'Youth' & 'The Life And Times Of Michael K.'

J.M. Coetzee has eight dozen books on the 1,001 list and this is just two. Granted, none of his books are extremely long, but I think it says something about the man's massive need to tell a story.

Youth is a volume of Coetzee's fictionalized autobiography retelling the author's departure from his native South Africa to England, where he worked as a computer programmer for IBM. The character in the story is wayward and without any real vision, which is the case for a vast majority of us, but it's a symptom that we think evades creative stalwarts like Coetzee. The need to fit in and shadow someone else's rise and fall, ins and outs and lifestyle. To read the right books, live in the right city, have sex with the right women, do the right drugs and so on and so forth. Not everyone can be Hunter S. Thompson.

The Life and Times of Michael K. is an earlier work of Coetzee from 1983 while still in South Africa. It's a dystopian novel much like Nadine Gordimer's July's People, published two years before (both Gordimer and Coetzee are the only two South Africans to win the Nobel Peace Prize for Literature, both were openly anti-apartheid and both are white).

The Life and Times ... chronicles the nitwitted Michael K. a disfigured gardener in Capetown, who is forced to take his sick mother to Prince Albert after a civil war breaks out in the capital. Much like Cormac McCarthy's The Road, the pair are tried as they slowly make their way to her birthplace. She eventually dies and Michael K. is forced to roam aimlessly with just a bare notion of survival.

Both novels are actually quite similiar: Two lonely young men attempting to fix something within themselves. A common theme. Now, to read those other eight dozen Coetzee novels.