Vital stats…
Author: J.M. Coetzee
Publisher: Random House
Format: Paperback
RRP: AUD $24.95
My rating 
What it’s about…
Born with a simple nature that repulses the world and a harelip that repulses even his own mother, Michael K is an outsider from birth.
Institutionalised as a child and marginalised as an adult, K leaves his job as a Cape Town gardener to take his ailing mother across civil war-torn South Africa to the country home of her girlhood.
When she dies along the way, K finds himself caught up in a bitter struggle to live a simple life.
So begins his mute rebellion against the pigeonholes society is bent on stuffing him into, and the complexities it insists he live by.
What we think…
I have to be honest. I didn’t love this book.
It is a seminal work. It won Coetzee the Booker Prize in 1983 (his first win of two). No doubt it also had something to do with his Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003.
It is clearly the work of a superior writer and a superior mind. You can see it in the opening description of Michael K:
“Year after year Michael K sat on a blanket watching his mother polish other people’s floors, learning to be quiet.”
Or in the closing image of a man drawing water from a well with a teaspoon. (This will make far more sense if you’ve read the book.)
The writing is spare and strong, the style is sophisticated and the imagery powerful. The central character of Michael K is vividly drawn.
The problem was that I just didn’t really care what happened to him.
As a result, I found the novel dragged in places.
Other books beckoned from my shelves.
Had I not committed to finish it in the presence of the omniscient Internet, it may have met the same fate as Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath; another literary landmark I only made it halfway through before my apathy for Tom Joad compelled me to pick up something else.
I daresay if I were studying Michael K instead of simply assessing it as a reader, I would have found more to rave about. It is pithy; thematically and linguistically rich. My favourite study combination.
As it is, I do respect this book. I can see it being the kind of work that stays with me, grows on me; perhaps even influences me.
But I didn’t find myself reading more slowly as I approached the end; desperate to wring every last drop out of the pages. I wasn’t tempted to open it at 3am and “just finish this one chapter”.
I didn’t consume it voraciously.
On a first reading at least, I found this a great novel, but not a great read.
– DF
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