Musings on the Life and Times of Michael K.
When I was thirteen, we moved out to a smallholding on the outskirts of Johannesburg. We still refer to it as “The Farm”, but only about a third of the land was arable, the rest was slate, covered with a thin crust of dust and scrub. There was a borehole and an orchard, a vegetable patch, chickens, three horses, two donkeys, a cow, and two pigs. There was also a family of nine – Wilson and Rebecca M. and their seven children – living in two small rooms behind the three garages that sheltered our Japanese sedans from the harsh African sun.
Within a month, my parents had arranged to build two extra prefab rooms, one for the boys and one for the girls, and had ensured that all the children could attend the little mission school behind the quarry. The warm winds swiftly spread word of this charitable new family and soon people from surrounding farms came limping in with sick and injured relatives in need of medical attention. Clothes, food, transport and advice were also liberally dispensed.
Let me stop there, because this is not intended as an ode to my parents’ compassion, but rather as a counterpoint to Coetzee’s vivid examination of the contention that there is freedom and even joy to be found in utter destitution. The author tempts the reader to ask himself: Do those who want or need next to nothing become irrelevant and therefore exempt from subjugation? Although it is risky to assign intent to the work of any author, this is the burning question I have taken from The Life and Times of Michael K – a book about a man who turns his back on an emaciated urban existence and seeks to return to the soil of his ancestors, carrying his dying mother on this back.
On his way, Michael encounters numerous obstacles in a war-torn country – roadblocks, robbers and a detention camp, where one of the inmates has a truly novel perspective on the sinister motives underlying the charity of a regime that cares for its poorest by incarcerating them:
“After that they started dropping pellets in the water and digging latrines and spraying for flies and bringing buckets of soup. But do you think they do it because they love us? Not a hope. The prefer it that we live because we look too terrible when we get sick and die. If we just grew thin and turned into paper and then into ash and floated away, they wouldn’t give a stuff for us. They just don’t want to get upset. They want to go to sleep feeling good.” (p. 88)
Food for thought, in more ways than one. To what extent is our own sense of charity fuelled by such selfish motives? Who hasn’t turned the sick and dying into paper and ash by simply switching channels on the remote? But Coetzee refuses to tread such beaten tracks. Instead, he takes the reader down the road less rutted. Michael escapes from the detention camp and makes his way out into the boondocks to the abandoned farm where his mother grew up. Here he finds a sense of place that lies somewhere between Freedom and Oblivion, digging a hovel for himself and living off the land, his sole purpose in life being the cultivation of pumpkins. This bucolic idyll is disturbed by a band of rebels, seeking to replenish their water supply at the farm, and later by a company of soldiers who capture and incarcerate Michael, because they suspect he is in cahoots with the guerrillas.
Later, we find Michael in a rehabilitation centre, where he becomes the object of fascination of the doctor who is in charge of guiding him back into society. The second part of the book consists of the doctor’s observations and musings, which again bear testimony to Coetzee’s ability to distil crystal-clear metaphors from murky realities, letting his characters do the thinking and talking:
“He is like a stone, a pebble that, having lain around minding its own business since the dawn of time, is now suddenly picked up and tossed randomly from hand to hand. A hard little stone, barely aware of its surroundings, enveloped in itself and its interior life. He passes through these institutions and camps and hospitals and God knows what else like a stone. Through the intestines of war. An unbearing, unborn creature. I cannot really think of him as a man, though he is older than me by most reckonings.” (p. 135)
All of which brings me back to The Farm, where Rebecca, Wilson and their children were tossed randomly from hand to hand like pebbles. Driven by curiosity rather than compassion, I went back to take a look several years after my parents had returned to the suburbs and I had emigrated to Holland. After negotiating passage with the farm’s new owner, I found Rebecca in her room behind the garages. She embraced me warmly and then gave me a bleak update on the rest of the family – the dead, the dying, the incarcerated, the subjugated – pebbles reduced to dust by poverty’s sledgehammer, a brilliant system of disenfranchisement that constantly reinforces the belief that some are destined to spend their lives as members of an underclass, a caste who could or should have no higher ambition than to seek joy in utter destitution.
And so Coetzee has led me down the path less-rutted, causing me to reassess my own memories, ideas, morals and motives. Tomorrow, when I re-read this review, I will undoubtedly find much to be at fault or at best imprecisely surmised or argued. But perhaps that is greatest strength of Coetzee’s work: it cannot be pinned down and made to reveal its intentions, but continues to provoke new questions and interpretations by remaining always open to new perspectives.
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Six Fang Marks and a Tetanus Shot
January 11th, 2010 @14:01 #
Bump! Good reading here.
January 11th, 2010 @22:42 #
Indeed good reading, and fine writing from Richard. I was refraining from commenting for fear of casting my usual blight.
January 12th, 2010 @08:58 #
Blight? Whatever makes you say that, Helen?
Speaking of blight - where is everyone these days? Off on Facebook and Twitter? I miss the banter and debate, though I am well aware how many hours it consumes. Perhaps we should have a weekly debate date. Every Thursday, say?
January 12th, 2010 @10:02 #
Better idea, a weekly no-Facebook day. I find a lot of the usual suspects hanging out over there, shooting the breeze. It's kinda like finding a new bar...
January 12th, 2010 @10:52 #
True. It's all rapid-fire exchanges at Facebar. The discussions here often demanded a lot of hard work and careful deliberation.
January 12th, 2010 @12:04 #
The decline of BOOK Chat is a lamentable development, I agree - but all is not lost. Facebook and Twitter may be on the verge of replacing the internet in toto, but I've hatched a scheme to stop their leeching of our comments once and for all. To put it simply, I'm going to start paying by the word. One rand per word per comment, redeemable upon invoice at the end of the month. That'll do the trick, I reckon!
Seriously, I'd very much get behind a "weekly debate date" if BOOK Chatters (them that is left) think it would stick. Ponder it, friends.
January 12th, 2010 @12:22 #
I've been on a chat sabbatical because the hits have increased so much that way too many people land up here - like family friends, employees and potential lays, seeing me mouthing off and thinking i am being-ing funny. see i said LAY, with my luck my pastor will land up here and my no sex before marriage ruse will be ruined.
January 12th, 2010 @12:28 #
BOOK Chat kept me sane while I had a salaryman's job, but it really demands too much time. Facebook commenting is easy because it demands much less time and confidence, and for this reason I think it's more inclusive. Far less enlightening and challenging too, of course.
I don't think a weekly debate day would stick. It would be impossible to predict what topics people would like to natter about. I'm sure the biggest BOOK Chat threads in the past were utterly surprising.
ha ha @Kate... In my case all the hits I get are from bots and spiders, so if there was any laying going on, it would only be to create a master race of metallic geeks.
January 12th, 2010 @12:34 #
What hits are you talking about, dear Louis and Kitty? Remember that I am not a geek. I am someone who parodies Vera Lynn songs in my posts, in the full knowledge that no-one under 80 will get the joke.
Louis, I am newish to FB, and already fed up with their comment system, even though everything you say is true. I really do not need to know every time someone says "LOL".
January 12th, 2010 @12:41 #
Louis has hit upon the problem: we're all freelancers! In one form or another... Whereas, if we had salaried jobs, we'd be much more inclined to practice presenteeism on this forum.
BOOK Chat has a rhythm, I've noticed, and I'm sure that as 2010 hits its stride we'll see some pretty good convos here. In a sop to the realities of the web, however, BOOK SA is also working on a "login with Facebook" feature that should encourage a bit more activity than currently.
Meantime, it's not too late for a final New Year's Resolution; repeat after me: "I will post a mildly controversial statement on BOOK Chat, thereby provoking much literary froth, once a week at a minimum. Ok, I'll at least think about doing that. Ok, maybe I'll think about it." Piece of cake, right?
(The FB feature, by the way, will be introduced, ahm, erm, sometime. It's a bit tricky, that one.)
January 12th, 2010 @12:42 #
I don't actually know what Kitty's talking about re hits. I just thought I'd pretend like I did.
January 12th, 2010 @12:48 #
*par example*, this is my current facebook status: "Delightful Wife brought me a custard doughnut from the shops. I am taking an unscheduled coffee break." This is not the sort of thing the expectant users of this site expect to hear their cultural agenda-setters spouting. (LOL)
January 12th, 2010 @13:00 #
Lucky fish, Louis! :)
January 12th, 2010 @13:04 #
Oh, and Kate's just pointing out that BOOK Chat does very well on search engines, so that what she talks about comes up toward the top of search results - meaning all potential suitors (e.g., lays) will see her chatter and be intimidated by her erudition and wit.
January 12th, 2010 @13:08 #
I've taken a bit of a comment sabbatical lately because I've been feeling as though my particular brand of confrontationalism and facetiousness don't quite fit in any more. Book SA seems to have become increasingly mainstream/establishment. I felt as though I'd prodded too many sacred cows for comfort.
And although I might get support for a certain point of view on Facebook, here on Book SA I'd be left twisting in the wind.
But if this is still the place for heated debates and off-kilter opinions, I'll gladly plunge back in.
January 12th, 2010 @13:14 #
Plunge, Fiona, plunge!
January 12th, 2010 @13:40 #
I are entirely with u Fiona, my lack of degrees and love of capitalism get me in lots of trouble. (is that unerudite enough?)
January 12th, 2010 @13:44 #
Oh, and it's not people goggling me, i mean googling, if someone wants info re Summertime for eg this site has the most of that thing that makes u at the top for it in webland.
January 12th, 2010 @14:39 #
Q: What does one have to do to get a response around here?
A: Leave one's computer for a couple of hours.
Promise to provoke others more regularly.
(You owe me R26 for that, Ben.)
January 12th, 2010 @14:48 #
And what's more, I bet Helen and Fiona could even add a mildly controversial comment or two about the actual post and its subject.
January 12th, 2010 @15:04 #
That'd be lovely.
January 12th, 2010 @15:09 #
Prod those sacred cows, Fiona, if nothing else at least you will make the vegetarians happy!
Wow Richard, what a thought provoking, well written piece. I'm feeling rather uneasy in the comfort zone of my own "sense of charity" right now. I remember that book making me cry and squirm. You have captured in your review what Coetzee captured in his book. (Is captured the right word, prodded perhaps?) Well done.
January 12th, 2010 @15:18 #
Thanks, Annette. It's one of those books that make you reassess your own actions and detachment from the needs of others. But I think I already said that.
January 12th, 2010 @15:31 #
Just caught up with this thread, as I've been doing last day of holidays before school starts tomorrow, stationery marking, playing WordTwist, and a bit of light working.
I do hope that Book Chat doesn't ever die, even if it has quieter days, not everyone can chat all of the time, but some of us can chat some of the time (this is especially for Helen, Fiona, Rustum, Louis, Richard, Kathryn and lots of others who keep things hip and happening over here for us erstwhile lurkers.)
January 12th, 2010 @15:44 #
Lurk on! Nice to see so many people coming out of the woodwork.
January 12th, 2010 @16:41 #
Since I and everyone else begged Fiona to prod the cows, she's been quite out of the picture. Come back, Fiona, come back! Only tame milquetoasty stuff from now on we all promise (even if we do have our fingers crossed).
Kate, that's just too funny :)
January 12th, 2010 @18:05 #
Is this a long dangly thread I see before me???
January 12th, 2010 @18:11 #
Who wants info for Summertime BTW? Pick me, pick me. I know ALL the words, srsly, The band always asks me to write them down on a serviette when someone requests it.
January 12th, 2010 @18:14 #
Gosh. I'm so excited my commas are all wrong and nothing makes any sense. Better start at the beginning...
January 12th, 2010 @21:00 #
@Fifi: what me, mainstream? I have dangled quite a few tidbits in the last few months, but no kitties pounced (as they have done on this thread -- AR clearly thinks it's a ball of wool).
@ Ben: On the advice of my labour lawyer, I am claiming back pay. That's R19847 you owe me (I'll take instalments).
@ Louis: I confess R's original piece made me contemplate actually reading The Life and Times. For about five minutes. But you have all seen me prod this particular sacred cow before. Am in search of new sacred cows for 2010.
@ Kitty: for some reason, I think I am safe in this space, bots and hits notwithstanding. I realise this is an illusion, but I've never attracted peculiar communications via this site, whereas my first few weeks on FB were quite mindboggling. Someone I honestly couldn't remember started bombarding me with messages, culminating in an outpouring about how jealous he had been of my boyfriend (wait for it) over 30 yrs ago. Then there was the friend request by someone who sounded like a Klan member. Within a month, I'd had to block seven people and report two for racism...
January 12th, 2010 @21:15 #
Helen, c'mon, it must be more than that :)
Everyone who want to nominate Helen for a BOOK Chat OBE (that's Order of the BOOK SA Empire), RT.
(Ok, don't RT, just reply.)
January 12th, 2010 @21:21 #
So nominated.
January 16th, 2010 @13:07 #
Seconded. OBE it is.
Sorry - I've also been scarce: it's a bit of a self-perpetuating problem. If people don't post, then there's nothing to comment on.
Fiona, if you're hesitant to post because of that one touchy, abusive post last year, forget it! We want to hear what you have to say. And what Ms Helen OBE (order of batting for England?) has to say.
Hmm. Muse. Empire? Does that make Ben-E the emperor? (I have visions of Darth Vader, with appropriate theme music).
I see Facebook as a more personal, relaxed space, whereas here there is a definite literary focus. No doughnuts or custard - or maybe custard pies, airborne.
Having said that, I am musing a new post - the next issue of Incwadi goes up in March. I'll put something up on BookSA.
January 16th, 2010 @13:15 #
For those that missed it, someone climbed into Fiona and Helen last year, completely over-reacting to some sound, pragmatic critique of storyline concepts. As was pointed out, writers have to develop thick skins.
January 16th, 2010 @17:16 #
Thirded. And I think Mr Ben's official title should go something like this: Sir Darth Lord Baron Ben Von Bookenham.
January 16th, 2010 @20:44 #
Agree re Ben's title. He's already President for Life, but that's so last year.
Meanwhile, am delighted at impending investiture. What shall I wear? Must not trip and yell "Oh Bloody Eff" as Ben clonks the silverware on my shoulder.
January 16th, 2010 @20:47 #
Ingrid, I'd forgotten about that! The irony for me was that the complainant objected to Fifi and I not being more supportive of up-and-coming writers. Which really did make me laugh out loud...
January 16th, 2010 @21:27 #
Ironic indeed.
So if Ben-Ed is Lord Darth Lord Baron Ben von Bookensteakeneggs, does that make us Padawan Learners? And what Force should we be using?
Ben Trovato will know.
January 16th, 2010 @22:09 #
We will use the force of The Tray, of course!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sv5iEK-IEzw
Who originally posted this link BTW? I know I first came across it here. I still need to strew rose petals wherever that person walks, and carry their books for them, and look after their cats when they’re away.
Did anyone else get lucky and score Eddie Izzard tickets?
January 17th, 2010 @12:25 #
Absolutely brilliant - thanks, ar!
January 17th, 2010 @22:00 #
I would also like to strew rose petals etc. That clip makes me shriek with immoderate mirth no matter how low I'm feeling. I have a feeling it was Rustum?
January 17th, 2010 @23:15 #
Aye, 'twas Rustum. He must be writing a bloody good book. Or cooking a bloody good meal. And growing a bloody long beard. Probably all three.
January 18th, 2010 @08:14 #
Crawling out of the woodwork for just a few minutes - and then back into the knotty gnarliness.
January 18th, 2010 @09:36 #
Rustum and I are crawling out of our respective woodworks to have coffee together this morning, so I shall soon be able to report back on book/meal/beard.
January 18th, 2010 @10:42 #
Of course it was! How could I not have remembered? Good linkage, that man. OBEworthy. Like that Cowboy Junkies version of Sweet Jane, which has become one of my ipod's personal fave songs. It plays it even when I didn't tell it to, but I don't mind at all. Delicious.
January 18th, 2010 @13:53 #
Yes, the man got me hooked on Cowboy Junkies too. I had never heard of them pre-Rustum. (I gave up listening to new artists round about the time my left ear conked in -- v. lazy of me.)