Boekverslag John Maxwell Coetzee

Geschreven door:	anoniem
Datum ingestuurd:	14 oktober 2003
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Woorden:	1.100
Bekeken:	2958 keer (12 deze maand)
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Titel:	Life and times of Michael K.
Auteur:	John Maxwell Coetzee
Jaar van uitgave:	1983
Prijs:	Winnaar Booker prize 1983

Auteur:	John Maxwell Coetzee
Geslacht:	man
Nationaliteit:	Engels
Geboren:	9 februari 1940
Populaire titels:	1999Disgrace (6) 1980Waiting for the Barbarians (3) 2002Youth (1) 1990Age of iron (1) 1983Life and times of Michael K. (1) 2009Summertime (0)

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Genre: It’s a story about the civil war in Africa.
Place: The story takes place in Cape Town and the environment of Prince Albert in South Africa.

Summary
Michael K, blemished by a hare lip, was taken out of school because of his disfigurement and because his mind was not quick. After a short trial he was committed to the protection of Huis Norenius in Faure .He spent at the expense of the state the rest of his childhood in the company of other variously afflicted and unfortunate children. At the age of fifteen he passed out of Huis Norenius and joined the Parks and Gardens division of the City of Cape Town as a gardener. Three years later he left and he took a job as night attendant at the public lavatories on Greenmarket Square. He quit night work after an incident and returned to Parks and Gardens. One day he received a message that his mother had been discharged from Somerset hospital and she wanted him to come and fetch her.For months Anna K had been suffering from gross swelling of the legs and arms, later her belly had begun to swell too. They took the bus to her room in Sea Point. For eight years she had been employed as a domestic servant by a retired couple, the Buhrmanns. He made redundant from his job as a gardener, chooses to ignore the civil war raging around him and to take his ailing mother out of Cape Town and back to the farm of her childhood in the district of Prince Albert. She couldn’t walk so he made a barrow for her to sit in. They needed a permit to leave the proclaimed Cape Peninsula police area and they would have to wait four months. But Michael wanted to take his mother out of the city so they left on foot. They were stopped a few times by the military on their way to Prince Albert but that didn’t held them back. Then Anna became feverish and she laboured to breathe. He took her to a hospital in Stellenbosch, where she died during the night. He reached Prince Albert alone and he found the farm of the Visagies. It was abandoned and he stayed there for a while. Then the Visagies grandson came and used Michael as his body-servant. Michael didn’t like this so he left and went into the mountains. After a while he felt sick and he went to the hospital of Prince Albert. He recovered and they took him to a work camp called Jakkalsdrif. He stayed there in a hut and he hat to work for his food. He became friends with Robert, an older man who had to provide food for three adults and nine children. He didn’t like to be imprisoned so he left quietly during the night and returned to the farm.
The Visagies grandson had left. Michael didn’t eat for days because he didn’t need it .He loved to plant melon and pumpkin seeds. He had a hiding place in the Karoo under the ground but soldiers found him .They didn’t believe he was there alone so they brought him to a rehabilitation camp, Kenilworth. Yet his captors are confounded by this strange wraith of a man who seems to want and to need nothing. Felicity, a nurse in the infirmary, and a doctor don’t want him to stay in the camp because he doesn’t belong there. Noël, a sergeant, and the police of Prince Albert came to interrogate him about ‘his friends’ in the mountains. There had been an attack on the town’s water supply. He couldn’t answer their questions. A few nights later he escaped but the doctor wanted to follow him because now he understood that he wasn’t crazy, he just didn’t belong in a camp. He belongs in a garden where no roads lead to.
Michael returned to Sea Point and he met a man and his two sisters. He thought that everywhere he went, people were waiting to exercise their forms of charity on him. They wanted to hear the story of his life but he isn’t good with words. The truth was that he is a gardener. He escaped the camps so he hopes to escape charity too. He wonders if the moral of the whole story is that there is time for everything. He thought by doggedly refusing to betray his instincts, he achieves a level of freedom which is more than any of them can hope to attain.

My opinion
The book is very easy to read. The names of towns are usually in Dutch, that’s a little unusual . It is a very interesting book to read. The way it is written is astonishing and beautiful because the author wants to explain the meaning of Michael’s life.

Most exciting page
One night in December, woken by excited shouts, the people of the camp stumbled from their beds to behold on the horizon in the direction of Prince Albert a vast and beautiful orange blossom unfolding itself against the murk of the sky. There were gasps and whistles of amazement. ‘What’s the bet it’s the police station!’ someone shouted. For an hour they stood and watched while the fire poured out like a fountain consuming itself and being consumed. There were moments when they were sure they could hear shouts and cries and the roar of the flames across the miles of empty veld. Then by degrees the flower grew redder and duller, the fountain lost its strength, till at last, with some of the children asleep in arms and others rubbing their eyes, and with nothing left to see but a smoky glow in the distance, it was time to go back to bed.
The police struck at dawn. In a squad of twenty, regular police and schoolboy reservists, with dogs and guns, with an officer standing on the roof of a van shouting commands through a megaphone, they moved down the rows pulling out the pegs, collapsing the tents, beating at the shapes struggling in the folds. They burst into the huts and beat the sleepers in their beds. A Youth who dodged them and ran away was chased into a corner behind the latrines and kicked into insensibility; a small boy was knocked over by a dog and rescued screaming with fright, his scalp lacerated and bleeding. Half-dressed, some wailing, some praying, some stunned with fear, men, women and children were herded on to the open terrain before the huts and ordered to sit down.