Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee (1999-11-01)

Good read about a bored, troubled man who challenged every scene around him. He got too involved with issues and characters around him which eventually took him down. Interesting characters and glad to have read it! May read another by this author, too.

One of Coetzee's best novels has a dissolute professor, at the end of his career, dealing with the consequences of his sexual abuse and the changing face of South Africa. A painful ride at times, but beautifully written.

Will the white men with their history of wrong survive and, if so, under what "disgraced" circumstances?

This compelling story, written with sparse prose, raises some very complex questions about race.

An interesting book dealing with an alienated man and his conflicts and understandings of the social structures and objectives of different groups of South African society as well as his struggles with his own personality issues. Not an entertaining book, rather a book of conflict and understanding.

Some parts of the book was interesting, but the end was very disappointing. The book jumps around too much for me. Sometimes got confused who was talking especially when he brought in the "opera" book he was writing. I only purchased the book for class. I would have considered it a waste of money, had I purchased it for a personal read.

Utterly disappointing...the protagonist has no purpose and the author does not give any plausible basis for the protagonist's (or his daughter) stubbornness. You can't insist on something illogical without explaining why that person would find that reasonable.

I hated this book and all the characters but especially the main character. He is a horrid person who does horrible things. Kept waiting for that to change, but no. Couldn't identify with anything at all in this book.

The paperback was dirty. Something had been spilled on it, possibly coffee. I washed the cover and the book is still readable but not in good shape. I found a photograph in the book of a couple dancing.

Well the author got the right name for this novel. Disgrace. I usually read books on history or historical novels and I thought I would try a best seller. What a mistake. If your into white guilt run out and buy this book. I noticed that the author no longer lives in South Africa. Gee I wonder why. Parts of this book are well written but overall it was a waste of time.

A cold but engaging experience. I didn’t warm to any of the characters, but the quality of the prose is so polished and spare and the story – of a South African college professor, David Lurie, propelling himself into one slow-motion train crash after another – is so realistic, I found the novel very compelling indeed. I didn’t care for Lurie’s lack of moral compass, nor his atheism (which, I correctly guessed, reflects that of the author), but I found him an intensely human character. His journey, from self-indulgent sensualist to slightly less self-indulgent sensualist, is depressingly but provocatively convincing.

Similarly depressing but thought-provoking are the contextual reflections upon post-apartheid South Africa. They made me feel that in the 1990s we were fed a feel-good story about Nelson Mandela that was so overwhelming in comparison to anything else being reported from that country, UK/US media did us a disservice by saying too little about the desperately conflict-ridden society he was governing. I was not surprised to learn that Coetzee emigrated to Australia three years after the book came out, though his having done so seems oddly to contrast with Lurie’s final, somewhat Hemingwayesque resignation to committing himself to problematic relationships and doing what very little he can to making his world a better place.

J. M. Coetzee’s novel Disgrace is surely meant to be read on two levels: the allegorical and the realistic. It’s a novel about modern South Africa, a novel about the changing racial relations there, a novel about academia—and it certainly is a novel about disgrace. As far as the allegorical, the hammer gets a bit heavy at times when punching down the coffin nails to make point: Native South Africans are deservedly furious because of past treatment; power was abused; retribution must be expected. And indeed the white protagonist, Professor David Lurie, does abuse power by sleeping with an Indian hooker and, then, with a student. Hence the title, Disgrace, don’t you see? But there’s bad and then there’s evil. And here is where the allegory becomes strained and whatever realistic aspect the novel has—and it does have a plenteous abundance of gruesome description—begins to creak. First, let’s back up: the hooker is a hooker after, all: she’s making money. The professor’s fault other than being a john is trying to contact her on a personal level when he sees her around the city. This is a fault? Well, allegorically, sure: he’s denying the truth that he is oppressing her by trying to convert her into something other than a female sex organ. Beginning to sound a bit PC to you? Read on. . . . The student, then? Seventeen, right? Underage, right? No, she’s 21 and is coming off an angry spat with her boyfriend. A typical enough seduction scene. Lurie is certainly taking advantage of his power, is caught, and the student newspaper slaps him hard with harassment as does an academic review board. In turn he gets his academic hackles up and while admitting guilt has “reservations of a philosophical kind” about the admission the review board wants him to sign. The entire scene reads like a meeting of stubborn children:
“We want to give you and opportunity to state your position.”
“I have stated my position. I am guilty.”
“Guilty of what?”
“Of all that I am charged with.”
“You are taking us in circles, Dr. Lurie.”
Well, no he isn’t; both sides are taking themselves in large, self-important circles. Lurie loses his job plus a good deal of his retirement. This is only one of many inane steps that this protagonist and his daughter make in this novel.
. . . Now we start into the allegory. Lurie moves in with his daughter, who lives alone in the countryside, among the natives. She makes a living by selling vegetables in the market. Are we to read that she is unlawfully raping the land? Evidently so. On this raped land where his daughter lives, Lurie plans on writing a comic opera about Byron. Are we to read that this is a foppish and frivolous waste at best? Evidently so. One day, three male South Africans show up and ask to use the phone. What ensues is a rape and torture scene, with the daughter ending up pregnant and Lurie ending up with lighter fluid thrown on his face and lit. But wait, oh ye in search of allegorical PC justice, for more will come. The daughter later spots one of the rapists but both she and Lurie refuse to act. Instead, she becomes a concubine of her South African neighbor (who evidently knew the rape was going to happen). And Lurie? He begins working with abandoned dogs, humanely shooting them. Are we to read that perhaps he and his ilk should thus be shot? Apparently so. Dogs, by the way, seem to have some symbolic significance since they are used by Whites to oppress South Africans. His daughter tells of her plan to become one of several wives, and Lurie replies,
“How humiliating. . . .”
“Yes, I agree, it is humiliating. But perhaps that is a good point to start from again. Perhaps that is what I must learn to accept. To start at ground level. With nothing. . . . No cards, no weapons, no property, no rights, no dignity.”
“Like a dog.”
“Yes, like a dog.”
Lurie, angered, moves back to the city, to find that his house ransacked and his notes destroyed. He goes to a play to watch the young girl he had an affair with. She’s taken the lead role and he stupidly, proudly believes that she’s matured because of him and maybe they can resume the affair. (Ahem, you can see that learning curves are rather steep for this man and his daughter.) No, her boyfriend warns the good professor; if she saw you, she would “spit in your face.”
So Lurie does the only logical thing (?) and moves back to the country where he can resume his job of shooting stray animals. There, instead of saving one dog he’s become attached to, he bears “him in his arms like a lamb” to be shot. So . . . Lurie and his daughter have become symbolic dogs? Evidently. And we are to believe that this is justice? Evidently. And we aren’t to want to shake both Lurie and his daughter against a hard concrete wall to knock a modicum of sense into their heads? Evidently not.
Coetzee’s short novel (220 pages) obviously pushed my buttons. It is well written and, as I noted, gruesomely descriptive. Maybe it will push your buttons differently.

David Lurie, a university professor in post-apartheid South Africa, will go to almost any length to satisfy his sexual needs, including the seduction of one of his students. When she charges him with sexual harassment, he is forced out of his job, partly because he shows no real remorse. He then moves in with his daughter, a lesbian who lives on a small farm. A tragic and violent event drives home the vulnerability of women in this society and sheds a different light on David’s role as a predator. This novel made me uncomfortable, particularly with regard to the role reversal between the blacks and the whites. The blacks have the power, and the whites now find themselves in a world where they are not the bosses. David’s daughter is more accepting of the new order of things, particularly the lack of law and order, while her father’s frustration festers. Their opposing attitudes cause a rift between them, and I have to say that, despite his despicable behavior with regard to women, his point of view seems entirely reasonable with regard to his daughter’s safety. His daughter becomes depressed but ultimately seems willing to absorb some personal losses in order to maintain her quiet life. Is she courageous or just plain stubborn? She basically has three choices: stand up for her rights, accept the situation as is, or leave. Standing up for her rights could cost her her life, and I think she feels that the whites deserve the treatment they are getting from the blacks anyway. Turnabout is fair play.

This is an engrossing and deceptively simple read. The straightforward prose keeps the story moving forward, yet at the same time gives a thoughtful reader plenty to consider.

52 years old seems very early for David Lurie, a white university professor in the “new” South Africa, to be moving into premature semi-retirement, yet that is where his actions seem finally to be taking him. A brief affair with a student causes his already limping career to take a disastrous turn for the worse, leaving him few options and virtually nowhere to go. He finally settles in with his daughter on her rural small farm. It seems like the two are virtually strangers, and that renewed relationship is seriously re-examined and tested after the brutal attack they suffer together early in the story.

One theme that stood out for me was the issue of Repentance. Early in the story, Professor Lurie defiantly rejects several attempts to elicit from him a public expression of repentance. Thereafter, however, he seems to spend a lot of time making tentative approaches to it on his own from different angles, even though he carries with it no expectation of returning to his previous life. How does true repentance differ from the mere regret a perpetrator experiences after having been caught? Once you believe you feel truly repentant, does that have to be expressed to another before the act is complete? If so, is it important who you select to receive your expression of repentance? Is your repentance real if it is freighted with an accompanying desire for absolution?

Professor Lurie is not criminally bad, but neither is he anyone's idea of a great human being. In this story he is neither hero nor even anti-hero. The author does not answer his questions for him before the story is over, but he seems to be pushing toward those answers by then. His daughter Lucy is also on a journey of her own that really starts in earnest after the attack.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book, and will be seeking out others by this author.

"Disgrace" is a compelling book that appears to be heading in one direction before taking a realistic yet unexpected turn and then veering off to some place completely different.
The book centers around Professor David Lurie, a man not above seducing and sleeping with his college students. The book begins when Lurie encounters a young rather naive woman who not only falls victim to his manipulations, but also strikes a feeling in Lurie that goes beyond mere lust. Unfortunately, the feeling is not reciprocated and Lurie's aggressive attempts to prolong the relationship result in catastrophe. She reports him, the university punishes him, and his life begins to unravel.
At this point, Coetzee has already created an intriguing and well told scenario that, if he had followed a more linear path, would have produced a great story. Instead, the tale heads in a different direction when Lurie moves to the South African countryside to stay with his daughter, who lives alone on a farm. The politics of South Africa soon come into play in a violent and life altering way, and Lurie's reaction to the events that unfold, coupled with the disgrace he experienced surrounding his unethical sexual affair, lend themselves to some emotionally charged and unforgettable reading.
Coetzee won the Nobel Prize for Literature for "Disgrace" and it is deserved. While the book is in no way optimistic or joyful, it is real, and the experiences and emotions the characters experience, coupled with the discussion of the always intriguing politics of South Africa, make for an unforgettable read.

I just finished J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace last night, and woke up this morning thinking that it was loathsome in almost every regard. The very bad behavior of the protagonist is punished, without exception, by the terrible and gratuitous suffering of women, homosexuals, and animals.

Just in case you don't get the point, his redemption, his apotheosis, is seen through his trying to write an opera -- the composition process beautifully well described but founded on the awful, shamelessly sadistic suffering of its female protagonist. Coetzee permits himself literally to scapegoat his repellent hero's suffering on to an abandoned 19th century woman. Asked how to keep the attention of jaded Paris audiences of the Belle Epoque, Victorien "Tosca" Sardou replied, Torture the women. Spielberg's wet t-shirt scenes in Schindler's List spring to mind.

The book is touted as a brave face-to-face encounter with post-apartheid south Africa, which consists, apparently, of miscegenation of every kind, punished by panels composed of mixed race or South Asian women's libber harpies in charge of human rights, or untrammelled by worthless police. The protagonist starts by screwing a prostitute with dark-haired children, presumably Indian, and moves on to a 20-year-old student named Isaacs. His punishment -- literally, his disgrace -- is that his Lesbian daughter should be raped by three black Africans, and not only not bring charges, but not get an abortion, and not leave her hopeless flower business farm in the countryside. Worse, he is forced to screw a deeply unattractive woman who euthanizes the few animals not brutally slaughtered or brutally permitted to reproduce by rapacious, multiplying, mentally deficient, congenitally immoral, and improvident blacks. In case you don't get the point that women are in charge now, on the last page he brings the one dog he has been able to care for to the killer woman for euthanizing. Because he can't keep it up on his own any more.

The misogynism cascading from subsidiary passages entailing dialogue spoken by his ex-wife, or the demands of the educated women of the academic panel which investigates his affair with Isaacs (only the men on the panel are semi-humane) is awful to feel.

And so on.

Um, no.

If I want real black and white race relations, I'll just stick to George Pelecanos. Or The Wire.

The spareness of the prose disguises it, as I've suggested, until you've slept on it. It's a time bomb of nastiness.

Ugh.

An old man entering his last phase finds himself reaching out, but after the arrogance and license of his more attractive years he finds that there is nobody left to hold onto. Seeking the comfort of those who must love him, he travels across the country only to serve as a witness as his daughter discovers in her adversity a final resting place for her soul.

In “Disgrace”, J.M. Coetzee’s acclaimed novel – based in modern South Africa – the overlay of the white western with the existential black African dilemma transcends. The shell of modernity in a pre-modern world – the impunity of development in a precariously tribal land. The elemental hate of race relations as the canvas upon which a story about the personal discovery of a man is written. This could all be inspiring; but what if this path leads instead to the realization of the profoundly commonplace?

Telling that story is difficult, but Coetzee did it well.

This book was sad, and therefore not a stress-free read. Those of us who are novelists understand that the key to a novel is starting well, holding people’s interest as we develop our characters and then delivering at the end. In this process, and especially with a novel such as this, Coetzee shows himself to be a master. This is especially true because the plot of this book was not a natural, easy win. We all like to read books about supermen. We swoon over love stories that depict the magnificent. We revere the heroic. But what if our characters are despicable? Not despicable because they are genius masterminds or irresistible powers of evil. Despicable because they are petty and miserable and insignificant. How does that story attract? How do you make this tale sing? That is the challenge that Coetzee faced – and overcame – with “Disgrace”.

Disgrace is a short story, and for this reason I won’t reveal its secrets. I will tell you I was surprised and moved in ways I would not have imagined. It was not epic and sweeping, but instead deeply human. But it is these types of novels that lend us our humanity. Read this book, you will be better for it.

SPOILERS WITHIN
Overall the novel left me with an unpleasant feeling. It wasn't the result of the content (rape, animal suffering, racism...), but rather the tone of the novel. The first "part" involving the affair with the student was interesting...although the reaction of the school board and the professor himself did not ring true to me. In spite of the generous descriptions of internal events, I also found the main character to feel one-dimensional so I never seemed to form a bond to him, and as a result, I was not affected by his struggles. The second "part" of the book was jarring because the whole book shifts from the scandal with the professor to him living out in the country with his lesbian daughter. I know there is supposed to be a paralell here, but it wasn't interesting to me, unfortunately. The daughter was incredibly flatly-drawn, and her response to the "incident" (remaining put) did not ring true at all, and actually made me like her even less. Her stance as a racial martyr was also a turn-off for me. Also, the stuff about Byron was obtrusive and seemed pretentious to me...as well as uninteresting. Once again, I assume there was some literary device at work, but it just wasn't interesting to me. Overall I was left with an icky and dissatisfied feeling.

Our MOOC class via Brown University and COURSERA read and discussed this book as the last reading in a course (also going to be offered Summer 2014) on Relationship in Fiction. The professor from Brown had some intriguing insights about this Booker Prize winning novel:

* It's a probing analysis of privilege: male, race and human.

* Our blindness may be hardwired - there's the arduousness of understanding.

* Not an accident that the protagonist is literature professor - literature shows troubling light on all of our affairs.

* How can we measure our lives? Sophoclean warning - no man is happy until dead.

* Understanding goes through many stages.

* It's a risk to own anything - too many people, too few things.

* How different we are at each stage of our CV.

* The author uses language that knows what it's doing.

From my perspective, in this novel it seems the author uses role reversal as plot points as a means for characters to gain understanding. In the beginning, David, the lit professor, hires a prostitute to satisfy his physical needs. Later in the book a woman (Bev Shaw) uses him for her physical needs, and then dismisses him. Now he understands what being a commodity is. He seduces a student - is it rape? Later, his daughter is raped. There's a symmetry in the plot. It seems out of disgrace, grace comes. When all of your former pleasures and status are taken from you and you think life has nothing to offer you anymore, you find that life can convert poverty into another kind of richness the professor said. 5 stars for the fine writing and depth of this novel. This novel is dark, but a fascinating catalyst for discussing fairly universal questions.

J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace (Viking, 1999)
[originally posted 14Aug2000]

As far as the rest of the world is concerned, the war is over. Apartheid has been smashed, South Africa is integrated, we can all forget SA exists and go on with our lives. South Africans, on the other hand, are painfully aware that the battle has just begun. And like all revolutions, it will not be bloodless.

J. M. Coetzee was on the front lines of the fight against apartheid for decades. As a sidelight, he became a blinkin' good author, gained international acclaim, won most every award known to man, and did more than any living human being, with the arguable exception of Nelson Mandela, to expose and underline the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. And now, with the legislation changing and integration happening, like most revolutionaries, he's going through the inevitable period of questioning: were things, perhaps, better the old way?

The result is Disgrace, a look at life in the new South Africa from as jaundiced an eye as one may ever encounter. The plot is thus: a womanizing university professor is caught, as it were, with his pants down. Facing censure form the college, he leaves and goes to stay with his daughter and her previously-worker-and-now-fellow-landowner away from the city for a while. In the country, events conspire to make him re-examine his viewpoint on everything from animal cruelty to (of course) the situation of minorities in South Africa under the new, "liberal" government. And the answers he comes up with, for the most part, he doesn't like.

Yes. It's just as depressing as it sounds, for the most part; the razor-sharp wit that Coetzee is famous for is in short supply here. There's the occasional chuckle, usually in sympathy for some boneheaded blunder, but no real out-and-out snickers at the stupidity inherent in the society around the characters; the tone of the book is more a stunned despair that the ideals of the revolution, five years on, could still be so far from realization. (A look at the American civil rights movement should have set the revolutionaries straight, but... you know.) But the depression factor doesn't preclude an appreciation for the lyricism of Coetzee's prose. Far from it. This is a simple human tragedy, albeit one of country-wide proportions, played out in its own minimal and somewhat pathetic fashion by a white man and a black man who remember life under apartheid all too well, and the way the world is slowly disintegrating around them.

Coetzee, of course, provides no easy answers; he's smart enough, and probably cynical enough, to realize they don't exist, and that South Africa, much like the characters in Disgrace, will simply have to keep stumbling along in the darkness until they trip over a lamp. And when they do, they hope against hope that, perhaps, they will have matches. *** ½

I thought "Disgrace" by J.M. Coetzee started off with a bang. Clever, subversive, intellectual. But even as it got more disturbing and racially and class charged, I felt it lost steam, became more enamoured with its own cleverness and perspective.

Mr. Coetzee is a Nobel Prize winning author, and I've read only one other book by him ("Slow Man" which I found to be grumpy and misogynist and self absorbed and uninteresting).

His protagonist in "Disgrace" is far more charming and sharp, which keeps the whole white man/player in South Africa perspective in line. David Lurie is a 52 year old professor in Cape Town, whose affair with a student, is only the beginning of his troubles. Less than a third of the way into the book, the landscape shifts dramatically, to farm country where Lurie's daughter lives, and where the story widens to larger themes of race, class, gender, aging, violence, sex, ambition, and animal and human rights.

My main issue with "Disgrace" was the fact that I couldn't see any further than Lurie's limited vision of the world, and that this vision was presented too solidly omnisciently. For instance, the young student he has an affair with is never more than a reluctant dead fish in bed (this happens in the beginning of the book, so this isn't a spoiler), so his continued treatises on Desire ring hollow and selfish. There was some of this going on in "Slow Man" about the "rights" of men to have sex with women. Maybe I'm conflating the two books unfairly in this regard, but I'm sensitive to the issue, so it struck me. And I found all the referencing of opera and Latin and literature and so on not subtle enough to blend in with the narrative. It felt too structured and purposeful and Metaphorical.

Still, the writing in "Disgrace" is great, the dialogue pitch perfect and smart, the landscape vivid, the themes overarching, and the story gripping. Mr. Coetzee knows what he's doing.

My introduction to Coetzee's work came in a college writing seminar. The instructor had assembled a reading list based, it appeared, on a random assortment of newish novels that piqued her interest, none of which she bothered reading prior to the start of the course. This the students took as a sign of laziness, so we were predisposed to dislike whatever the teacher fed us. One book happened to be Coetzee's "Elizabeth Costello," which I recall eight years later as being a slow read, pensive, a meditation. My irritation over the instructor, coupled with my impatience as a young student, biased me against Coetzee's writing, so it took a long time for me to return to him, which luckily I did, because "Disgrace" is an entirely different sort of book than "Elizabeth Costello." It is what reviewers would call "compulsively readable," which in this case means there's a palpable tension hanging over the narrative from the get-go that lingers to the final page. We don't want to read on for fear of what will happen next, but of course we keep reading. The story is told from the viewpoint of an aging college professor, and one source of the aforementioned tension is the professor's stubborness. He seems reluctant to accept the signs of aging or to change his worldview. When the professor, David Lurie, becomes embroiled in a sex scandal involving one of his current students, he refuses to defend or explain his actions, which leads to his dismissal from the school. Lurie also fails to accept the changing South African culture he experiences when he travels from Cape Town to a more remote section of the country to visit his daughter, Lucy. Lurie cannot establish a connection with Lucy, nor can he understand the lengths she goes to in order to adapt to her surroundings. When young thugs terrorize the two at Lucy's farmhouse, the event, rather than drawing father and daughter together, distances them further. What amazes me about the book is how cohesive it seems despite the shifts in focus. "Disgrace" begins with the professor's interest in a young "exotic" prostitute, then shifts to the scandal with the student, then veers off course again, taking us to Lucy's rural world before shifting yet again to Lurie's work in a primitive pet hospital and his futile efforts at composing an opera based on Byron's life. It is the professor's distinctive voice--closed-off, learned, unwavering--that ties the various threads together. He is at times an infuriating character, yet his vulnerability is revealed multiple times. In fact, he seems determined to suppress that vulnerability at every turn. The way events in the novel opened onto tragic and inevitable consequences ultimately gave "Disgrace" the feel of a Shakespearean tragedy.

I read this book, first time, in 2001, attracted to the white cover with the title in small black letters but recently couldn't remember much about the story. When I read it this time, I was very impressed by the depth and layers of the story in simple, very frugal writing, conveying the process of a country undergoing huge scale changes. The disgrace of losing youthful charms, and sense of invincibility, disgrace of having to explain himself of being subjected to condescension and judgment, disgrace of sharing history of subjugation as collective perpetrator and then as victim, disgrace of survival at all cost, disgrace of the way animals are treated, disgrace of inability to protect the ones you love....The author conveys all this without sentimentalizing or shocking graphics in his rather cold, composed style of writing. This is a very intelligent book, and worth reading again.

I had a similar feeling reading Ian McEwan's SATURDAY a few years back. Good story though a tad ridiculous in places. The writing, though, is so note perfect that it just draws you in. DISGRACE packs quite a bit into it.

Set in post-apartheid South Africa, it charts the downfall and attempted redemption of David Lurie. At 52, he still has some of vigor in him but not as much as his imagination would have it. Like a little kid whose eyes are bigger than his stomach, Lurie thinks he can handle a fling with a student. He cannot. The downfall is swift and merciless. J.M. Coetzee must be well acquainted with the putrid quagmire of the politically correct university to describe the proceedings against Lurie so well with such an economy of words. Anyone whose heart has not been constricted by that equally putrid ideology of feminism cannot help but feel ones nerves pinched at the Orwellian procedure and outcome.

Trying to find balance afterwards, Lurie reconnects with his daughter Lucy in the South African farmland. Here, the realities of race in modern South Africa provide the background against a clash of visions between father and daughter. After a vicious racial attack (South Africa is the rape capital of the world, last I heard) those visions hit the breaking point, with Lurie more concerned about his daughter's safety and the daughter, symbolic of the nation at that point in time, just wanting to continue with her life, damaged and lessened though it may be.

DISGRACE is filled with a few subplots and secondary characters that not only provide texture to the main characters but also provide some excellent context for the issues underlying the plot. From the (very) ambiguous black neighbor to Lurie's surprising volunteer work with the dogs, these provide enough tension to humanize David and Lucy even further and demonstrate that the personal philosophies we carry around with us have to bend a bit for the realities of others with whom we must interact. This is definitely an author I shall remember when I am perusing the shelves.

David Lurie, a university professor with a weakness for women,has a one sided affair with one of his students.He is denounced and-though freely admitting his guilt and wrongdoing to the board of inquiry-he refuses to sate the modern day lust for revenge by repenting in public. To escape he stays with his daughter at her rural smallholding.A brutal robbery occurs.His daughter is raped.Their opposing views on how to deal with it reveal all the faultlines that exist between the old and the new...
'Disgrace' works on so many levels,not only as a gripping story and narrative, but also in exploring the dark history and past that the new South Africa was born from.The history of the white mans disgrace (mirrored by Lurie's own disgrace)the need for revenge,settling scores or simply trying 'To forget it.Its finished.Move on' (as Lucy feels about her ordeal)show the shaky road on which South Africa walks, and the fears of repeating the disaster that was and still is Zimbabwe.
Having read some of the new emerging South African writers, it is clear how influential 'Disgrace' is, not only in literary terms, but in current philosophical thought.
The allusions to Byron's philandering across Europe and the feelings he left behind (analogous to colonialism?)this really is the complete book. Absorbing, thought provoking and disturbing.

This book is really two connected stories in radically different settings which involve one main character. Coetzee's protagonist is the unappealing character of David Lurie. Coetzee's choice of a name appropriately suggests the lurid, unsavory character David has become as he attempts to lure women to himself. In the opening sentences we first meet David as he seeks his solace in his weekly rendezvous with a prostitute and subsequently with a student following the end of his ten year marriage which was based on sensuality, now fizzled out. David erroneously convinces himself that these women return his interest. His mistaken perspective enables him to aggressively and doggedly pursue them as a predator, even as they try to leave. Not recognizing when to stop is what gets the ageing professor into trouble.

As a South African professor of romantic literature and an expert on Lord Byron, David prophetically asks his class to explain the following lines from Byron's verse, referring to Lucifer, "the angel hurled out of heaven":

"He stood a stranger in this breathing world,."
An erring spirit from another hurled;
A thing of dark imaginings that shaped
By choices the perils he by chance escaped."

David's selection of this verse is not mere serendipidy. He brings up this verse just as he himself is about to punished and hurled out of his comfortable academic lifestyle by an academic review committee. His expulsion is retribution for his total lack of contrition for a bad decision to seduce a reluctant 20 year old student who has a boyfriend. David's unbending response to the committee's request for apology is to reply that he acted on his instinct alone, in response to human nature, a sorry excuse for a professional.

The setting of the second part of this book is in the desolate rural South African farmland to which David now finds himself "hurled" as a "stranger." David, who is now an outcast, has decided to seek refuge with his daughter. He finds little to do in this unfamiliar other-world. David ends up finding meaning in assisting the sad task of the euthanasia and cremation of unwanted, abandoned dogs simply because he finds so few opportunities to make himself useful. With few women around, he ends up settling for an affair with a middle aged portly, married woman he finds unattractive and unkempt-because there is simply nobody else around. He writes an opera about his hero, Byron, who had a similar philandering lifestyle. Only a dog who is about to be euthanized, and who is unique among the dogs in liking music, listens and seems to appreciate David's opus.

Both David,and the daughter he suspects is a lesbian, fall prey to a racially motivated hate crime when his trusting daughter enables a home invasion by permitting three male strangers to use their phone. Due to very limited law enforcement, the revolting crimes go unpunished and instead of being hurled into jail, an egregious situation of coexistence develops when one of the perpetrators ends up unabashedly moving in next door with relatives. He poses a daily threat. He peeps into their window and serves as a constant reminder to his daughter, already traumatized by the consequences of the violent acts.

As one would expect of a Booker prize winner, this book is very well written with concise language and a moving plot. However, emotionally, it deals with extremely weighty and unattractive subjects. Notably, the book has no character sufficiently appealing for the reader to identify or empathize with. The daughter initially seems strong but becomes a weak victim after the crime The professor's fall from grace is never resolved. The book ends on a particularly low note. When his protagonist is given a chance for redemption, and could form a relationship, albeit with an animal,David fails to save the dog he could have easily rescued and adopted. Our disappointment is intensified because we are told it is the only dog who likes music and the only one to appreciate David's composition. Instead the book ends with him subjecting the animal to euthansia, sacrificing it along with all the other dogs.

Coetzee's plot confronts the really tough problems of gender and racial hate crimes including the violence of rape motivated by anger and the desires of some to level a historically unequal playing field and to equalize things between the haves and have nots with violence. While in the first setting the fallen professor's disgrace seems well deserved, especially in view of his lack of remorse, in the second part, the disgrace is not at all one his daughter brought upon herself. She did not "shape" by her "choices the perils" that fell upon her. It seems poetically and morally unjust this victim should suffer for the sins of their ancestors.Unlike the professor, the perpetrators of these outrageous crimes never suffered disgrace or imprisonment, but remained at large to mock their victims.

While not a satisfying ending, it may be a realistic ending. Searching "hate crimes in South Africa" on-line, I did not find racially motivated violence, but did encounter the term "corrective rape." Lesbian women are apparently at significant risk of victimization. Rape is intended to set them straight and teach them a lesson. It continues unpunished because there are rarely consequences in South Africa's criminal justice system. This explains why Coetzee's victim chooses not go public or to inform the police when the crime is inflicted- or even to ask the police to arrest a perpetrator who has the audacity to move in next door. He can live in close proximity with impunity because there is reason he should hide.

probably there isn't anything much left to say considering there are 378 reviews of this book.

I gave it 5 stars, but I likely will never read another Coatzee book again. He is a writer of the first water, but he is just too hard on his reader. He doesn't spare the reader. This happens sometimes, when writers take on one or another of the really hard aspects of the human condition, but I really prefer a writer of the first water writing on a difficult topic and injecting a little bit of human transcendence along with the grittiness and the tragedy. A little bit, just a little bit, is that too much to ask from a writer? a soupcon of hope. As a species we are irretrievably flawed, and also capable of transcendence. The triumph of the human spirit is always, always appreciated by the faithful and diligent reader, and I wish Coatzee had seen fit to honor his reader for reading the thing all the way to the end...

the the store reader reviews were excellent, 5 stars for the reviews, overall. I learned a lot about post-apartheid South Africa, the reviewers filled in the blanks suggested by Coatzee. I'm not a South African, I'm an American -- a country with it's own share of disgrace. But after reading Coatzee I'm feeling less harsh and judgemental about my own country, more optimistic. So I guess that is a plus for the book.

there is a lot to this book. there are a lot of themes, sparely and expertly laid out. it is interesting to read both professional and reader reviews, to see what themes resonated and which themes were kind of glossed over. one big professional reviewer of this book, someone who teaches it for a living and who has even written a book about the book, he insists that the personal story of David Lurie is simply a stand-in, a metaphor for the country of South Africa.

I certainly didn't read the book this way. To me, the personal life of David Lurie, the privileged, educated man who dedicated his life to the god Eros -- this is a very familiar theme in Western culture these days. In America, and elsewhere I would imagine, all bow down to "in love with", accepting the wreckage of lives as the just due of the god.

Coatzee did a fabulous job of explaining male sexuality. The book was worth reading for that alone. The outstanding sentence for me occurred during the episode when he met Melanie's family, had a meal with them. On seeing her even more beautiful younger sister, Desiree, a schoolgirl: "He meets the mother's eyes, and the the daughter's, and again the current leaps, the current of desire."