Life and Times of Michael K - JM Coetzee
To be
honest, I'm struggling to figure out why this book won a Booker Prize.
Michael K
is a simple man with a harelip, living in South Africa during a fictitious
civil war. His mother wants to move from the city to a farming area she
remembers from her youth, so Michael creates a trolley for her to be wheeled
around on, and sets off. On the way his mother dies, and from then on Michael
wanders from one incident to another, barely ever taking charge of his
situations. At the end of the book, Michael is befriended by a pimp, who
“gifts” his time with a prostitute – another incident Michael passively allows
with no real enthusiasm – before he returns to the apartment block he and his
mother set out from, and the story ends.
I don’t
generally want to give away the whole plot of the book, but although I have
left out a number of adventures, the summary above gives an idea of how
pointless the story seems.
Now, I do
understand that this is kind of the point Coetzee is trying to get across. The
name of the protagonist, Michael K, reminds me of Josef K, the protagonist from
Franz Kafka’s book, The Trial, and
that book too portrays a man powerless to do anything within the system he
finds himself. And in a lot of ways, Life
and Times is quite clever, and intentional. For example, Michael is quite
simple, and so the narrative style reflects that, using mostly shorter sentences
and less descriptive phrasing. Yet because of that narrative choice, the book feels simple. And because it feels
simple, it doesn’t engage the reader as much as I want it to.
I want each book I read (and particularly the 'Booker' books) to be judged on its own merits, and so I am trying to go into
each of them without a preconceived idea of what it will be like. But, in order
to judge it on its own merits, I also can’t let my judgement be affected by
another separate work. Read in light of the themes found in The Trial, Life and Times of Michael K can
be interpreted as a commentary on the pointlessness of conflict, and the use of
simple language (and the way many characters judge Michael based on his
appearance) can challenge the reader to look beyond Michael’s simplicity as
well.
But, without
that knowledge, I found the book relatively plotless and meandering, with no
real resolution. On its own, out of a specific context, it seems dull.
Completed 23 June 2017.
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