by J. M. Coetzee
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Product Description
Disgrace--set in post--apartheid Cape Town and on a remote farm in the Eastern Cape--is deft, lean, quiet, and brutal. A heartbreaking novel about a man and his daughter, Disgrace is a portrait of the new South Africa that is ultimately about grace and love.
At fifty--two Professor David Lurie is divorced, filled with desire but lacking passion. An affair with one of his students leaves him jobless and friendless, except for his daughter, Lucy, who works her smallholding with her neighbor, Petrus, an African farmer now on the way to a modest prosperity. David's attempts to relate to Lucy, and to a society with new racial complexities, are disrupted by an afternoon of violence that changes him and his daughter in ways he could never have foreseen. In this wry, visceral, yet strangely tender novel, Coetzee once again tells "truths [that] cut to the bone" (The New York Time Book Review).
A finalist for The National Book Critics Circle Awards
Coetzee is the only writer to have been awarded the Booker Prize twice
Amazon.com Review
David Lurie is hardly the hero of his own life, or anyone else's. At 52, the protagonist of Disgrace is at the end of his professional and romantic game, and seems to be deliberately courting disaster. Long a professor of modern languages at Cape Town University College, he has recently been relegated to adjunct professor of communications at the same institution, now pointedly renamed Cape Technical University: Although he devotes hours of each day to his new discipline, he finds its first premise, as enunciated in the Communications 101 handbook, preposterous: "Human society has created language in order that we may communicate our thoughts, feelings and intentions to each other." His own opinion, which he does not air, is that the origins of speech lie in song, and the origins of song in the need to fill out with sound the overlarge and rather empty human soul. Twice married and twice divorced, his magnetic looks on the wane, David rather cruelly seduces one of his students, and his conduct unbecoming is soon uncovered. In his eighth novel, J.M. Coetzee might have been content to write a searching academic satire. But in Disgrace he is intent on much more, and his art is as uncompromising as his main character, though infinitely more complex. Refusing to play the public-repentance game, David gets himself fired--a final gesture of contempt. Now, he thinks, he will write something on Byron's last years. Not empty, unread criticism, "prose measured by the yard," but a libretto. To do so, he heads for the Eastern Cape and his daughter's farm. In her mid-20s, Lucy has turned her back on city sophistications: with five hectares, she makes her living by growing flowers and produce and boarding dogs. "Nothing," David thinks, "could be more simple." But nothing, in fact, is more complicated--or, in the new South Africa, more dangerous. Far from being the refuge he has sought, little is safe in Salem. Just as David has settled into his temporary role as farmworker and unenthusiastic animal-shelter volunteer, he and Lucy are attacked by three black men. Unable to protect his daughter, David's disgrace is complete. Hers, however, is far worse. There is much more to be explored in Coetzee's painful novel, and few consolations. It would be easy to pick up on his title and view Disgrace as a complicated working-out of personal and political shame and responsibility. But the author is concerned with his country's history, brutalities, and betrayals. Coetzee is also intent on what measure of soul and rights we allow animals. After the attack, David takes his role at the shelter more seriously, at last achieving an unlikely home and some measure of love. In Coetzee's recent Princeton lectures, The Lives of Animals, an aging novelist tells her audience that the question that occupies all lab and zoo creatures is, "Where is home, and how do I get there?" David, though still all-powerful compared to those he helps dispose of, is equally trapped, equally lost. Disgrace is almost willfully plain. Yet it possesses its own lean, heartbreaking lyricism, most of all in its descriptions of unwanted animals. At the start of the novel, David tells his student that poetry either speaks instantly to the reader--"a flash of revelation and a flash of response"--or not at all. Coetzee's book speaks differently, its layers and sadnesses endlessly unfolding. --Kerry Fried
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Average Customer Review:
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Payback, debts due, revenge exacted, 2008-11-26
Lecturing in Cape Town university downsized to a technical college, once a professor of literature, now an adjunct in communications, David Lurie seems older than 52. He begins to decline, long divorced, longing for solace and seeking it unwisely. "Because he has no respect for the material he teaches, he makes no impression on his students." (4) "The irony does not escape him: that the one who comes to teach learns the keenest of lessons, while those that come to learn learn nothing." (5)
Out of a job after he refuses to go along with the abjection that he believes, stubbornly and quixotically, is demanded by the administration after he is charged with sexual harassment, he retreats to the Eastern Cape, to join his daughter, Lucy, who runs a small kennel and grows flowers on a remote farm. The drift away from city habits to country attitudes adds poignancy to Lurie's slide into despair. You both cringe at his refusal to confess his wrongdoing, and sympathize with his pride.
The book, pivoting around the rape, off-scene, of Lucy, the assault on Lurie, and their gradual displacement by the neighbor who craves her land and knows more about the rapists than he lets on, Petrus, may be rather schematic in parts, but as with a drama, each character's defined according to his or her type. Coetzee's attention to details shows his commitment to each character in this serious, downbeat, and grim novel.
For instance, we view his accuser Melanie's signature on the document of her accusation, to Lurie through the limited omniscient gaze of the novel: "the arabesque of the M, the l with its bold upper loop, the downward gash of the I, the flourish of the final s." (40) In such mundane details, her attraction, and her vindication, swirl together to drag him down.
His rural retreat hastens his regression. "His mind has become a refuge for old thoughts, idle, indigent, with nowhere else to go." (72) He volunteers at an animal shelter. He tries to gain empathy, but he keeps his perspective: "So if we are going to be kind, let it be out of simple generosity, not because we feel guilty or fear retribution." (76) The novel's most telling moments, for me, came as Lurie begins to feel a connection-- but only to a point, eschewing sentimentality-- with the dogs he cares for, far from his former urban comforts.
As for his daughter, on her own, she faces the aftermath of the crime. The narrator muses how it's "a risk to own anything" in South Africa today. "Too many people, too few things. What there is must go into circulation, so that everyone can have a chance to be happy for a day." So the theory goes if not the brutal practice, the repayment of debts taken from the descendants of the settlers by those they subjugated.
Lucy's refusal to admit her rape galls him. She languishes, while he wants her to seek safety and earn justice. Lucy senses this is the cruel exchange, the test she must undergo to survive in the countryside of her transformed and restive nation. Lurie, meanwhile, finds the recuperation he came there for evades him. "Here he is losing himself day by day" as he cares for his daughter and does menial chores for covetous Petrus and at the animal shelter.
There, he has an uneasy, basic, affair with the shelter's supervisor, Bev. She's ungainly, with features like a troll, but Lurie rationalizes that now, this is the only kind of woman he will find for his shamed desires. "Half of literature is about it; young women struggling to escape from under the weight of old men, for the sake of the species." (190)
He explains to Bev how he's fallen. "Teaching was never a vocation for me. Certainly I never aspired to teach people how to live. I was what used to be called a scholar. I wrote books about dead people. That was where my heart was. I taught only to make a living." (162) He slowly regains his interest in a dramatic-operatic piece on Byron's abandoned mistress Teresa, and the conjunction of this failed romance with his own tangled lovelessness moves the final section of this story into a fitting meditation.
While Lucy, Petrus, and the hinterland's raw terrain prove ultimately uninviting, neither does the Cape, when Lurie returns from his extended stay, prove any more hospitable. The last sections show Lurie suspended between his urbanity and his pared-down life now, and show how his journey into the African interior has taken him into his own dark heart. As the title warns, this Booker Prize winner for 1999 unsparingly tears off the masks Lurie dons, until he and we must face his uncomfortable self.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
 Riveting, 2008-10-25
The first book I read by Coetzee was 'The Life and Times of Michael K'. It was difficult to get through and I avoided this author for many years. Recently I picked up 'Disgrace' and I could not put it down. It is written with intelligence and, more importantly, focuses on the power of emotions in human life. 'Disgrace' is poignant, frightening and loving - sometimes all at once. The horror of a new nation that has finally rid itself of Apartheid is a controversial topic. Mr. Coetzee grasps the many-faceted and difficult issues that come with change. He is not afraid of being politically incorrect. He is an artist and creates with his heart and mind through his pen. Most Nobel prize winners are difficult to wade through. This book is a page-turner. It is one of the few books I choose to re-read. While the book deals with families, race, change and the country of S. Africa, I believe that race is talked about only one time. Yet this is the underlying theme - how anger, desperation, revenge, reparations and hope create a desperate time for a new nation, newly rising from an ugly past. Disgraceful things occur from the embryos of the past. I recommend this book to anyone who cares about people, Africa, apartheid and the effects of the disgraceful era of colonialism on a nation. Setting people free does not make them better. Feelings of revenge, hopelessness, and anger have had decades to fester and grow. To try and understand this country rationally is impossible. Thank you Mr. Coetzee for the gifts of literature you have given the world.
0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
 Will put you in a bad mood and crush your spirit., 2008-10-08
Another example of "literature" that gets that moniker by virtue of being dark, depressing, anxiety producing and pointless. It has the most flagrantly negative ending since Romeo and Juliet which is a roaring comedy in comparison. If you enjoy that, you may get off on reading this annoying, condescending, purposefully grim little book.
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Booker AND Noble Prize - Oh C'mon!, 2008-09-04
I fully expect for this review to get trashed given the popularity of this book but here it goes anyway. This was at best a mediocre book. Unlike many of the negative reviewers I did not dislike it because it was depressing. The author tries very hard to write a depressing book but I felt little for the characters to be disturbed or to be depressed by their misfortune. That is a big failure for the author. The protagonist is not meant to be a likable character but that is not the problem either. Coetzee simply fails to develop his character or for that matter any of the other characters in the book. They are not believable. Their actions are unconventional, which by itself is not a problem, but the author's lack of explaining and convincing readers leaves readers puzzled.
I noticed that many of the 1-star reviewers rated the book poorly because of the sad emotions it brought on them. Unfortunately for me I cannot even admit to those same emotions. At least they felt something! Yes, it was a depressing book but it lacked depth and hence I did not become too involved in the story. If your goal is to learn a bit more about South Africa I would also recommend looking else where. Skip this one!
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
Challenges the reader, 2008-08-21
Coetzee's Disgrace is a complicated read and experience for the seasoned novel reader. The protaganist, David Lurie, is an unsympathetic, unlikeable main character. He is a womanizer, immoral, and emotionally immature. We meet him initially as he is engaged in his weekly tryst with a prostitute; we see him through a misguided -- and almost unrealistic -- seduction of one his students, which ultimately leads to his unapologetic downfall within his university community; and then, finally, we watch him physically degenerate through an attack while visiting his daughter's farm. All of his life-altering changes play against the backdrop of a South Africa experiencing its own transition. South Africa's political alteration, though painful, will ultimately lead to a freer and more enlightened society; so, too, will Lurie's recent experiences and growth lead to a more enlightened individual. We can only assume so, given his embracing of a woman who is described as physically unattractive, but emotionally and intellectually beautiful, a far cry from the exotic prostitute and attractive 20-year-old he had been with. Coetzee's language is beautifully sparse, and painful, similar to Ian McEwan's most moving prose.
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