Coetzee, J.M. "Disgrace"

1999


Reviewed by Marianne
from Let's Read


I have read the book quite a while ago and really liked it. I was going to read more by this author but with my long TBR pile ...

Anyway, I liked the description of the people, the professor who, after having lost his job, goes to live with his daughter, Lucy, in a remote area in South Africa. I really liked Lucy, too, the description of South Africa, both the landscape and the life/political situation. I could imagine being there, that's always a good book for me. And it's quite different from my life, so it's definitely interesting. 

From the back cover:

"After years teaching Romantic poetry at the Technical University of Cape Town, David Lurie, middle-aged and twice divorced, has an impulsive affair with a student. The affair sours; he is denounced and summoned before a committee of inquiry. Willing to admit his guilt, but refusing to yield to pressure to repent publicly, he resigns and retreats to his daughter Lucy's isolated smallholding.

For a time, his daughter's influence and the natural rhythms of the farm promise to harmonise his discordant life. But the balance of power in the country is shifting. He and Lucy become victims of a savage and disturbing attack which brings into relief all the faultlines in their relationship."

J.M. Coetzee "who in innumerable guises portrays the surprising involvement of the outsider" received the Nobel Prize in 2003 and the Booker Prize for this novel in 1999.

Read my other reviews of the Nobel Prize winners for Literature.  

Original Post on "Let's Read".

Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee (3m)

Cross-posted at my blog, 1morechapter

Winner, 1999 Booker Prize

Disgrace caught me by surprise. I didn’t like the main character; I didn’t like the events that happened in the book; but yet, as I turned the last page, I realized it was flat out brilliantly written. It definitely deserves its place on the shortlist for Best of the Bookers.

Before reading it, all I really knew about it was that a professor had an affair with a student. As it turns out, that’s only a minor point. The book has several issues: men’s subjugation of women, South Africa after apartheid, and animal rights. How Coetzee could say so much in just a little over 200 pages is amazing. There are several parallel stories going on. I want to say so much about it, but to do so would be to give away everything. I’m glad I was ignorant going into this novel, so I won’t say much except that it will definitely get a re-read from me someday and preferably in a group setting. There would be many, many things to discuss.

(1999, 220 pp.)

As to the film, I thought it followed the book almost exactly. It was produced by Australians but I believe most of the outdoor shots at least were filmed in South Africa; the scenery was beautiful. John Malkovich played David Lurie exceptionally. My only small quibble is that his South African accent went in and out some. I thought the actress who played Lucy was also excellent. I highly recommend this movie IF you have read the book. You probably wouldn’t appreciate it as much or at all if you haven’t.

Film grade: A

Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee (Small Talk)

I am a sucker for Booker prizewinners. At least most of them. So I pick up the 1999 winner Disgrace, by the South African (now Australian, I think) writer J.M. Coetzee. And turns out he is also a Nobel Prize winner!

The title of the book describes the state David Lurie is in. 52 years old, twice divorced, Lurie teaches poetry at a Capetown University. In an impulsive Lolita moment, he starts an affair with a young student. He loses his job in the process and thus starts his descent into disgrace. David retires to his daughter Lucy’s home in the country hoping to clear his mind and see what can come out of a vague dream of writing a book on Byron.

Rural life in South Africa for a white man and his single daughter is not idyllic. That fact is brought home rather forcefully when strangers, who later turn out to be relatives of Lucy’s African neighbour and helper, render David and Lucy helpless in a rather violent attack against them. The difference in the way the older man and the younger woman react to the attack is telling. David is angry and wants his daughter to give up her land and go away, maybe away from South Africa itself. His daughter however decides to stay.

The burden of history turns out to be hard to bear for white South Africa. In the countryside they are forced to barricade themselves against a hostile world, and still end up with the possibility of a bullet in the back. Or they could choose to leave. Lucy’s generation is learning to start all over again, learning to adapt, to forge new relationships, start with nothing again. David cannot do the same, or won’t do the same and he is left to rely on his fledgling Byronic opera and his new-found love for stray animals (another species left with nothing) as substitutes for the strength to carry on.

It is a bleak novel, yet there is a sense of re-building as if from a wasteland. Just as Lucy’s child begins its life in her womb, a child born of violence and helplessness, David and Lucy have to begin life again in deepest Africa. All the dilemnas of white South Africa are brought to life in this short and sharp novel from a writer with an obvious talent for a layered tale. Coetzee is a new discovery, one I will explore more of.

My Nobel List this year is unfortunately pretty short. It consists of precisely two books - Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook and J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace. Poems by Pablo Neruda could count as well, I suppose.

Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee

(Cross-posted from my blog, Out of the Blue)

Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee won the Boooker Prize in 1999. And I can very well see why. Although I could read it only in the Italian translation by Gaspare Bona, I found it exceptionally well-written, with a concise, brief style that suits the book perfectly. But I also found it very unpleasant to read.

The book tells the story of David Lurie, a 52-year old twice-divorced professor who teaches Communication at a technical university in Cape Town, South Africa. He is dissatisfied with his job, but goes on nonetheless. His "disgrace" begins when he has an affair with one of his students. When the affair is found out, he does nothing to protect himself from the consequences and is forced to resign.

After that, he seeks refuge in his daughter Lucy's farm in the Eastern Cape. Things go well for a while, but then he and his daughter are brutally attacked and the consequences are hard to deal with, both for David and for Lucy.

This book depicts the tensions between different generations, sexes, and races in post-apartheid South Africa. As such, it is a very interesting read. But also, as I already mentioned, quite unpleasant. I don't know if I liked it or not. But I'd recommend it anyway.

Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee (Wendy)

He stood a stranger in this breathing world,

An erring spirit from another hurled;
A thing of dark imaginings, that shaped
By choice the perils he by chance escaped.
-A line from Byron's poem 'Lara'-

Disgrace explores the ideas of race, gender and generational differences. In simple, yet powerful prose, Coetzee develops his main character - a professor of communications named David Lurie - amid the social and political complexities of South Africa.
.M. Coetzee's novel

David Lurie is a middle aged man of questionable morality, whose passions lie with young women...girls, really. When he begins an affair with one of his students - the beautiful Melanie - David finds himself on the other side of a sexual harassment investigation. He retreats to his daughter Lucy's farm in the country where terror and unexpected violence unfold.

Throughout the novel, Coetzee intersperses the poetry of Byron, and the tangled life of this poet as he pursues a girl much younger than himself. David Lurie's desire to write an opera about Byron and his lover is largely symbolic of David's own struggle within himself.

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. - From Disgrace, page 4 -

In fact, the novel's largest theme seems to be about the confusing nature of language - filled with misunderstanding, second meaning, and the breakdown of communication - specifically that between the sexes, the generations, and the races. It is clear throughout the book that David's perceptions, as a man, are different from Lucy's (or Melanie's) female perceptions; and that David's understanding of African culture as a white man, are different from the black Petrus (who lives on Lucy's land). David's struggles to communicate and connect with his daughter are fraught with misunderstanding.

Coetzee won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003 - and it is easy to see why after reading Disgrace. His style is spare and shocking, and the novel is not one that a reader can put down and forget.

Highly recommended; rated 4.5/5.