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From the author of Waiting for the Barbarians, another startling and disturbing portrait of today's South Africa, a land and a people beset by violence and siege. Coetzee here tells the story of a handicapped young man who has worked as a municipal gardener in Cape Town. His mother is dying, and she wishes to return to her birthplace out in the veldt. Without the required transit passes, mother and son set out on a journey that will end in death for her and in a new but temporary life on an abandoned farm for him. His respite in isolation and peace does not last long, however; grotesque reality soon returns to trouble this quiet new world. Against the solitude of this private drama, Coetzee paints an eloquent and pained picture of his homeland and of the bureaucrats, doctors, army deserters, and camp guards who reveal the stress and qualms of their existence and who uneasily sense that there is no conclusion to their troubles and no future for their lives.… (altro)
A bleak, austere work from a master fiction writer. Coetzee conjures up a book that is part-allegory, part-captivating fiction, and part-news article. His vision of a wartorn South Africa in the mid-to-late 20th century is stark, with not a word out of place. Coetzee takes us to the essence of man, but also to the lives of low, rough individuals, caught by circumstance and cruel society. It's a reminder of the challenges facing people at the bottom of the pecking order, and the unrealistic expectations held by the rest of us towards them. But also an effective, scathing portrait of a society torn at every angle. ( )
I think Coetzee sabotaged himself and took a drastically wrong turn about 2/3 of the way into the book, but I found the first part of the book quite moving. Michael K tries to take his dying mother back to her home in the countryside but she dies on the way, leaving him caught in a nightmare landscape. Ostensibly taking place during a civil war—the time is never specified—Coetzee so overdoes the police state world that it seemed nearly unbelievable to me. So long as Coetzee focuses on Michael’s struggle to survive from day to day, it’s excellent and the first 2/3 of the book are about his efforts to avoid detection. Then, inexplicably (to my mind) Michael gets captured and the book loses all its power and intensity. Coetzee switches narrators to a doctor in the rehabilitation/labor where Michael is being held. I found this narrator and his inflexible, unyielding determination to “understand” Michael ruined an otherwise wonderful book. He is constantly badgering Michael and constantly pondering to himself why things might be as they are. I found it a terribly disappointing end to an otherwise powerful story. But maybe you’ll disagree. ( )
En plena guerra civil sudafricana, el jardinero Michael K acaba en un hospital, lejos de su casa, desamparado. Michael no tiene más remedio que buscar un trozo de tierra, empezar de cero y recuperar su dignidad. Otra obra maestra de J.M. Coetzee, donde el autor reflexiona sobre la necesidad de llegar a la esencia de la experiencia humana, en un mundo donde impera la sinrazón y la soledad, que Coetzee retrata con un estilo luminoso y desconcertante.
But in spite of such pleasures, I have serious doubts. My main concern is Michael K himself. He's more of a plot device than a real man, and we are constantly reminded how simple Michael is, and how little he understands .
And so J.M. Coetzee has written a marvelous work that leaves nothing unsaid—and could not be better said—about what human beings do to fellow human beings in South Africa; but he does not recognize what the victims, seeing themselves as victims no longer, have done, are doing, and believe they must do for themselves. Does this prevent his from being a great novel? My instinct is to say a vehement "No." But the organicism that George Lukács defines as the integral relation between private and social destiny is distorted here more than is allowed for by the subjectivity that is in every writer. The exclusion is a central one that may eat out the heart of the work's unity of art and life.
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War is the father of all and king of all. Some he shows as gods, others as men. Some he makes slaves, and others free.
Dedica
Incipit
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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.
Citazioni
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He fetched the box of ashes from the house, set it in the middle of the rectangle, and say down to wait. He did not know what he expected; whatever it was, it did not happen. A beetle scurried across the ground. The wind blew. There was a cardboard box standing in the sunlight on a patch of baked mud, nothing more. There was another step, apparently, that he had to take but could not yet imagine.
Twelve men eat six bags of potatoes. Each bag holds six kilograms of potatoes. What is the quotient. He saw himself write down 12, he saw himself write down 6. He did not know what to do with the numbers. He crossed both out. He stared at the word quotient. It did not change, it did not dissolve, it did not yield its mystery. I will die, he thought, still not knowing what the quotient is.
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. He passes through these institutions and camps and hospitals and God knows what else like a stone. Through the intestines of the war. An unbearing, unborn creature. I cannot really think of him as a man…
[Your stay in the camp] was an allegory – speaking at the highest level – of how scandalously, how outrageously a meaning can take up residence in a system without becoming a term in it.
Ultime parole
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He would clear the rubble from the mouth of the shaft, he would bend the handle of the teaspoon in a loop and tie the string to it, he would lower it down the shaft deep into the earth, and when he brought it up there would be water in the bowl of the spoon; and in that way, he would say, one can live.
From the author of Waiting for the Barbarians, another startling and disturbing portrait of today's South Africa, a land and a people beset by violence and siege. Coetzee here tells the story of a handicapped young man who has worked as a municipal gardener in Cape Town. His mother is dying, and she wishes to return to her birthplace out in the veldt. Without the required transit passes, mother and son set out on a journey that will end in death for her and in a new but temporary life on an abandoned farm for him. His respite in isolation and peace does not last long, however; grotesque reality soon returns to trouble this quiet new world. Against the solitude of this private drama, Coetzee paints an eloquent and pained picture of his homeland and of the bureaucrats, doctors, army deserters, and camp guards who reveal the stress and qualms of their existence and who uneasily sense that there is no conclusion to their troubles and no future for their lives.
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