Life and Times of Michael K

FROM THE PUBLISHER

In South Africa, whose civil administration is colapsing under the pressure of years of civil strife, an obscure young gardener named Michael K decides to take his mother on a long march away from the guns towards a new life in the abandoned countryside. Everywhere he goes however, the war follows him. Tracked down and locked up as a collaborator with the rural guerrillas, he embarks on a fast that angers, baffles, and finally awes his captors. The story of Michael K is the story of a man caught up in a war beyond his understanding, but determined to live his life, however minimally, on his own terms. J.M. Coetzee has produced a masterpiece which has the astonishing power to make the wilderness boom.

FROM THE CRITICS

The New York Times

Coetzee is a writer of clarifying inventiveness and translucent conviction....Mr. Coetzee's subdued yet urgent lament is for the sadness of a South Africa that has made dependents and parasites and prisoners of its own children, black and white....he discloses, in the language of imagination, the lumbering hoaxes and self-deceptions of stupidity. His theme is the wild and merciless power of inanity....For the sake of the innocent, time is Mr. Coetzee's hope. -- Cynthia Ozick

Charles McGrath

....As in his earlier Waiting for the Barbarians, Mr. Coetzee proves himself an absolute master of moral fiction. -- The New York Times Books of the Century

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