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"Those who cultivate letters must be supplied with the books necessary for their purpose; and until this supply is secured I shall not rest."
Life & Times of Michael K
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Life & Times of Michael K
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This Book is Currently in the Wild!
1 journaler for this copy...
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Part of my Booker Prize reading challenge, but still on my TBR pile. (Left: author JM Coetzee)
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Life & Times of Michael K was published in 1983, eleven years before South Africa's first multi-racial election sounded the final death knell for apartheid. So while the general political context is clear -- this is an apartheid-era story -- the novel is vague, presumably deliberately so, on some key historical details: what year it is, who's in power, and which battles are which (of all possible moments of civil war during those decades). We're told so little about outside circumstances because this is a story about an interior life: the day-to-day experiences of thirty-two year old Michael K, a mentally disabled man with an uncorrected hare lip. As the story begins, Michael's mother, Anna, is ailing in her room in Sea Point, a suburb of Cape Town. Hoping to spend her last days in a more hospitable place, Anna asks Michael to take her home to her birthplace, a farm near Prince Albert, in the Karoo. Their progress through the countryside is slower than expected, since Michael must push Anna in a makeshift cart, and they keep getting detained by police and soldiers. The journey does not go well, and Anna dies in hospital in Stellenbosch. Though Michael's journey in the second half of the novel is a long one, the story's real territory and subject matter is his broken heart. And his brave and open heart. From a deserted farm house outside Prince Albert, to the Kenilworth rehabilitation camp and all the way back to Sea Point, Michael dreams of two things: staying outside "the camps", and planting a next generation of seeds in fertile ground. Coetzee won the 1983 Booker Prize for Michael K, then won it again in 1999 for Disgrace (making him the first two-time Booker winner). |
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Released 6 yrs ago (6/21/2005 UTC) at Starbucks in the Marriott Hotel in Ottawa, Ontario Canada WILD RELEASE NOTES:
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