Life and Times of Michael K: A Novel

by J. M. Coetzee

Overview

From author of Waiting for the Barbarians and Nobel Prize winner J.M. Coetzee. 

J.M. Coetzee's latest novel, The Schooldays of Jesus, is now available from Viking. Late Essays: 2006-2016 will be available January 2018. 

In a South Africa turned by war, Michael K. sets out to take his ailing mother back to her rural home. On the way there she dies, leaving him alone in an anarchic world of brutal roving armies. Imprisoned, Michael is unable to bear confinement and escapes, determined to live with dignity. This life affirming novel goes to the center of human experience—the need for an interior, spiritual life; for some connections to the world in which we live; and for purity of vision.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780140074482
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	01/08/1985
Pages:	192
Sales rank:	79,667
Product dimensions:	5.11(w) x 7.67(h) x 0.42(d)
Lexile:	940L (what's this?)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Born in Cape Town, South Africa, on February 9, 1940, John Michael Coetzee studied first at Cape Town and later at the University of Texas at Austin, where he earned a Ph.D. degree in literature. In 1972 he returned to South Africa and joined the faculty of the University of Cape Town. His works of fiction include Dusklands, Waiting for the Barbarians, which won South Africa’s highest literary honor, the Central News Agency Literary Award, and the Life and Times of Michael K., for which Coetzee was awarded his first Booker Prize in 1983. He has also published a memoir, Boyhood: Scenes From a Provincial Life, and several essays collections. He has won many other literary prizes including the Lannan Award for Fiction, the Jerusalem Prize and The Irish Times International Fiction Prize. In 1999 he again won Britain’s prestigious Booker Prize for Disgrace, becoming the first author to win the award twice in its 31-year history. In 2003, Coetzee was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Hometown:

Adelaide, Australia

Date of Birth:

February 9, 1940

Place of Birth:

Cape Town, South Africa

Education:

B.A., University of Cape Town, 1960; M.A., 1963; Ph.D. in Literature, University of Texas, Austin, 1969

What People are Saying About This

Nadine Gordimer

An outstanding achievement.

From the Publisher

"An outstanding achievment." —Nadine Gordimer

"A major work of crystalline intensity." —Los Angeles Times

"So purifying to the senses that one comes away feeling that one's eye has been sharpened, one's hearing vivified." —The New York Times Book Review

Editorial Reviews

"An outstanding achievment." —Nadine Gordimer

"A major work of crystalline intensity." —Los Angeles Times

"So purifying to the senses that one comes away feeling that one's eye has been sharpened, one's hearing vivified." —The New York Times Book Review

From the Publisher

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

The New York Times

....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

Charles McGrath