Disgrace

Rating:
Summary: Many Aspects Here Worth Noting
Review: As depressing as this novel can be, there are many critical overtones to it. This book is proerly entitled, because each of the main characters, Lucy, Petrus, Melanie, and most notably David Lurie is dealing with the element of Disgrace. At the beginning of the book, David Lurie appears to be in a world of his own where all he is concerend about is his next sexual escapade. Whereas sex remains on his mind in later chapters of this captivating novel, he begins to see the point of view ever so slightly of the female in these relationships when his daughter Lucy is savagely raped by two men and a boy. It is interesting how David accepts his bannishment from teaching without a fight, but encourages his daughter to report the rapists to the police.

The back drop of the South African society plays an interesting part in this story. Whereas race is not overly emphasized, when it does come up, one can see how the changing times are effecting each of the individuals in this part of the world. Crime really does pay in this so called new land of opportunity and maybe that is why the lement of Disgrace and Depression is so apparent here that even a dog does not deserve to exist in this element.

Overall, this is a thought provoking novel which can ellicit many interesting points of view. Those who can tune out the depressing theme will find this is a well written book with significant depth.

Rating:
Summary: A Fractured Novel from a Fractured Culture
Review: Coetzee's "Disgrace" is in many ways a fascinating novel that puts its finger on the pulse of a fractured country that is at once convulsing and healing, and the book does an absolutely riveting job of conveying the difficult realities of post-apartheid South Africa. The protagonist, David Lurie, is a literature professor whose profession has been altered to his grave dissatisfaction by the grim realities of a country that finds itself in sudden need of teaching much of its populace important job skills. Cast out of the intellectually fulfilling world of the humanities, Lurie has become a professor of communications instead, and he is at sea, both professionally and sexually. After an unwise liaison with a student, he allows himself to be fired from his professorial job. In search of a life both more simple and satisfying, he moves in with his estranged daughter who runs a farm and dog-boarding service in rural South Africa. I won't give away too many of the details, but what happens next is both terrifying and fascinating. Their peace is shattered by a terrible crime, but the implications of this crime subtly branch out into global politics and world history. Nothing heavy handed here: Coetzee's ability to link private pain to political complication is admirable, engaging and utterly moving.

On the other hand, "Disgrace" seems to run out of steam about halfway through. At just over 200 pages, the book felt to me artificially inflated, and that is something of a problem. The early sequences, with Lurie's involvement with a Muslim prostitute and his academic escapades were eminently readable and compellingly rendered, but many of his later ruminations seem to drag. Nevertheless, I spent a great deal more time ruminating on this novel after I finished. "Disgrace" brings into uneasy focus the horrible cost of an immoral political regime like apartheid and the horrible pain of a country that wants desperately to recover and to find itself.

Rating:
Summary: The Disgrace Never Ends
Review: This is my first Coetzee novel but it won't be my last. "Disgrace" is told with such spare, honest beauty it almost redeemed a very depressing plot line. A university professor from Cape Town commits what he thinks is a "no-fault" breach of ethics, is caught and partly through his own arrogance loses his job. Cast adrift, he has more than his own share of bad luck in the outside world and doesn't deal with that very well. But Coetzee is a marvelous writer and, needless to say, he has real insight into today's South Africa. A great read.

Rating:
Summary: Read it, then sit, then think about it a few days later
Review: I picked up Disgrace because of its distinction as a Booker Prize winner, and like all winners of that award it is excellent. Coetzee has used a simple story, and a bare minimum of words to compose an extraordinarily thoughtful work. Because it is so subtle (and a very quick read) you're best served by reading straight through, putting it aside, and then revisiting the book a few days later when, as will surely happen, you are unable to put its haunting story out of your mind and you've developed a more pronounced emotional response to its warm notes and tragedies.

Rating:
Summary: A likeable protagonist
Review: Learned without being heavy, the novel acquainted me with the life of a character I would normally feel nothing in common with and made him truly likeable, despite his peculiar behavior, which in fact makes him all the more human.

Rating:
Summary: Grace and Disgrace: Biblical and Kabbalistic Themes
Review: In Disgrace, Coetzee writes a novel of moral regeneration. For his protagonist, Coetzee presents a womanizing professor in his early fifties, David Lurie. His story in many ways parallels that of the biblical David. At first proud and defiant, David Lurie eventually comes to recognize his moral failings and asks for forgiveness. Like King David, he goes to Salem (Jerusalem). Like King David, he composes poetry, accompanying himself on a stringed instrument. And is it going too far to suggest that the volunteer animal doctor, Bev Shaw, the only character who is consistently referred to by her full name, is a play on the name of King David's last concubine, Abishag?

For the names are full of significance. David's last name, Lurie, and that of the student he becomes involved with, Isaacs, together allude to the 16th century kabbalist, Isaac Luria. The Lurianic kabbalah explores the mystical connections of language, and David Lurie's conception of language emphasizes this mystical element. He is a professor of "Communications", but he rejects the notion that language had its origins in the need to communicate. He sees language as originating in music and sees as its function the filling of the human soul. One can think of language as "enchantment" or "incantation" to capture this connection to music. In a striking passage, Lurie reflects that he would like to like to hear the story of Petrus, the African farmer who helps run his daughter's farm, but not in English. I expected Lurie to reason that English was the language of the colonialist, but that isn't where he is headed. Lurie sees English as a dead language, where the words have lost their mystical power, and can no longer give voice to spiritual truth.

In the Lurianic kabbalah, there is a notion of a flawed Creation, in which the divine light was placed in vessels which were unable to contain it, and the vessels shattered. This motif is picked up in the scene from the play in which Melanie Isaacs (the student who becomes involved with Lurie) appears. In this scene, Melanie comes on stage as a job applicant in a beauty parlor, and promptly manages to short the lamps, causing a terrific blast of light, and then plunging the theater into darkness.

The title "Disgrace" can be understood as an absence of grace. The word "grace" appears three times in the novel, each time in a context which indicates the absence of grace. It is first used to refer to a dying dog who is not given a "coup de grace"; there is no mercy, there is no grace. "Grace" appears next in a conversation between David and his ex-wife, Rosalind, who asks about the companion of Lurie's daughter. The companion is named "Helen", but Rosalind gets it wrong and calls her "Grace". It is the sort of slip which is so meaningless that it must mean something, otherwise Coetzee wouldn't have stuck it in. And here it clearly refers to the absence of Grace in the life of David's daughter. The final time that grace is used is with respect to a dog in Bev Shaw's animal shelter; it's "period of grace" is about to expire, and it will be put to death. Once again, "grace" is only used to refer to its absence.

One central idea of the Lurianic kabbalah is that in order to create the world, God had to "make space" for creation by contracting. There is a reflection of this process, by which a human must contract the ego in order to make room for God. In each of the stages that Lurie goes through in this novel, from losing his job, losing his possessions, losing his sense of himself as a protector and a creator, he experiences a process of contraction. This appears to be a disgrace ("How the mighty have fallen," says Melanie's father to David, quoting King David), but in fact it is a precondition for making David alive to the possibilities of spiritual regeneration. So that the final scene of the book, when David's contraction of the self becomes complete, comes through as final moment of grace.

Rating:
Summary: An Aged Lord Byron
Review: This slim, elegant and complex novel is fully deserving of the Booker Prize that it won. Coetzee strikes me as a bit of a modern day Hemingway. Both authors weave their stories concisely and bluntly around subtle political themes. Their language and imagery is stark and terse. They both rely heavily on geography that they know well, whether it's Coetzee's homeland of South Africa or Hemingways's adopted Europe and Cuba. And they both use animals as metaphors to explore the human condition.

Hemingway created a machismo around bullfighting that most readers are now repelled by. And yet the inevitable death of the bull speaks to the capriciousness of staged conflict. The Spanish Civil War that Hemingway also wrote about is another such unfair conflict that the author uses as a metaphor. Coetzee uses the animal clinic in Disgrace to display the contradictions in his protagonist, David Lurie. Is Lurie cruel or merely pragmatic as he delivers unwanted animals to their deaths in this book? The disgraced Lurie receives more kindness from a dog at the clinic than from the student he casually seduced at his University. And yet Lurie cannot recognize or accept this kindness even as this dog licks his hand. Instead, he looks for understanding and acceptance in a student whose life he has intruded upon and who has seemingly forgotten him.

Both writers use political themes and situations that they understand well. Coetzee explores the interaction between whites and blacks in the apartheid society of his native South Africa, while Hemingway writes of conflict after being an ambulance driver in World War I. And Hemingway certainly lived the hedonistic life that he wrote about. What's that advice always given to aspiring writers? Write about what you truly know and understand.

The authors approach animals from different angles. Coetzee is an animal activist who writes touchingly about their unfair treatment in the animal clinic in Disgrace. Hemingway was a boisterous sportsman who wrote of the battle between man and nature. The bull usually loses, but not always, and the fish wins in The Old Man and The Sea. Who's the real loser in Disgrace? Lurie, who lives, or the animals who die?

Lurie is truly at the end of his game, although he doesn't quite seem to know it. Over 50 with faded good looks, he has become a sad joke. What is more pathetic than a narcissist and hedonist in his later years? At least Bryon, who Lurie is obsessed with, had the good taste to die early.

Out of touch with reality, Lurie pays an uninvited social call to the tidy little family of the student he has seduced. He has another affair with an unattractive friend of his daughter in the small town where they all live. To what end? Luried merely acts on his impulses. Lurie can't understand the simple life his daughter tries to lead in the complex world that has been thrust upon her. Even his ex-wife cannot muster up any sympathy for this pathetic Lothario. Lurie is excited to recover his stolen car, as if it is an escape. Lurie has nowhere to escape to, since he is just running from his own sad existence. He retreats to his apartment, which has been ravaged by vandals, and yet feels no urge to restore even the physical comforts of his life.

Disgrace is a commentary on the loneliness of life. David Lurie is finished, all washed up. He's an intelligent and cultured man who never quite figured out how to live. And now he is alone.

Rating:
Summary: It is (not) so easy to be good...
Review: You could expect quite something of this novel, being awarded the Booker Prize. You could expect something noteworthy of this well-renowned author, J.M. Coetzee. You could even expect a story, exploring life and its conditions in present-day South Africa to offer plenty of interesting material for literary portrayal. But, to say that much at the very beginning: this book in my estimation falls short of any of these legitimate expectations. Although the characters depicted, David Lurie, the main protagonist, and his daughter in particular, reveal some depth and detail, they are hardly believable as real-life people. Only at the beginning of the story there is something like suspense and a multi-facetted insight into the described sphere of academics and campus life. Here the author obviously is at home and offers a convincing story. But as soon as David Lurie, a professor himself just like the author, gets estranged from this battlefield after an sexual relationsship with one of his students and chooses exile from society, the trouble begins. Not just for the hero but for the reader as well. Taking us with him on his daughter's farm and becoming a victim of a brutal raid out there, he gives us his view on the inextricably intertwined lines of guilt, of cause and effect. In the course of events all of this is being drenched in the authors comments on morale in such a bookish style that it is all very hard to stand.The more purposeful the story is arranged, the more absurd all of its telling gets. Any additional word on this one would already be one too much as this work's literary significance deteriorates the farther it proceeds - a poor book and certainly a bore to read.

Rating:
Summary: Disgrace must have an opposite
Review: I have read almost all the reviews on this website, and I , like others, am filled with a variety of emotions and thoughts about this compelling book. I agree with the majority of readers, that although this book is emotionally draining, it is worth the energy involved. It is a phenomenal book, timely and well written, about a subject which those of us who are not South Africans, will never quite understand.

There is one character who I haven't heard much about in the reviews I have read. Melanie's father. If this book is about disgrace, which it obviously is, then I must look for the opposite of disgrace. I saw that opposite, the hopeful and merciful attribute of grace, in Melanie's father. He had no reason to show kindness to David, yet he did. Is this because, as a Christian, he has experienced amazing grace in his own life? Although David's character made sly remarks about Christianity, I think that Coatzee himself made a positive statement about Christianity through Melanie's father. He was a man of love, kindness, and grace in the midst of a story filled with hatred, unforgiveness, and disgrace.

Rating:
Summary: The Gray Areas of Life
Review: This is an eloquent book about changing and aging, told with thought and with understatement. It ties together two seemingly unrelated stories: the first dealing with the professional and libidinous difficulties of David Lurie, a 52 year old professor of English, the second dealing with the change in South African Society with the end of apartheid.

The story of David Lurie involves his liason with a prostitute, his subsequent seduction of a young student, and his consequent loss of his academic position.

The story of South Africa involves Lurie's daughter who is attemption to establish a life for herself in the rural areas of South Africa and who is brutally raped while her father is visiting her.

The most remarkable aspect of the book is its ability to present volatile issues and persons with a minimum of moralization and criticism. We learn to understand something of David Lurie and of South Africa and to control our predisposition to rush to instant, nonmeasured judgment.

Society and individuals both change and age for reasons internal to themselves. Some things must be learned and understood through time.

I think this is what the book is about and it is beautifully conveyed.