past, Michael is unable to do so. He is frustratingly elusive for the other characters in the book. After Michael enters the refugee/POW camp, “Life and Times” shifts to the viewpoint of the doctor charged with his care. The doctor is strongly affected by Michael’s behavior. He can’t understand why Michael refuses to eat even when food is readily available to him. The act doesn’t seem political. Late in the book, another character seems equally puzzled, noting that it’s hard to give charity to someone who doesn’t ask for anything. Michael himself seems appalled by the idea of being a charity case. The only things Michael seems to cherish are the seeds from a pumpkin he grew while he was living on the farm in the country. The idea of gardening and growth runs counter to the war occurring in the background of the book. Coetzee seems interested in displaced people and what should happen to these people when they are unable (or refuse) to care for themselves. The war has created an atmosphere of distrust, so everyone suspects Michael’s motives. At one point, he’s accused of giving aid to the guerrilla fighters in the mountains. Michael went to the mountains, incidentally, but lived in a cave by himself. His whole intention throughout “Life and Times” is to avoid other people, yet people keep intruding on his solace. It’s interesting that this impulse in him paradoxically draws people closer. They are completely unused to someone who shuns human contact rather than seeking it. With this book, Coetzee has done something extremely difficult, creating a closed-off, remote character who can still elicit understanding and sympathy from the reader. Coetzee’s writing is clear and precise but can also be cold and austere at times. He reminds me of DeLillo, the way everything seems pared down to the essentials. I wouldn’t say “Life and Times” is the masterpiece that “Disgrace” is, but it is nevertheless a smart, well-crafted novel, further proof of Coetzee’s greatness.

5 people found this helpful

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Jason Adams

A slog

Reviewed in the United States on July 15, 2023

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I can see the art and perspective of “The Life and Times of Michael K,” I just didn’t enjoy reading it. Our protagonist starts as a pariah due in no way from his own actions and ends, if possible, even lower on the food chain. Despite’s flashes of intelligence and intuition, Michael K is stripped of his humanity. At the end, there is a glimmer of an idea of what it is to be human from an essentialist perspective, but one is left with the impression that this flash of insight will soon fade with the starved and torn body beneath. Always philosophical and at times poetic, this is a tough one to work through.

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TM

Entirely original piece of art

Reviewed in the United States on May 31, 2020

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This book is entirely original. Any attempt to explicate the novella's plot will seem borderline incoherent.

While much of the narrative follows a Forrest Gump equivalent roaming about in war-torn South Africa, I would argue that the thrust of the work has more to do with human beings and trauma. Humans are animals placed in complex circumstances where equally complex institutional arrangements and social structures control aspects of our lives. In order to comprehend maliciousness, inequality, and luck, we apply meaning by wielding shaky concepts like intent and causality. When our concepts fail, we suffer and struggle to make sense of what we see. The Life and Times of Michael K, in my mind, demonstrates how someone who defies social classification, and thereby negates the accepted hierarchy of meaning, becomes a source of constructed meaning, himself. Michael K's blankness lets contemporaries view themselves introspectively within their concepts of him.

What a wonderful achievement for JM Coetzee.

4 people found this helpful

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Suzanne Dobbins

Step inside MIchael K's world in this harrowing novel of war

Reviewed in the United States on March 10, 2013

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“The first thing the midwife noticed about Michael K when she helped him out of his mother into the world was that he had a hare lip. The lip curled like a snail’s foot, the left nostril gaped. Obscuring the child for a moment from it’s mother, she prodded open the tiny bud of a mouth and was thankful to find the palate whole.”

In this novel by Nobel Prize winner J.M. Coetzee, Michael K is a simple-minded young man, living in the middle of a civil war in South Africa. His mother, a maid in the home of a white family, is ailing. The family she works for has left the city, making no provisions to take care of their servants. She not only asks Michael to care for her, but she requests that he take her back to her home in the country.

One of the things that struck me most about this novel, was the “science fiction” feeling of the book. We have Michael, who is like a stranger in a strange land. He cannot communicate because of his deformity, and with the war going on, he is in danger from both the army and the insurgents. The countryside is devastated. It is dry and hot. There is no food anywhere. And of course, Michael is black. He does not have value here.

Yet, through it all, Michael cherishes his freedom – which is taken away on several occasions. He strives to maintain his dignity and eventually we see the light of compassion in others.

So many times in novels relating to the horrors of war in Africa, it feels like the reader is outside looking in. Coetzee is (for me at least) able to extend the feeling of what it is like to be Michael K. I really enjoyed Life & Times of Michael K and hope to read more by this author.

7 people found this helpful

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Pros from Dover

Exactly as advertised

Reviewed in the United States on October 15, 2023

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Exactly as advertised

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Ot

An imaginative story about spiritual freedom

Reviewed in Canada on April 9, 2024

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This captivating novel can be viewed as an allegorical representation of the search for spiritual freedom, as embodied in the peculiar character of Michael K, a simple, unassuming man of limited intellect. In a time of civil war and repressive measures that herd the jobless and other undesirables into work camps, K, equally averse to charity and servitude, doggedly pursues his idea of freedom, passively resisting social and political forces through evasion and flight, seeking refuge and peacefulness in nature. For K--someone who has never felt love, but only expectations from others--human bonds are entrapments that stand in the way of freedom.

N

Superlative!

Reviewed in India on September 28, 2023

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Finest of the finest prose from the greatest living writer of english.

ZeitGhoul (music is my sanctuary)

Coetzee inhabits some of the most unusual but important characters in modern literature

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 7, 2020

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This book for me is one of Coetzees darkest realisations. But it also contains seeds of hope in its harrowing narrative.

Michael K is a man who I feel represents the desperate longing for simplicity in life that most of us camouflage with our busy lives of distraction...a man bought to the edges of total desperation born of his unfortunate unlucky origins and a facial disfigurement at a time and in a society where industrial sea change had no room for those with any kind of a handicap.

This relatively short story reminded me in many ways of Okri's spellbinding epic Famished Road, but this time from the point of view of someone who had always lived a life sheltered from the storm of that societal sea change and totally unprepared for the battle to survive he would soon need to confront.

Coetzees books demand repeat reading, such is the complexity he finds in his often surprising characters, and after one reasd of Michael K I just know that I've read yet another important novel by an artist who shaves off disturbing layers of his narrators and who also inhabits his torn characters so well.

Safe to say that whilst pretty much all his other books are more enjoyable reads for me it is hard to deny the importance of the territory Coetzee plots in each novel....including this one.

I recently started growing my own pumpkins and found that part of the narrative the most enthralling and painful.
Pity is such an important axis of this book and it would be a pity to give this a miss if you are already a fan of this great writer.

3 people found this helpful

Laure Maziers

Ma fille a pris plaisir à lire ce livre

Reviewed in France on March 14, 2019

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Bien arrivé, en bon état.
Commandé pour ma fille dans le cadre de ses études.
bien que ça soit une lecture 'obligatoire', elle a pris plaisir à lire ce livre.

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Kindle Customer

A book of pathos and poor humanity

Reviewed in Australia on August 17, 2019

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Don't expect a jolly mood, this is about a poor soul trying to find peace in life during the oppressive apartheid era.

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