Mini-Reviews: Bernhard’s Woodcutters, & Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K

Woodcutters [1984] by Thomas Bernhard – ★★★★

In this unusual, but pretty much in line with Bernhard’s style, story, our narrator does not know how exactly he ended up where he is now – in a wing chair at the apartment of one aristocratic married couple, the Auersbergers. The last time he was there, some thirty years previously, he was still in love with everything that the Auersbergers represented, everything artistic. Now, however, some thirty years on, he again finds himself in their house as their “old friend”, but now despises everything about his hosts. The reason he is there in the first place is that he stumbled upon the rich couple on the street, and the death of their mutual friend Joana, brought them all to the same funeral. Now that he accepted their dinner invitation and sits in his comfy wing chair, his mind goes back to the past, as he tries to recall where he met the Auersbergers and Joana, a country girl, who once aspired to be an actress or a ballerina, but whose only claim to fame was her eventual marriage to celebrated tapestry weaver Fritz, who then left her.

The narrator’s sense of superiority to all those gathered around him is mitigated by his feelings of loss regarding Joana’s untimely passing, as the people around him, seemingly unconcerned about his presence, await the arrival of one famous actor, the star of this impromptu soiree. The narrator starts to muse “very rationally” about his “irrationality” of finding himself at this soiree and confronting a society he no longer thinks is worthy of him, as the dead woman, Joana, becomes something like a martyr in his mind, sacrificed to the carefree artistic life of a ruthless society, bearing a nostalgic tinge not that dissimilar, in my opinion, to that of the main character of Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s. In the course of the evening, the narrator’s thinking gets more contradictory, as the actor makes his entrance, and the Viennese theatrical life gets a swift dissection, with personal grievances coming out to the surface: “…the art and artists are ground down and pulverized year in, year out; whatever the art or whatever the artists, the Viennese art mill grinds them all to powder”.

🥂 Thematically, the story reminded me of Krleža’s On The Edge of Reason, which I also read for my 10 Books of Summer Reading Challenge, and what is distinguishable here is the narrator’s inward monologue, full of stark cynicism and deadpan criticism, which makes up almost the whole of the narrative, as Bernhard roasts the bourgeois life filled with artistic and intellectual pretenses. The novel is an ironic take on theatre life and its illusions, as well as an infuriatingly entertaining work of great observational insights, not least on the passage of time, its effect on people, their perceptions and relations.

Life & Times of Michael K [1983] by J. M. Coetzee – ★★★1/2

In this story, “simple-minded” man Michael K is forced to evacuate a war-torn city, taking his sick mother with him. They have to travel from Cape Town to the countryside (town Prince Albert), and the journey is fraught with difficulties, dangers and bureaucratic hurdles (special “permits” are required wherever you go). When Michael’s mother suddenly dies, the man has to fend for himself, soon sliding into poverty and drowning in trouble, as other people are quick to take advantage of him and his pitiful, vagabond situation.

The narrative intrigues, but also cannot shake off the artificiality and obviousness of its own construction. The first sentence is intentionally geared at capturing the attention, being very similar to Coetzee’s first sentence in Waiting for the Barbarians, in that it also refers to an original facial characteristic being a prominent feature of the main character. In Waiting for the Barbarians it was: “I have never seen anything like it: two little discs of glass suspended in front of his eyes in loops of wire”, in Life & Times of Michael K, it is: “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”. Further on, the author is determined to heap on the protagonist just enough “defects”, including isolation and loneliness, to make him as sympathetic as possible in our eyes. It would not have been half as bad if the writer’s intentions in that regard were not already so glaringly obvious.

Absurdity was probably the novel’s intention, but the matter-of-fact writing is simply determined keep us emotionally distant from Michael, even if insights into his mind still sporadically delight: “always, when he tried to explain himself, there remained a gap, a hole, a darkness before which his understanding baulked, into which it was useless to pour words. The words were eaten up, the gap remained. His was always a story with a hole in it: a wrong story, always wrong” [110]. These are few and far between, however, and all the repetitiveness also does this story quite a disservice.

On the originality front, Coetzee’s prose also leaves much to be desired. The novel is considered “kafkaesque”, but it has neither the originality of Kafka, nor his subtlety, but certainly plenty of pretensions on that side, including referring to the protagonist as “K” (just as Kafka did), talking about bureaucratic obstacles to overcome on the journey (Kafka’s The Trial/The Castle) and even trying to imitate the trope of one mother’s death leading to confusion, aimlessness and “mental stupor”, just as Albert Camus did (The Stranger), not to mention the obvious parallels between Michael K and the titular character of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. Furthermore, the skill of gardening and childish simplicity in adults (the alleged attributes of Mickael) have all been linked since the Middle Ages (possibly due to the charitable works of monasteries), and, just as Waiting for the Barbarians lifted more than just a few things from Dino Buzzati’s The Tartar Steppe, it turns out that Life & Times of Michael K has plot and titular name similarities with Heinrich von Kleist’s novella Michael Kohlhaas [1810] (plus, in all likelihood, a whiff of Keyes’s Flowers for Algernon, too).

💼 In sum, this Booker Prize-winner is a fine novel worthy of a read, but those who are already on intimate terms with existentialist literature, may also find it dragging, derivative and axiomatic.