Life and Times of Michael K by J.M. Coetzee

Although this novel affected me very deeply, I find it very difficult to express my thoughts about it. Published in 1983, it was obviously inspired by events in South Africa in the tumultuous years of apartheid. Yet it is non-specific as to time and place and written with an allegorical tone, so that it can apply just as well to any violence-torn country anytime, anywhere.

Michael K was born with a hare lip, so that he could not suck from the breast or the bottle and had to be fed from a teaspoon. When it became apparent that he was also "simple," he was institutionalized for the remainder of his youth. Now, as an adult, he is working as a gardener while attempting to care for his ailing mother. As the violence of conflict consumes his mother's neighborhood, she asks Michael to carry her back to the veld where she grew up, and he attempts to do so.

The journey becomes a confusing bad dream for Michael as he travels on foot, pushing his mother in a home-made rickshaw, dealing with curfews and road checks and the bad intentions of some of his fellow displaced persons. When his mother dies along the way, he knows of nothing else to do but to continue his journey and take her ashes to her childhood home. When he reaches the place, he finds a deserted farm where he can perhaps be left alone to grow things so that he can take his sustenance from Mother Earth. But he is not long allowed to follow his own path.

Through the course of this short novel, Michael K is imprisoned, relocated to a displaced persons' camp (supposedly for his own good), and forcibly hospitalized (again for his own good). And all he wants is to be left alone. "He is like a stone, a pebble that, having lain around quietly minding its own business since the dawn of time, is now suddenly picked up and tossed randomly from hand to hand."

I cannot properly express how sad this novel is, and I cannot help thinking about all the simple people (perhaps not simple in lack of intellect but in way of life) who are caught up in conflicts that they care nothing about. I think about Afghanistan and the mountain people, who perhaps do not even care about jihad and religious extremism and do not even want the help of their American "saviors." I imagine them, and others like them in other places, just wanting to be left alone.

This novel won England's Booker Prize and Coetzee has been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. I highly recommend it as a book that will make you think long after you have finished it.