Coetzee, J.M. Life & Times of Michael K. New York: Penguin, 1985.

A novel that tells an entire life story, birth to death, in 184 pages. Granted, it's a little light on years 1 through, oh, 25? 30? But we get enough in flashback. Michael K is a man born with a harelip to incapable parents and grows up in an orphanage. As an adult he gets a job as a gardener, and then war hits South Africa and his mother becomes sick and they need to flee the city for the countryside where she was born. Thus begins a story that's part road novel (think The Road of course, but also What is the What), part adventure novel (a la Robinson Crusoe), and even part medical drama as K eventually ends up in a labor camp's clinic, refusing any food and wasting away.

What a dull novel, right? Except I almost couldn't put it down. The prose throughout is the sparsest of sparse. I think I came across five similes in the entire novel. Maybe four. What is it about the following that can be so absorbing?

He tried the water-tap beside one of the petrol pumps, but it was dry. He drank from a tap at the rear of the shop. In the veld behind the filling station stood the hulks of scores of cars. He tried doors till he found one that opened. The back seat of the car had been removed, but he was too tired to search further. The sun was going down behind the mountains, the clouds were turning orange. He pulled the door to, lay down on the dusty [!!! -ed.] concave floor with the box under his head, and was soon asleep.

How strong the temptation to metaphor the F out of those "scores of cars"! Or maybe "hulks" is a metaphor I'm just not reading correctly. Another writer—DeLillo probably, maybe Updike—would hammer home the way war has turned men into scrap the way it has these cars, and rhapsodize for at least a quarter of a page on the image. Coetzee's aim here is more urgent, I think, and so more honest. We can see the cars just fine, and to get all lyric about them would be in one way to if not glamorize his character's life, or life in general during wartime, then at least mystify the whole experience. K's life is monotonous and plain and so the language of the novel has to be as well.

It's like there are two ways to make a reader really see something beyond words on a page. One of them is through figurative language, which is to say to use other language to connect an image to other associative images with which we're all kinda culturally familiar. And the other one is to just put the thing in there and make use of it and keep writing toward the usage and behavior of things. Or maybe it's not like this at all. How much can you rely on a reader to supply critical information on his own?