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What Members Thought
In a word: devastating.
This is Coetzee's signature novel and absolutely must be read. To say that I loved it feels like a highly inappropriate statement because even though I feel that way I can't love a book that devastated me as a reader and challenged my notions about reconciliation and redemption from injustices of the past on an individual as well as societal levels. Perhaps not many would see it that way but the novel is also a subtle statement on race relations in modern times and its pow ...more
This is Coetzee's signature novel and absolutely must be read. To say that I loved it feels like a highly inappropriate statement because even though I feel that way I can't love a book that devastated me as a reader and challenged my notions about reconciliation and redemption from injustices of the past on an individual as well as societal levels. Perhaps not many would see it that way but the novel is also a subtle statement on race relations in modern times and its pow ...more
Oct 20, 2011
Suzanne
rated it
really liked it
·
review of another edition
Shelves:
fiction,
boxall-s-1001-list
“The first thing the midwife noticed about Michael K when she helped him out of his mother into the world was that he had a hare lip. The lip curled like a snail’s foot, the left nostril gaped. Obscuring the child for a moment from it’s mother, she prodded open the tiny bud of a mouth and was thankful to find the palate whole.”
In this novel by Nobel Prize winner J.M. Coetzee, Michael K is a simple-minded young man, living in the middle of a civil war in South Africa. His mother, a maid in the h ...more
In this novel by Nobel Prize winner J.M. Coetzee, Michael K is a simple-minded young man, living in the middle of a civil war in South Africa. His mother, a maid in the h ...more
Michael K. is a simple man with a harelip who works as a gardener in Cape Town at the time of a civil war in S. Africa. His elderly mother is ill and wants to return to the village where she grew up. When the pair cannot get travel permits, Michael loads his mother into a cart he has constructed from his bicycle and they set out to escape the city on foot. His mother dies en route, but Michael continues on. He lives simply, off what he can hunt or grow and develops a mindful attitude to the mome
...more
May 06, 2017
Diane
rated it
really liked it
·
review of another edition
Shelves:
20th-century,
africa,
1001,
booker-prize,
nobel-laureates,
1001-done,
2017-reads,
around-the-world-2017,
gar-2017,
powells-25
Jul 10, 2014
Crina Toth
rated it
it was amazing
·
review of another edition
Shelves:
south-african-literature
