[T]his is a challengingly questionable position for a writer to take up in South Africa, make no mistake about it. The presentation of the truth and meaning of what white has done to black stands out on every page, celebrating its writer's superb, unafraid creative energy as it does; yet it denies the energy of the will to resist evil. That this superb energy exists with indefatigable and undefeatable persistence among the black people of South Africa—Michael K's people—is made evident, yes, heroically, every grinding day. It is not present in the novel.…

A revulsion against all political and revolutionary solutions rises with the insistence of the song of cicadas to the climax of this novel.

I don't think the author would deny that it is his own revulsion.… 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. (“Idea” 6)

What kind of model of behavior in the face of oppression was I presenting? Why hadn't I written a different book with (I put words in her mouth now) a less spineless hero?

To a reader taking this line, much of the text of Michael K is just one fancy evasion after another of an overriding political question: how shall the tyranny of apartheid be ended?…

How do I respond to such readers?

One writes the books one wants to write. One doesn't write the books one doesn't want to write. The emphasis falls not on one but on the word want in all its own resistance to being known. The book…in the heroic tradition, is not a book I wanted-to-write, wanted enough to be able to bring off, however much I might have