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En plena guerra civil sudafricana, el jardinero Michael K acaba en un hospital, lejos de su casa, desamparado. Michael no tiene más remedio que buscar un trozo de tierra, empezar de cero y recuperar su dignidad. Otra obra maestra de J.M. Coetzee, donde el autor reflexiona sobre la necesidad de llegar a la esencia de la experiencia humana, en un mundo donde impera la sinrazón y la soledad, que Coetzee retrata con un estilo luminoso y desconcertante.
Nos encontramos en una Sudáfrica dividida por la guerra civil, en una ciudad atemorizada por el aullido de las sirenas del toque de queda. En medio de la violencia que sacude el país, un jardinero, Michael K, acompaña a su madre a refugiarse en el campo. Pero el viaje se interrumpe pronto entre las paredes de un hospital. Solo y desamparado, Michael no tiene otro remedio que buscar un trozo de tierra que le permita empezar de nuevo y vivir con dignidad. (Fuente: contraportada del libro).
But in spite of such pleasures, I have serious doubts. My main concern is Michael K himself. He's more of a plot device than a real man, and we are constantly reminded how simple Michael is, and how little he understands .
And so J.M. Coetzee has written a marvelous work that leaves nothing unsaid—and could not be better said—about what human beings do to fellow human beings in South Africa; but he does not recognize what the victims, seeing themselves as victims no longer, have done, are doing, and believe they must do for themselves. Does this prevent his from being a great novel? My instinct is to say a vehement "No." But the organicism that George Lukács defines as the integral relation between private and social destiny is distorted here more than is allowed for by the subjectivity that is in every writer. The exclusion is a central one that may eat out the heart of the work's unity of art and life.
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés.Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
War is the father of all and king of all. Some he shows as gods, others as men. Some he makes slaves, and others free.
Dedicatoria
Primeras palabras
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés.Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
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.
Citas
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés.Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
He fetched the box of ashes from the house, set it in the middle of the rectangle, and say down to wait. He did not know what he expected; whatever it was, it did not happen. A beetle scurried across the ground. The wind blew. There was a cardboard box standing in the sunlight on a patch of baked mud, nothing more. There was another step, apparently, that he had to take but could not yet imagine.
Twelve men eat six bags of potatoes. Each bag holds six kilograms of potatoes. What is the quotient. He saw himself write down 12, he saw himself write down 6. He did not know what to do with the numbers. He crossed both out. He stared at the word quotient. It did not change, it did not dissolve, it did not yield its mystery. I will die, he thought, still not knowing what the quotient is.
He is like a stone, a pebble that, having lain around quietly minding its own business since the dawn of time, is now suddenly picked up and tossed randomly from hand to hand. He passes through these institutions and camps and hospitals and God knows what else like a stone. Through the intestines of the war. An unbearing, unborn creature. I cannot really think of him as a man…
[Your stay in the camp] was an allegory – speaking at the highest level – of how scandalously, how outrageously a meaning can take up residence in a system without becoming a term in it.
Últimas palabras
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés.Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
He would clear the rubble from the mouth of the shaft, he would bend the handle of the teaspoon in a loop and tie the string to it, he would lower it down the shaft deep into the earth, and when he brought it up there would be water in the bowl of the spoon; and in that way, he would say, one can live.
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