Life and Times of Michael K

"It’s set during the civil war in South Africa in the 70s or 80s. It’s an absolutely devastating read from the first page, but you can’t put it down. It’s a terrible and beautiful story about a man, Michael K, whose mother is dying, and they leave Cape Town in a bid to get her back to her homeland. He builds this makeshift cart and starts pushing her along the road. In a sense it’s a road trip, but one with apartheid built into it, and all the troubles of trying to live amidst a civil war. On the way K’s mother dies and is cremated, and he takes her ashes and decides he’ll continue with his journey and return them to her birthplace. He does eventually get there, but he goes mad in the process, although this is another case of the madness being socialised into him. He’s quite delusional because he doesn’t have enough to eat or drink. He lives in a field in a hole that he’s dug, and whenever he’s caught he’s subjected to terrible mistreatment. But he favours freedom above all else, and decides he’d rather live in this hole and be free than in a camp. It’s almost entirely narrated by him, so you get this very tender portrait of a man doing his best to survive, and in a way his simplicity is in his favour and allows him to utilise the limited resources he has. For example he finds seeds and grows melons and he thinks of them as his sisters, and then he grows some pumpkins that are his brotherhood: so these are humanity to him. It’s a very terrible and tender book. Again it’s about the conditions that keep us sane and what happens if they’re taken away from us – if we’re constantly mistreated and left without food and drink. The human brain functions within a fairly small bandwidth and when it goes outside of that anything can happen. Although I don’t think Coetzee would want him to be seen that way, certainly Michael K behaves in ways society would label as mentally ill. It’s a very beautiful and affecting book."