Disgrace (J.M. Coetzee)

Sometimes Coetzee's fiction can come across as the work of a philosopher or essayist rather than a novelist, but in Disgrace he generally avoids sounding too intellectual by making a somewhat despicable character the focal point, somebody whose learning doesn't make him any better a person. The character in question is a professor who has to learn to put his life back together after committing what may be a crime. He has to recover from a fatal blow to his dignity, but he finds that he can't do it by returning to his previous position, and there's no escape in dying as there is for other Coetzee characters like the narrator of The Age of Iron. There's also a very serious and very un-p.c. political commentary about the failings of black-led South Africa which made Coetzee more or less an outcast from his own country. So, appropriately enough, the book disgraced him though it is in actuality one of his most accomplished literary works.

On one level, about the demise and education of a narcissistic professor who sexually harrasses a student. On another level an allegory about the raping of South Africa and the rage and violence that finally provoked. A superb book that simply cannot be put down.

Disgrace is sparse, sharp, and dark. It contained no colorful natives, no majestic wildlife, and no exotic scents or flavors. It quickly, almost surgically, boxed the main character, communications professor David Lurie, into a prison of his making. Chance circumstances leave Lurie looking for sexual companionship and a series of bad choices lead to his disgrace. Readily admitting his guilt, but unwilling to admit to any remorse, Lurie compounds his disgrace and is exiled to his estranged daughter's country home. In a self-imposed solitary confinement, cut off from the rural community by his homophobia, sexism and racism and other bigotries, he is forsaken even by the romantic poet Byron and can only empathize with Byron's left-behind lover Teresa as she fades into middle age. I specifically chose this book because it deals with the aftershocks of apartheid. Due to Coetzee's minimalist approach, the reader learns little about the various characters' previous experiences. No specifi... Read more

Years ago, and I do mean years (1972 in fact), I read a number of South African novels for a senior class English project. In the intervening 37 years, I read "The Covenant" by James Michener, Nelson Mandela's autobiography (one of my heroes) and not much else on the subject. When I saw Nobel-winner Coetzee's book "Disgrace" on a list of best English-language books from the Commonwealth, I thought it was worth a try and I was right. "Disgrace" is the first post-apartheid book I've read, but that stain on the beautiful country still has a significant impact on the story. Protagonist David Lurie, a divorced professor at Cape Town Technical University, views his perpetual horniness as a biology problem to be solved rather than an imposition on others' lives. His clinically orchestrated affair with a vulnerable young student results in his first disgrace, the loss of his job. From city and university life, Lurie moves to the outback of South Africa to live with his daughter Luc... Read more

Enough people have written on how powerful this novel is, so I need hardly weigh in with my own thoughts. I do, however, find it rather odd that nobody has drawn attention to the comic strains of the novel. Now, I do not mean to detract from the gravity of the novel- the subject matter at hand is certainly no cause for laughter. Yet the parallels between Lurie and Don Quixote are, for this reader at least, clear- like Quixote, Lurie filters reality through the lens of literature, transforming his entire life into an overlit pantomime of which he is the central actor. Like Quixote, he is a walking anachronism, a 'moral dinosaur' (in Lucy's terms) whose hidebound principles are profoundly out of step with his times. One reviewer has compared Lurie to Ahab, and while I think such a comparison appears to be tenable, Lurie is rather different from that most memorable of monomaniacs. I'm not so sure that Lurie is, like Ahab, an obsessive driven by inexplicable impulses, though he would c... Read more

This arch, posturing novel is bloodless, unaffecting, prissy-pants, and reeks of falsity. No fictional reality is created; instead, there is a haphazard, tossed-off quality. Most of the events are drained white of any drama or power, presumably purposely. I need to reread Tom Sharpe's big-hearted South Africa books, Riotous Assembly and Indecent Exposure, to cleanse my palate of this pinched, fussy thing.

this book casually communicates its true message as "background" to the plot, giving us offhand assorted facts of life in south africa: the revamping of the university curriculum now excludes literature as irrevelant...hundreds of people scavenge amongst the refuse at the dump...enterprising blacks now have power of life and death over isolated whites...

Coetzee won the Booker prize for this novel set in South Africa, the only writer to date to do so. The man can write and has an amazing ability to drop you right into a life in the opening sentence, in this case a divorced professor who at 52 "has managed to solve the problem of sex rather well." Not exactly... as it turns out. The title is appropriate for both the man and the country. Written in the present tense, situations are left unresolved and very much on one's mind at the end of the book.

An uncomfortable novel about a South African Professor's fall from grace after having an affair with one of his students. This personal story is set against the backdrop of a South Africa which is struggling to define a new social order; both between black and white, and young and old. The real conflict in the story comes when the Professor moves in with his daughter in an attempt to put the pieces of his life back together - only to find that his daughter's life has descended into something which he can neither understand nor respect.