Life and Times of Michael K. by J. M. Coetzee

Here comes Life and Times of Michael K., another book by Coetzee. I can hardly say if I like him or not and why I continue reading him. His prose is powerful and sadly appealing. His ability to go into such details to make you feel every emotion from repulsion to delight is impressive. And yet there is something gray-coloured and dragging on every page that leaves you hopeless and joyless, a kind of feeling you get on a winter day when instead of snow it starts raining and mud is all around and the sun seems to have abandoned this miserable Earth.

The main character of the novel is Michael, a simple gardener in Cape Town. In the middle of the civil war in South Africa he decides to take his sick mother out of the city to rural Prince Albert, the place where she was born. On the way to Prince Albert his mother dies. Michael still manages to bring her ashes to the place where she supposably was born. And then he realizes he is absolutely alone and he has to survive somehow. He hides on an deserted farm and plants vegetables finding a secret pleasure in growing and watering them. He is some kind of Robinson Crusoe who does not want to be found. Moreover, he prefers to stay there forever away from people and their wars. However, he gets into a work camp where he fails to adapt and later on after a successful escape he returns to his deserted farm to continue growing pumpkins and hiding from the world. There he is found by the police being almost dead of starvation and yet accused of helping arsonists hiding in the mountains. He is taken to a rehab centre where he meets a doctor deeply moved by his story. However, he escapes again to come back to Cape Town and to finally find "the moral of it all, the moral of the whole story: that there is time enough for everything" and this is an amazing conclusion, a soothing one after all.
My relations with Coetzee are way too complicated. On the one hand, they remind me of the films directed by Martin Scorcese (not of their contents, but of my promising to myself to never go to his films again and always being in the cinema whenever a new movie is on). On the other hand, they are as hysterical as teenage quarrels when you shout at his face to never call him and then spend evenings breathing at the telephone receiver. And just as I know I will see a new Scorsese's film as well as I won't be able to stay silent forever no matter who I have a fight with, I am most likely to read Coetzee again (especially that last Sunday I bought "Disgrace" after having promised to myself a holiday away from Coetzee).