J.M. Coetzee’s latest novel, The Schooldays of Jesus, is now available from Viking. Late Essays: 2006-2016 will be available January 2018. Set in post-apartheid South Africa, J. M. Coetzee’s searing novel tells the story of David Lurie, a twice divorced, 52-year-old professor of communications and Romantic Poetry at Cape Technical University. Lurie believes he has created a comfortable, if … created a comfortable, if somewhat passionless, life for himself. He lives within his financial and emotional means. Though his position at the university has been reduced, he teaches his classes dutifully; and while age has diminished his attractiveness, weekly visits to a prostitute satisfy his sexual needs. He considers himself happy. But when Lurie seduces one of his students, he sets in motion a chain of events that will shatter his complacency and leave him utterly disgraced.
Lurie pursues his relationship with the young Melanie—whom he describes as having hips “as slim as a twelve-year-old’s”—obsessively and narcissistically, ignoring, on one occasion, her wish not to have sex. When Melanie and her father lodge a complaint against him, Lurie is brought before an academic committee where he admits he is guilty of all the charges but refuses to express any repentance for his acts. In the furor of the scandal, jeered at by students, threatened by Melanie’s boyfriend, ridiculed by his ex-wife, Lurie is forced to resign and flees Cape Town for his daughter Lucy’s smallholding in the country. There he struggles to rekindle his relationship with Lucy and to understand the changing relations of blacks and whites in the new South Africa. But when three black strangers appear at their house asking to make a phone call, a harrowing afternoon of violence follows which leaves both of them badly shaken and further estranged from one another. After a brief return to Cape Town, where Lurie discovers his home has also been vandalized, he decides to stay on with his daughter, who is pregnant with the child of one of her attackers. Now thoroughly humiliated, Lurie devotes himself to volunteering at the animal clinic, where he helps put down diseased and unwanted dogs. It is here, Coetzee seems to suggest, that Lurie gains a redeeming sense of compassion absent from his life up to this point.
Written with the austere clarity that has made J. M. Coetzee the winner of two Booker Prizes, Disgrace explores the downfall of one man and dramatizes, with unforgettable, at times almost unbearable, vividness the plight of a country caught in the chaotic aftermath of centuries of racial oppression.
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“I am sunk into a state of disgrace from which it will not be easy to lift myself. It is not a punishment I have refused. I do not murmur against it. On the contrary, I am living it out from day to day, trying to accept disgrace as my state of being.”
Coetzee has a way of writing and describing the human existence that is just utterly breathtaking. None of his characters are beautiful people, and they are all flawed and scarred in the deepest ways, but Coetzee puts the reader inside them. For a moment you are David taking advantage of a young woman. In the next you are Lucy trying to fathom how to continue existing after you’ve been used beyond repair.
This was not a happy novel, and it has no happy ending, but it leaves you with thoughts and questions about yourself and the people who surround you. Though we’re meant to hate David at the novel’s outset, Coetzee shows us that even the most hateful people have lives, souls, feelings, emotions, and families. Though Lucy knows her father is not a good person, they do the best they can for one another in their respective states of disgrace.
Well written and deeply affecting.
This is a wonderful, tragic book. I’ve never been to South Africa, but Disgrace struck me first as a story of post-apartheid life in that country. Of course, it’s much more than that. The characters and the circumstances they find themselves in are complex and universal. The result is a remarkable story that gets you thinking about a place, but also about right, wrong, and ways they shift with perspective.
Brilliant, shattering – essential reading.
The story moved with character and story intensity
Disappointing characters, strange story.
Brilliant. Coetzee’s usual outstanding characters. Addresses that soul-scraping (and desperately relevant) issue of whether one must do the right thing, or is it sufficient merely to eschew what is wrong. Brutally realistic, but without sensationalism. No spoiler alert, but if you are in the least introspective, it will give your world view a good shake.
In Coetzee’s most intense novel concerning his homeland of South Africa, he examines human frailty and the struggle to maintain personal morality and sanity in a country still trying to recover from the devastation wrought by the apartheid era. Coetzee’s main character, David Lurie, is a distinguished professor of classics at the University of Cape Town. When he is forced to resign his tenured position for reasons of misconduct, he seeks refuge at his daughter’s smallholding farm in the South African countryside. Then a life-altering event leads him to ponder the consequences of his own actions and behavior. The tumultuous backdrop of race relations in modern South Africa fuels this story of one man’s disgrace and his attempts at redemption. Using the immediacy of spare, clear language that has the power to sting like a burn, Coetzee constructs scenes that are indelible. Coetzee is recognized as one of the world’s greatest living writers, and Disgrace may be his greatest achievement.
It had potential but then became boring. Love to read about Africa. Had a little in it.
This was a haunting story that just kept coming into my mind weeks after I’d finished reading it. Very sad and true to life. Not a happy story at all but unforgettable.
Disliked most of the characters. Overall disturbing story
Good character building but no satisfactory ending. Let me looking for conclusions