Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #267 in Books
• Published on: 2000-04-06
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Emerging from the dissident calibrations of literary voices joined together in the culture of protest against the apartheid regime, the distinctive writing of novelist, critic and academic J M Coetzee has become identified as one of the most finely tuned among contemporary Southern African writers. From the local recognition accorded his earliest novel Dusklands to the international acclaim with which his rewriting of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe story, Foe was received, Coetzee has dedicated himself to transforming South African writing from a blunt weapon of struggle to a delicate and incisive instrument of reflective liberation.

Disgrace takes as its complex central character 52-year-old English professor David Lurie whose preoccupation with Romantic poetry--and romancing his students--threatens to turn him into a "a moral dinosaur". Called to account by the University for a passionate but brief affair with a student who is ambivalent about his embraces, David refuses to apologise, drawing on poetry before what he regards as political correctness in his claim that his "case rests on the rights of desire." Seeking refuge with his quietly progressive daughter Lucie on her isolated small holding, David finds that the violent dilemmas of the new South Africa are inescapable when the tentative emotional truce between errant father and daughter is ripped apart by a traumatic event that forces Lucie to an appalling disgrace. Pitching the moral code of political correctness against the values of Romantic poetry in its evocation of personal relationships, this novel is skillful--almost cunning--in its exploration of David's refusal to be accountable and his daughter's determination to make her entire life a process of accountability. Their personal dilemmas cast increasingly foreshortened shadows against the rising concerns of the emancipated community, and become a subtle metaphor for the historical unaccountability of one culture to another.

The ecstatic critical reception with which Disgrace has been received has insisted that its excellence lies in its ability to encompass the universality of the human condition. Nothing could be farther from the truth, or do the novel--and its author--a greater disservice. The real brilliance of this stylish book lies in its ability to capture and render accountable--without preaching--the specific universality of the condition of whiteness and white consciousness. Disgrace is foremost a confrontation with history that few writers would have the resources to sustain. Coetzee's vision is unforgiving--but not bleak. Against the self-piteous complaints of all declining cultures and communities who bemoan the loss of privileges that were never theirs to take, Coetzee's vision of an unredeemed white consciousness holds out--to those who reach towards an understanding of their position in history by starting again, with nothing--the possibility of "a moderate bliss." --Rachel Holmes

Good Book Guide
Beautifully written and utterly distinctive

Synopsis
After an impulsive affair with his student sours, David Lurie 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. He and Lucy become victims of a disturbing attack which brings into relief all their faultlines.

Customer Reviews

Conflicted response
I really enjoyed the beginning of this novel with its lucid and stylish way of dealing with the themes of ageing, sexual desire, freedom and moral responsibility through the story of middle-aged David Lurie and his failed conquests and their consequences for his career. However after the attack on the farm, I became increasingly irritated by his daughter Lucy. Whilst Coetzee demonstrates a fascinating and highly sympathetic insight into male sexuality through Lurie, who, unlike so many reviewers I actually found a rather likeable and multilayered character whose development throughout the story was both interesting and enjoyable, he shows a complete lack of understanding of women through Lucy's behaviour.

I found Lucy impossible to relate to. I failed to understand why she not only refused to report the rape she suffered, but also why she so masochistically chose to remain on the farm, haunted by the memory of her attack, whilst allowing one of the rapists to roam free right on her doorstep. Moreover I was infuriated by her sickeningly submissive justification of the rapists'actions by instead holding herself accountable as some sort of twisted scape goat for the contemporary consquences of a history of white oppressive rule. A history of racial oppression does not justify rape even if it explains its motivations. To top it all off, she then decides to marry her neighbour (who is related to and protecting said rapist) in the irrational hope that it will ensure her safety in continuing to live on the farm, a decision which makes even less sense than the others.

In all his philsophising about accountability, Coetzee seems to have completely glossed over the accountability of the rapists for their crime. He seems to be suggesting that the rape is indirectly a justified comeupance for white colonial rule and on a more symbolic, personal level for Lurie's lack of sexual self control. Whilst part of me can appreciate the point Coetzee seems to be making about how you can't oppress people and then be surprised when they bite back by threatening your safety with crime, the cold and unforgiving way in which he conveys this is so unpalatable that for me it was both aggravating and sadly ineffective.

For a more sympathetic (and moving) novel which deals with the same ideas but far far more effectively, try Alan Paton's Cry the Beloved Country. Rather than positing a solution to the problems of a post-apartheid society which involves whites being expected to submissively tolerate crime and abuse, as Coetzee does (implying no real improvement to race relations as it is merely the tolerance of intolerance), Paton suggests the possibility of progression through racial unity, joint efforts and increased understanding. As far as I'm concerned this is a genuine picture of tolerance.

The worse book ever published
The characters may be compelling but the story is crude and you read all of it hopeing it will get better and it doesnt. Waste of time. Worst book ever published. They must have been on drugs to get the nobel prize

A good book.
David Lurie is a successful academic confronted with ignominy and shame when he is denounced for having an affair with a student in his class. Rather than defend his actions and show remorse, he accepts his punishment and looses his academic career. The powerful status this man had is taken away from him and lost in disgrace. Set in post apartheid South Africa, one senses the allegory.

Coestzee deepens the story, when Lurie moves up to the Eastern Cape to spend time with his Daughter. New characters are introduced and the story becomes multi-layered. While her Dad - in some respects - is the author of his disgrace, she becomes the victim of an entirly different disgrace. While David knew he had the choice to defend his actions but chose not to, he cannot understand why his daughter feels she has no choice other than inaction following her disgrace. Coetzee's clever juxposition is not the only challenge David has. The rustic rural enviroment he finds himself in, also challenges him in all sorts of ways, one imagines he never has experienced before. David cannot revert to his academic life and now must come to grips with some very different rudiments of life.

There is no doubt, David's affair with his student and subsequent disgrace could have easily happened in a South Africa with apartheid. However, it is his daugher's reactions to her experiences and her sense of abject helplessness that could only manifest in a post-apartheid South Africa. There is a clearly a message here of white power attenuating starkly between a single generation such that a father and a daughter cannot relate to each other's dilemas.

A good book.