In J.M. Coetzee’s Booker-prize winning novel Life & Times of Michael K (1983), a medical officer working in an internment camp writes: “What I have learned of life tells me that it is hard to keep out of the camps.” Michael K himself is temporarily imprisoned in this camp named “Brandvlei”—one letter short of “brandvleis,” which translates most literally as “burning meat”, calling to mind the dehumanizing extermination camps of the Third Reich. The historical era of the novel is non-realist, but the text nonetheless resonates with Derrida’s comments, made around the time that the novel was published, that the word apartheid “occupies the terrain like a concentration camp. System of partition, barbed wire, crowds of mapped out solitudes.” Sidestepping more obvious debates that emerged when Life and Times of Michael K was published, such as Nadine Gordimer’s criticism that Michael K should have become a freedom fighter, my paper will examine confinement, freedom and corporeality in the novel alongside Solzhenitsyn’s A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Agamben’s notion of “bare life,” and contemporary theories of global apartheid. I shall also point out that a considerable proportion of Coetzee’s most recent work shows a preoccupation with camps: in Elizabeth Costello, Coetzee’s protagonist notoriously compares the slaughter of animals to the Holocaust, and finally finds herself in a camp that resembles a gulag, enabling Coetzee to tease out an intricate relationship between confession and incarceration.