Product Description

A divorced, middle-aged English professor finds himself increasingly unable to resist affairs with his female students. When discovered by the college authorities, he is expected to apologise and repent in an effort to save his job, but he refuses to become a scapegoat in what he see as as a show trial designed to reinforce a stringent political correctness. He preempts the authorities and leaves his job, and the city, to spend time with his grown-up lesbian daughter on her remote farm. Things between them are strained - there is much from the past they need to reconcile - and the situation becomes critical when they are the victims of a brutal and horrifying attack. In spectacularly powerful and lucid prose, Coetzee uses all his formidable skills to engage with a post-apartheid culture in unexpected and revealing ways. This examination into the sexual and politcal lawlines of modern South Africa as it tries desperately to start a fresh page in its history is chilling, uncompromising and unforgettable.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2209 in Books
• Published on: 1999-04-06
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 220 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

Guardian
'in a shortlist that will produce what the public judge to be the greatest Booker prize winner of all time'

Customer Reviews

An atmospheric novel about race, sexuality and morals
Disgrace is set in South Africa and centres on the life of ageing professor David Lurie and his daughter Lucy who runs a small farm in the remote countryside. Lurie embarks on a relationship at work which exploits his position of power, and his questionable morals are thrown into sharp relief by a sinister encounter at his daughter's farm. The book goes on to describe the uncomfortable father-daughter relationship which develops and analyses the behaviour of Lurie, a man at an important junction in his life. It also raises questions about race relations in post-aparteid South Africa, where the cultural divide still seems to be very marked.

I found it easier to pity Lurie rather than sympathise with him, which is sometimes a disadvantage in a main character. However, the writer's understanding of women's nature made Lucy come alive and my empathy for her meant that her actions were easier to understand and justify than Lurie's were. One of the book's strengths is its descriptive passages which allow the reader to build up a good picture of the setting and put the lives and often harsh actions of the characters into context.

I would certainly recommend this book to anyone who enjoys an engaging story. The essence of the book is quite dark, and there is not much to be upbeat about by the end of the novel. However, rather than be depressing, the book encourages you to question where your sympathies lie and seems to be some sort of lesson in moral standards.

Bleak, nihilistic but powerfully and superbly written.
Disgrace' deals brilliantly with the distance between people - between men and women, between the white settler and the black history of Africa, between the intellectual and the petit bourgeois, between the 'thinker' and the feeler, between father and daughter.

David, the principal character, is an empty, desiccated, husk of a man. It would be easy to call him bitter, but it's hard to see what could have caused such bitterness, other than perhaps a thousand small disappointments amidst the waste of his life in this unwelcoming country. His primary emotions - those which drive him, which he controls - are calculating, callous, unfeeling. He regards Melanie (the student and cause of his downfall) less as a conquest than a trinket... he toys with the idea of making her more than this but is ultimately careless, in the literal sense of the word. Careless and uncaring in his attitudes, he is surprised by the anger which his actions stir up in others - her lover, her family, his colleagues. Even here, confronted by the collapse of the structure of his life - his job, his home, his colleagues - his reaction is lethargic, langorous. You wonder what could stir this man to a passionate response. A visit to his daughter Lucy in the veldt throws him into a different world, of barren heat and dust, hardship, dogs, and a simmering antipathy between the white settlers of the land and the black natives who are gradually reasserting themselves. It also brings an experience which even he cannot shrug off - the brutal robbery and violation of his daughter, and an assault on himself by fire which he leaves him stunned, and in some ways ridiculous, his hair burned away, his head half shrouded by bandages. The experience ages him too...

Themes of heat, dust, fire and dryness persist through this novel. There are echoes of older writers in the descriptions of the wasted landscapes - like Eliot's Gerontion, he is suddenly an old man in a dry month, in a country which, in an ironic counterpoint to Yeats, is 'no country for old men'.

None of the themes or narrative lines in the book is brought to completion. There is no resolution, no satisfaction, for the protagonists or the reader. That David is a Professor of Communications is an obvious irony - every line of communication (or reconciliation later in the novel) evaporates in the heat or disappears into the dust - with Melanie's family, with Bev, with his ex-wife, with Melanie herself. The men in the book behave like jackals throughout, preying on women... the men who rape David's daughter differ only in degree from David himself. Lucy's feeling that in some sense her assailants have a right to avail themselves of her is echoed by David's assumption of droit de seigneur over his students. Small, passing cruelties between men and women recur through the book...

This is a bleak and nihilistic book, which leaves the impression that there is little hope for relations between peoples in Africa... and little enough for relations between peoples elsewhere. At the end of the book, as David, reduced to nothing, begins to develop his opera - Byron in Italy - the possibility of redemption through passion, love and longing arises. Eventually, though, even this is reduced to a terrible howl of pain and loneliness, echoed by the confined and doomed dogs at the clinic, howling at the moon from their dusty kennels, accompanied by the thin, mechanical clank of David's banjo. The final scene, as David condemns his last dog to death, is like the flickering of a flame being snuffed out, and almost unbearably sad - the last gesture of love and affection which the dog has shown him destroyed with the animal.

Dark, merciless and yet ultimately life affirming.
J. M. Coetzee, a Booker Prize-winning author, has immaculate credentials as a literary author. "Disgrace" portrays the fragile political makeup of South Africa as a country, but this is not the overriding aspect of this story. This is an intense gripping story that addresses a number of important issues - not just political but also social and psychological. Perhaps the older we become, the more we understand human nature and can sympathize with human weaknesses. The characters are complex, existentially struggling human beings, hard to understand, and to warm to, but this is precisely where the novel's strength lies, for the tragic, blundering attempts by the protagonist to be understood by those around him, and his faltering efforts at understanding his daughter provides an allegory for people living together in any society.

At fifty-two Professor David Lurie is divorced, having been married twice, he has, in his mind solved the problems of sex rather well, filled with desire but lacking in passion. An affair with one of his students leaves him jobless and friendless. David is still unwilling to admit that sexual fulfilment and passion have passed him by. He believes in romance, as the romantic poets about whom he teaches believe in the wonder of nature. However, as the story unfolds he comes to realise and accept that for him sexual relationships will no longer hold passion or meaning. Before this realisation he has one moment when he feels pure gratitude for all the women in his life. His complacency is short lived, for piece by piece his life begins to crumble around him. As a professor of modern languages, who, under the guise of "the great rationalisation," has now been relegated to adjunct professor. He now teaches Communications 101 at Cape Technical University, formerly Cape Town University College. Post-apartheid South Africa has also gone through a process of rationalisation, and a brittle affair with a student in his romantic poetry class leads to him being fired on sexual harassment charges, and he now seeks refuge at his daughter's house in the country hoping to write a libretto on Byron.

Rural South Africa presents David with a harsh and violent reality, forcing him to reassess life as he has lived it. His daughter, Lucy, who works her smallholding with her neighbour, Petrus, an African farmer now on the way to a modest prosperity. Lucy is held by her love for the land. The visit to his daughter Lucy in the veldt throws him into a different world, of barren heat and dust, hardship, dogs, and a simmering antipathy between the white settlers of the land and the black natives who are gradually reasserting themselves...

Aptly titled, this is a novel about the carrying of disgrace on a daily, human level, about the way that what happens in one fractured family reflects a greater national whole. I came to sympathise with David, and by the end of the book I felt saddened for him. This book sheds light on a society, whose problems are largely forgotten by the West, but who are still struggling to come to terms with there own history. A truly beautifully written novel.