Life & Times of Micheal K by J.M. Coetzee
A very kind researcher with whom I met during a conference recommended me works from J.M. Coetzee. A great thing about the researcher was that we shared fondness of books and the same authors. However, Coetzee was a recommendation which was not part of my library.
He recommended reading Waiting for the Barbarians and Life and Times of Michael K. Although, I have read Waiting for the Barbarians by Coetzee, I found this particular book very interesting. The next on the list of works from Coetzee is his book Disgrace.
This book explores the poor, aloof, lonesome, and introvert character of Michael K. It is an interesting read, written with themes of race, war, apartheid in South Africa on a geopolitical scale but also individual thoughts in times of despair and abject poverty. The book howers around Michael’s life and his purpose or the lack of it.
Context: After running away from the Camp and returning to the house where he buried his mother’s ashes, Michael K decides to build a house near a dam.
His first step was to hollow out the sides of the crevice till it was wider at the bottom than the top, and to flatten the gravel bed. The narrower end he blocked with a heap of stones. Then he laid the three fenceposts across the crevice, and upon them the iron sheet, with slabs of stone to hold it down. He now had a cave or burrow five feet deep. When he backed away towards the dam to inspect it, however, his eye at once picked out the dark hole of the entrance. So he spent the rest of the afternoon looking for ways to disguise it. When dusk fell he realized with surprise that he had spent a second day without eating.
The next morning he dragged in bag full of river sand to spread over the floor. He split flat stones from the hillside strata and built up the front wall, leaving himself only an irregular slit through which to wiggle. He made a paste of mud, and dry grass which he stuffed into cracks between roof and walls. Over the roof he spread gravel. All day he did not eat or feel any need to eat; but he noticed that he was working more slowly, and that there were spells where he simply stood or knelt before his handiwork, his mind elsewhere.
As he was prodding mud into the cracks and smoothing it flat, it occurred to him that at the next hard rain all his careful mortarwork would be washed out; indeed, rainwater would come pouring down the gully through his house. I should have laid a bed of stones beneath the sand, he thought; and I should have allowed myself on eave. But then he thought: I am not building a house out here by the dam to pass on to the other generations. What I make ought to be careless, makeshift, a shelter to be abandoned without a tugging at the heartstrings. So that if ever they find this place or its ruins, and shake their heads and say to each other: What shiftless creatures, how little pride they took in their work! it will not matter.