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: #1154 in Books
• Published on: 2000-04-06
• Original language: English
• 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

Review
This is a bleak, pessimistic, spare book about the new South Africa, winner of the 1999 Booker Prize. In a departure from his usual more allegorical style, Coetzee tells with searing realism the story of the disgrace of a university professor from Cape Town, David Lurie, and his subsequent wanderings in search of some sort of resolution. Lurie has an affair with a student; the student is impressionable, but far from infatuated with him. Her boyfriend intervenes and a complaint of sexual harassment is made against him. He resigns without offering any sort of defence. Coetzee mounts a searing attack on the kind of political correctness pervasive in a society which cannot control even the simplest manifestations of crime, including rape and armed robbery. When Lurie goes to live with his somewhat hippy daughter in a country district, the already dark story becomes darker still. He helps at an animal sanctuary, which becomes a procession of death; virtually all the animals are put down. Here Coetzee is evoking the prospect of a holocaust; it is disturbing. But Lurie's impressions of his daughter's black neighbour and occasional worker, a man who clearly has designs on her property, are more disturbing still. They are shot through with ambivalence. While this man is able to offer help and stability, Lurie also sees him as the face of the new realities. His daughter must either submit to these or leave. Armed robbers arrive at the property; they set Lurie alight and rape his daughter. His daughter's reaction, to Laurie's horror, is a sort of acceptance. This is Coetzee's point: the whites in South Africa are going to have to accept new realities or leave the country. These realities include the debasement of language and the acceptance of warlordism and naked power. Lurie is an expert on the Romantic poets and his aspect of the new South Africa, the coarsening of learning, worries him. His fears are compounded when his daughter elects to have the child which is the product of the rape. All in all this is a disturbing book; deeply pessimistic about the prospects of the new South Africa and disillusioned by the over-simplifications that have replaced the previous barbarities. But as with all Coetzee's works, it is beautifully written and utterly distinctive. Review by JUSTIN CARTWRIGHT Editor's note: Justin Cartwright is the author of Leading the Cheers, which won the 1998 Whitbread Novel Award. (Kirkus UK)

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

Customer Reviews

Thought-provoking study of accountability and blame
Not an uplifting book, this one. But one that hits deep, and makes you think hard. In the end, I suppose it's all about accountability and blame - not comfortable things to think about at any time, but in post-apartheid South Africa, particularly difficult. How does one define and/or justify exploitation? I don't know. I shall have to read the book again, now that I know the questions I want to ask.

Thought provoking but largely frustrating
I have just finished reading Disgrace and I am in two minds about whether or not I liked it. The style of writing is undoubtedly superb and the author clearly scholarly. However, like the previous reviewer, I found myself increasingly irritated with Lurie's daughter and her unfathomable refusal to deal with her horrifying ordeal. She would neither lay down and die or get up and walk, which, after any life changing trauma, one ultimately has to do. Her perpetual inertia became wearing and in fact, in the end, really quite boring. Having said this, the interplay between Lucy and Petrus was very thought-provoking. Although Petrus was a shadowy character, his inexorable rise to dominance over Lucy was marked and profound. Perhaps a typical post-apartheid role reversal? However, what did the affair between Lurie and the student have to do with anything, other than perhaps be a weak attempt to force Lurie to look at himself. Also, why did Lurie sleep with Bev Shaw? I didn't think it made much sense (but then I'm not a man)! My overall impression was that this novel was interesting, beautifully written and thought-provoking, which are all good things of course, but I found it stumbled over the obstacles of tedium and a distinct lack of apparent adequate motivating factors in the characters.

Limited sympathies
Lurie is a hard character to like or to sympathise with, who often acts willfuly without seeming to care for or consider the consequences of his actions. Nor does he have the humour or self effacement to let him get away with it. And yet there is something there that means he is not wholly repellent. He cares for his daughter, who is determined to shut him out emotionally.

The characters are complex and it is not always easy to follow what is driving them. The relationship, if there is one, between Lurie's daughter and Petrus is ambiguous.

I enjoyed reading the book and the writing is pacy, but I was left confused by the ending and unsure of what it all meant.