Product Description

From the author of Waiting for the Barbarians and the Booker-Prize-winning Life & Times of Michael K, a dazzling new novel--his first in five years

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 in 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 Times Book Review)

"The kind of territory J.M Coetzee has made his own. . .By this late point in the century, the journey to a heart of narrative darkness has become a safe literary destination . . . Disgrace goes beyond this to explore the furthest reaches of what it means to be human: it is at the frontier of world literature."--Sunday Telegraph (UK)

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #16749 in Books
• Published on: 2005-08-30
• Released on: 2005-09-06
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

Amazon.com
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

From Publishers Weekly
As a writer, Coetzee is a literary cascade, with a steady output of fiction and criticism (literary and social) over the last two decades. This latest book, his first novel in five years, is a searing evocation of post-apartheid South Africa; it earned him an unprecedented second Booker Prize. An uninspired teacher and twice divorced, David Lurie is a 52-year-old poetry scholar-cum-"adjunct professor of communications" at Cape Technical University. Spooked by the flicker of twilight in his life trajectory, he sees himself as an aged Lothario soon to be "shuddered over" by the pretty girls he has so often wooed; he is disappointed in and unengaged by the academy he now serves by rote; and he cannot locate the notes for his opera, Byron in Italy, in which he has placed so much reluctant hope. He is, even at his best, a man of "moderated bliss." So when he seduces Melanie Isaacs, a lithe student from his poetry elective ("She does not resist. All she does is avert herself"), he believes her to represent the final object of his desire, his last act of lush, Romantic desperation. And then he is found out. This not uncommon outrage earns him a dismissal and censure from the university committee he refuses to cooperate with in hopes of saving his job. He immediately shoves off for Salem in the Eastern Cape where his daughter, Lucy, manages a dog kennel and works her smallholding, harvesting a modest crop. Here David hopes to cleanse himself with time-honored toil. But his new life in the country offers scarce refuge. Instead, he is flummoxed to discover an unfamiliar Lucy-principled, land-devoted, with a heroic resignation to the social and political developments of modern South Africa. He also memorably encounters Petrus, Lucy's ambitious colored neighbor and sometime assistant. Petrus embodies the shifting, tangled vicissitudes of a new national schematic, and forces David to relate to the broad segment of society previously shrouded by the mists of his self-absorption. But a violent attack on the estate irrevocably alters how the book's central figure perceives many things: his daughter and her bewildering (to him) courage, the rights of South Africa's grossly aggrieved majority, the souls of the damaged dogs he helps put down at the local Animal Welfare League and even the character of Lord Byron's mistress and the heroine of his operatic "chamber-play." But this is no tale of hard-earned, satisfying transformation. It is, rather, a paean to willfulness, an aria on the theme of secca, or the drying up of "the source of everything." In Coetzee's tale, not a single note is false; every sentence is perfectly calibrated and essential. Every passage questions the arbitrary division between the "major and minor" and the long-accepted injustices propped up by nothing so much as time. The book somehow manages to speak of little but interiority and still insinuate peripheries of things it doesn't touch. Somber and crystalline, it "has the right mix of timelessness and decay." It is about the harsh cleansing of humiliation and the regretfulness of knowing things: "I lack the lyrical. I manage love too well. Even when I burn I don't sing, if you understand me." To perceive is to understand in this beautifully spare, necessary novel. First serial to the New Yorker. (Nov.) FYI: Viking accelerated the pub date after the Booker Prize was announced on October 25.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Middle-aged professor David Lurie shuffles numbly through the shifting landscape of postapartheid South Africa. After he gets fired for sleeping with one of his students--and refusing to express remorse--Lurie finds shelter with his grown daughter and is exposed to a social reality that threatens more than his own sense of security. Winner of the Booker Prize, Coetzee's eighth novel employs spare, compelling prose to explore subtly the stuttering steps one man takes in a new world. (LJ 12/99)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Customer Reviews

Booker AND Noble Prize - Oh C'mon!
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!

Challenges the reader
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.

Why J.M. Coetzee emigrated from South Africa
Disgrace is not about a rape. It is not about an University professor having affairs with students. The fact that he is 50sh, the fact that he has a daughter running a kennel in the countryside are not relevant.

The book is about the condition of living as a white in South Africa today. The rape is not an ordinary rape, it is a bloody premeditated vengeance on an innocent victim who must leave for ever. The living in the country is not an expression of freedom any more. It is nightmare that rapists, African rapists will come again and again and again, until David Lurie's daughter will have to leave.

She wants badly to stay. She even considers that raping is a price she now must pay, for privilege of staying on her property, in country she always lived.This exasperates her father, David Lurie. The hospital of the dogs is mostly doing euthanasia for dogs, while they lick the hands of their executioners, deluded that they will be cured. Professor Lurie, expelled from a decent teaching job, works as hireling in a veterinary clinic, not saving the dogs' lives. Is this the life he wants?

There is no doubt in my mind that this book explains clearly why the only Nobel prize writer had to leave South Africa. He went to Australia, where, Coetzee was received as a hero, after being denied a US residency by a real dimly-lit-minded bureaucrat from INS.