Library Blog Archive

This is the first book in a series devoted to works of Fiction that you may not have read, that are well worth discovering. They are all available in Watch House Cross Community Library for you to read.A Book to Discover:No. 1: The Life and Times of Michael K by J.M CoetzeeReview taken from The New York Times 1983.Review by Cynthia OzickIn ''Life and Times of Michael K,'' J. M. Coetzee, a South African born in 1940, has rewritten the travail of Huck's insight, but from Nigger Jim's point of view, and set in a country more terrible - because it is a living bitter hardhearted contemporary place, the parable-world of an unregenerate soon-after-now, with little pity and no comedy. Conscience, insight, innocence: Michael K cannot aspire to such high recognitions - he is ''dull,'' his mind is ''not quick.'' He was born fatherless and with a disfigurement: a harelip that prevented him from being nourished at his mother's breast. When he needs some tools to make a cart to transport his dying mother, he breaks into a locked shed and takes them. The smallest transgression, undetected and unpunished, the single offense of life; yet nearly every moment of his life is judged as if he were guilty of some huge and undisclosed crime - not for nothing is his surname resonant with the Kafkan ''K.'' His crime is his birth. When as a schoolchild he is perplexed by long division, he is ''committed to the protection'' of a state-run orphanage for the ''variously afflicted.'' From then on he is consistently protected - subject to curfews, police permits, patrols, convoys, sentries, guns, a work camp with wire fences, a semi-benevolent prison hospital: tyranny, like his school, ''at the expense of the state.'' Though a mote in the dustheap of society, he is no derelict. From the age of 15 he has worked as a gardener in a public park in Cape Town. His worn and profoundly scrupulous mother also lives honorably; she is a domestic servant for a decent enough elderly couple in a posh seaside apartment house. They have gone to the trouble of keeping a room for her - an unused basement storage closet without electricity or ventilation. Her duties end at eight o'clock at night six days a week. When she falls ill, she is dependent on the charity of her employers. The building is attacked, vandalized, the residents driven out. Michael K is laid off. The country is at war. The purpose of the war, from one standpoint - that of a reasonable-minded prison-master - is ''so that minorities will have a say in their destinies.'' This is indisputably the language of democratic idealism. In a South African context such a creed unexpectedly turns Orwellian: It means repression of the black majority by the white minority. Yet in Mr. Coetzee's tale we are not told who is black and who is white, who is in power and who is not. Except for the reference to Cape Town and to place-names that are recognizably Afrikaans, we are not even told that this is the physical and moral landscape of South Africa. We remain largely uninstructed because we are privy solely to Michael K's heart, an organ that does not deal in color or power, a territory foreign to abstractions and doctrines; it knows only what is obvious and elemental. Though there is little mention anywhere of piety or faith, and though it is the prison-masters alone who speak sympathetically and conscientiously of rights and of freedom, Michael K responds only to what appears to be divinely ordered - despite every implacable decree and man-made restraint. He names no tyranny and no ideal. He cares for his mother; he cares for the earth; he will learn how they come to the same in the end. COETZEE is a writer of clarifying inventiveness and translucent conviction. Both are given voice gradually, seepingly, as if time itself were a character in the narrative. ''There is time enough for everything.'' As in his previous novel