Life & Times of Michael K

Whoa. It's amazing how Coetzee manages to write a novel both about and not about apartheid with few overt references to race. Life & Times of Michael K is a thin book, yet requires laborious reading due to slow-moving prose. However, it's effusive and detailed, painting a picture of the Cape Peninsula I had the fortune to see part of during my time in South Africa. In addition, one sometimes feels Coetzee 'hammers' some of the central themes of the text later on through the thoughts of the 'simpleton' protagonist, Michael K (read this review and check this one out for some other interesting criticism of the novel's debts to Kafka, etc.).

Nonetheless, it's a fascinating experience to read an anti-apartheid text with such a universal message, the struggle to live unfettered in camps, behind high walls, the struggle to be free. That very same struggle seems to transcend racial lines, too, even in a minority-dominated South Africa in the midst of war and unrest. That is best exemplified by the presumably 'white' doctor at the camp in Kenilworth, who also desires to live free, to live life without being in the confines of camps, literal or metaphorical. I believe that theme, that universal struggle to be 'free' is better explored in this fine essay, the wish to escape 'all camps.' Naturally, this theme relates to apartheid South Africa in horrific ways, just as it could be seen as allusions to the earlier history of 'rehabilitation' and labor camps in World War II, the Boer War, or even the German genocide in colonial Namibia. Similarly, the ordeals and experiences of Michael K, from living in a cave to the dugout on the abandoned Visagie farm near Prince Albert (possibly where K's mother lived, he'll never know), the labor camps, the streets of Cape Town or Stellenbosch,

For another fascinating review of the novel, the recently deceased Nadine Gordimer puts things into perspective from a South African anti-apartheid activist and literary background. She emphasizes race and the political oppression and violence of state terror (apartheid) as shaping social relations in profoundly negative ways that prevent relations between blacks (including Coloureds, such as Michael K) and whites taking the shape of anything besides master-slave. She also highlights the importance of gardening and examines some of the political implications of the novel, especially pertaining to how Coetzee perceives (or perceived, at the time) the future of South Africa.

Overall, my own opinion of Coetzee's work is positive. I am always intrigued by his densely layered prose, his fervent attention to describing the veld and landscape, and, even in this novel, his keen interest in animal rights (think of the killing of the wild goat on the Visagie farm). Intertextuality in the novel also intrigues me (the Kafkaesque allusions), as well as Coetzee's penchant for universality in a specifically South African setting. Much like Michael after leaving the cave (which seems like an obvious Plato reference), we, as readers, are led on an allegorical path out of the cave to see the world beyond the shadows of tyranny, to find meaning.