Paul Bryant's Reviews > Life & Times of Michael K

Oooooh! DFJ is sooo gonna kick your ass! (I wouldn't worry about Donnie Boy. He's a paper tiger.)

See? What did I say? Paper tiger.

Well, not that I'm a pqualified psychoanalyst or nuttin'. But it seems pretty obvious that the prospect of those flaming torches is getting you excited in a big way. The whole review drips with the drool of slobbering anticipation. You welcome the torches, the abuse, the pain. You VANT to be punished for your transgressive little vays. Or why else would you write a review that screams "over here ... I'm over here .... HURT ME ... HURT ME".

Not that there's anything wrong with that. It's just, if you'd lived a few scant centuries earlier, you'd have been a natural to play a walk-on role in the exciting exploits of Torquemada and his band of merry torchers.

But maybe you were an extra in "Life of Brian"?

Just sayin'

I can't talk right at the moment, I'm busy trying to escape the fire that's engulfing Bryant Towers...I've dragged my laptop to the upper balcony and as the ancient mildewed curtains roar into a technicolour inferno I scream at my persecutors "TOP OF THE WORLD, MA! YOU SUCK, JULIA ROBERTS, AND ALL YOUR MOVIES DO TOO! EVEN THE ONE WE'RE ALL SUPPOSED TO LIKE! ESPECIALLY THAT ONE!! J M COETZEE LOOKS LIKE A GOETZEE! TOP OF THE WORLD!"

At last, the voice of dissent! Vive la pluralisme! Paul, you have not died in vain!

By the way, has anyone here read John Sladek's wonderfully loopy debut novel, The Reproductive System? I'm irresistibly reminded of Toto Smilax's last words:

SCREW LASSIE! PISS ON LAMP-POSTS! BOW-WOW-WOW-WOW-WOW!

That book sounds amazing, Manny!

It's very funny :)

mmm, shall I bother or not? I don't know now. I liked Disgrace. Maybe I'll go for the Sladek instead.

Sladek! he needs readers, and Mr Coetzee doesn't.

OK I'll put Coetzee on the back burner for now. And after I've read through the library books I've got coming (about 20 over the summer yippee!) I'll take a look at Sladek.

Paul you're missing something very important in your review. The 2nd part is closely connected to Kafka's short story "A Hunger Artist". Read the short story and you'll see the ending in a different light.

Thanks for the tip, but you know you can't go round writing books which depend on other books for their meaning to become clear. I'll dig up Kafka's story though.

Well, you've read Ulysses and rated it 5 stars, case closed I think ;)

Touche!

God, I read the Hunger Artist a life time ago and can now remember nothing about it at all (well, except the 40 days of starvation biblical references, but I swear that's all I remember). But Kafka or no Kafka, I'm not sure it is enough to save the end of the book for me.

hahahaha!

I can't believe I missed this review. And agree with you completely, Paul -- including on Pretty Woman.

But, your reference to "The Doctor's Tale" made me now remember ANOTHER Kafka story - A Country Doctor. Yet another allusion.

I think, had I known that this was an intentional mash-up/sampling of Kafka going in, I may have had a better mind-set to appreciate it. As it was, it just pissed me off because it seemed to get in the way of the great story and character at the heart and at the beginning of this novel.

On to other things............

Codswallop. lolol. But really, isn't three stars a bit generous? :P

Yeah but the first 126 pages are well worth more the three stars, I felt different about the bj, K didn't even enjoy all that much,just wanted to tend to his garden but the war and all...

*than three

While your interpretation of Part 2 with the doctor is very interesting, I would instead argue that the second section is instead a criticism of the doctor himself. After all, he does not really understand Michael, though he appears to be using him as a guide towards a similar lifestyle or mindset. There is a condescension towards his character as he expresses a desire to provide him with “a graduated diet, gentle exercise, and physiotherapy, so that one day soon he can rejoin camp life and have a chance to march back and forth across the racetrack and shout slogans and salute the flag and practice digging holes and filling them again” (133). He does not listen to Michael when he corrects the doctor, who calls him Michaels instead of Michael (131). He is confined by and conscious of the war that is occurring around him, thereby constricted and constrained by the social rules enforced upon him.

Michael, however, is consistently lowered and limited by the same social rules. However, in the absence of others, as when he was alone in the veld and gardening, his capabilities expand and flourish.

I do not believe that the doctor’s musings of Michael are supposed to be the guiding voice of reason or how the reader is ‘supposed’ to interpret the story or him, I think it is instead a socially structured narrative designed to impose structure and rules on Michael in order to better examine why these rules and structures do not always work. Notably, the doctor is imposing on Michael’s body itself with these social rules -- what and when he should eat. However, instead of criticizing Michael through Part 2, I believe that the voice of the doctor instead criticizes the ‘norm’ through the doctor’s condescension to him.

Nevertheless, I do find your point about why that narrative must exist. It is an all-too-common trope in media that the experiences of persons of color - although seeing as Michael’s race is interestingly not mentioned in a highly racialized apartheid South Africa is very interesting - are translated and interpreted by a white, colonial voice. Interestingly, this is also done on another level by Coetzee himself, who is the writer of the story.

that is unfortunately an almost universal trope - that non-white people's experience has to be mediated through a white person in order to be understood by other white people. We see this all the time, such as in The Constant Gardener, The Poisonwood Bible and The Last King of England, not to mention Dances with Wolves.

I love this review. I just finished the novel, after many years of wanting to read it, and your review described my thoughts exactly, eerily.

hmm, separated at birth perhaps...

I just finished this book and took a few bewildered moments to gather myself and then immediately went to see if you had reviewed it. Pleased to see that you found the medical officer's tale pretentious too. He did go on a fair bit! I was busy trying to figure out the underlying topics and what exactly Coetzee was trying to say, and then this character starts shouting that it's all an allegory and he has to find meaning in Michael's existence. Gee. And Michael himself decides that the meaning of it all is that there's always time. Terribly meta and not very helpful!

but who are we, it seems the literary mob can't get enough of this goulash. Pshaw, I say.

Ah, I guess we are literary philistines. :D
But your Pretty Woman comparison also made me check if you had reviewed Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon. That's another one for the literary mob, isn't it? I'm disappointed that you haven't reviewed it. As movie comparisons go, Wonder Boys is the intellectual version of The Hangover. With a dash of Californication.

Instead, may I interest you in my review of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay? I shouldn't say this, but it's one of my favourites - reviews, that is, not books -

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

I am almost afraid to, as I have that very book waiting on my Kindle. Bought as a "daily deal" before I started Wonder Boys. I was hoping that Chabon might have matured in the right direction. But of course, this is merely an added incentive to read it! I shall have your review to look forward to when/if Kavalier and Clay turn out to be another Tripp and Crabtree!