You know that advice for writing that tells you to strip everything away and get rid of all the unnecessary words, all the adjectives and adverbs? Reading Life & Times of Michael K, I understood what good advice that is. The writing was so spare, so clean, but evocative and beautiful at once. Life & Times of Michael K felt like a post-apocalyptic novel, but in this case the apocalyptic event is a civil war that is senseless to all the characters in the book, but yet they must live through it (or try to). Why invent an apocalypse when there are conditions such as these in the world?
I've had Life & Times of Michael K on my shelf for quite a while. I think I originally picked it up years ago when I was collecting Booker Prize winners. I thought I might read it for my South Africa selection, but then I read Cry, the Beloved Country instead, and Life & Times of Michael K continued to sit on my shelf, next to Nadine Gordimer (whom I've also never read) since my recent geographic reorganization of my books. There's no point in saying I wish I had read it sooner, but I'm glad I got around to it.
