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Summary: Disgrace
Review: I, and everyone I know who has read this book, has been deeply disturbed by it. Ones specific reaction depends on ones sex and knowledge of South Africa. The characters lives are painted as an unrelenting misery that can only become worse. Any beauty in the locations is ignored. Coetzee piles on the agony by the shovel full and after the third read I began to wonder if this was not a deliberate exercise to win a Booker. Read it, but not if you're prone to depression.
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Summary: Profoundly disturbing
Review: This is a story of a society that has fallen apart at the seams--if you have ever visited South Africal (I have) and been impressed by its seeming progress, good roads, Western style hotels, etc., read this book for a very different view. It is hard to understand what motivates the daughter in this book--perhaps in the end it's survival instincts, or atonement. If you're looking for a standard "good read"--this isn't it!
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Summary: very powerful novel
Review: This book is probably the most successful literary attempt at describing post-apartheid society in South Africa. Coetzee shows the reader a country in which nothing remains of a social system which used to be all-encompassing in all its injustice and horror. Furthermore, he makes it painfully clear how such abrupt change is affecting the more or less ordinary people who have to deal with it on a daily basis. Coetzee is extremely good at telling a story without using cheap effects or resorting to banality. The way he manages to let the reader see the total picture of a somewhat sordid character like David Lurie, is nothing short of brilliant. The way he shows us the characters' unescapable parts in the overall picture is also brilliant. All in all, this book seems to be more informative about latter-day South Africa than any sociology text book, doctoral thesis or 'objective' journalism could ever hope to be.
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Summary: Great Literature that Defies Easy Explanation
Review: The best literature works on so many levels at once that you cannot summarize it in a simple review. Such is Disgrace. On one level it is a depressing, humiliating tale of a man of such arrogance and self-absorption that he cannot even fully appreciate that his daughter's rape echoes his own all-but rape of a young student. On another level it is a meditation on the emptiness of academics where the teacher of Romantic poetry does not even see--or wish to see--that he is a predator, as far removed from Byron as he is from the rest of humanity. Then again, this can be seen as an allegory for white Africa that has ravished black Africa for centuries and even now cannot understand why black Africa is rising up in anger and violence.Relentlessly Coetzee tears away Lurie's shredded morality and dignity in a grinding display of beautiful writing through terse and on-point prose. The book is hypnotic, each word perfectly placed, each image exactly described, each character succinctly drawn. The authorial style, ironic and a bit removed, distances the reader just enough from Lurie to allow you to both identify with him and see what he does not have the courage to see--his own extreme cowardice borne from an inability to think of anything but his own pleasure. Look how Coetzee presents Lurie's total moral decay. Even as he begs for forgiveness from the family of the girl he assaulted, he feels a tug in his groin for the young daughter! Even as he forces himself on his victim while she lies beneath him, stunned into silence, not moving, not participating at all, he is quoting the great Romantic poets, almost comparing himself to their lofty ideals! Most amazing is that Coetzee pulls this off with such simple effort that this is a fast reading book. It draws you in, rushes you to the finish, and leaves you realizing that you need to go back and examine it in more detail. A perfect delivery, a tour de force.
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Summary: Gripping Book That Makes You Think
Review: This is one of those books that you cannot put down once you start to read it. The juxtaposed stories of the aging misogynist professor who winds up disgraced from his dalliance with a student and the "disgrace" of the atrocity committed on his daughter out in the countryside of post-apartheid South Africa was truly gripping. It was one of those books that jammed in a lot of thoughts and ideas in a relatively few pages. The only reason I don't think that this book deserved five stars was because it may have been so overly ambitious that I felt that the symbolism and ideas didn't fully gel properly. But a very good book from an obviously skilled author.
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Summary: Mesmerizing
Review: I found it mesmerizing, I found although it was short every paragraph was well used, there was no wasted writing. I found it to be very much "a book in my face", you know the moral issues were so blatant and so out there, whereas so many books there are chapters and chapters on character development and little tidbits of information which allows one to form an impression of the character, not so here, I felt it was all there, hanging out and forcing you to get involved. David's first description of the vet lady, Bev Shaw, was so real, the other thoughts of his I found very telling of his morals was when he told Lucy "animal-welfare people are like Christians, everyone is so cheerful that after awhile you itch to go off raping and pillaging or in this case kicking a cat"...I don't often read books which has such extreme lack of morals an so blatant non-conformity. I tried to understand Lucy's motivation but really couldn't, even David- it was scary that someone who at the start was so egotistical and such a pleasure seeking person could by the end be filling their time dealing with dead dogs at an incinerator. Why did he fall so low, he would not admit his guilt to his colleagues yet had entered a life indicative of living in shame? One cannot condone what he did with the student, yet his reasoning being that giving in to an impulse was interesting. At this point I am trying to decide if he was just stupid or was he really holding onto his values and beliefs and not just going along with what he should have and what most people in this situation would have. The other thing I found interesting about how this book was written was that the racial issues were present but they were not laid out for us to immediately see, we learned he was white but many other characters were not described in this way,what about Melanie?
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Summary: The Sovereignty of Biology
Review: The first page of this absorbing novel fully sets the tone for the drama that will unfold, as David Lurie, a 52 year old professor at a minor South African university, explains how he manages his libidinal itch in the absence of a live-in partner and in the presence of his own diminishing attractiveness. Coetzee doesn't sensationalize or render in graphic detail the intimate relations of his characters, but he wants you to understand that, at every critical juncture, his story advances as the consequence of biological, mostly male, imperatives. However biology, or genetic inheritance, may predispose behavior or shape character, it does not eliminate the need for choice. Ultimately, Coetzee's all too human principals take matters into their own hands. Moreover, Coetzee masterfully interweaves the eponymous "disgrace" of David Lurie into what becomes a tale of, and despairing comment on, post-apartheid South Africa. The novel moves briskly and, unless we pause from time to time, we're likely to miss the irony that abounds in Coetzee's South Africa. Following the protagonist's disgrace, when he goes to his daughter's farm for an extended sojourn--setting up a city-country juxtaposition in which everything Lurie is has its counterpoint in his daughter's manner of life--the ironies begin to pile upon each other in a way that some may find forced. Moreover, in an otherwise starkly realistic novel, Coetzee tests the boundaries of the "believable" in several plot twists, one that is strictly second order business but another that is absolutely necessary to the outcome. That said, this is compelling fiction by a mesmerizing writer. Coetzee has a particular gift for dropping words and phrases into place that implant not merely an exact thought but a complete mindset or frame of reference. Of course, we're all accustomed to "understanding" an author, but I cannot say, until now, that I've ever felt so strongly that "I literally see exactly what you mean." Brief, precisely wrought observations on aging or on the relationship between men and their domestic beasts, to take but two examples, unlocked for me not the proverbial "world of meaning" but a seemingly literal reproduction of the author's mind--an eerie, almost mystical effect of words running across a page. For careful readers, there is magic here.
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Summary: Disturbing yet Tragically optimististic
Review: Disgrace is the story of David Lurie, a middle-aged university professor and hedonistic womaniser whose philandering gets him dismissed from his post at University College in Cape Town, South Africa. Realising his faults and seeking moral restitution. He decided to rejuvenate his relationship with his daughter who lives on a farm in the "sleepy" farming town (chosen by Coetzee, perhaps, for it sinister name) Salem, in the Eastern Cape. There is a lot of symbolism in this novel especially relating to the ongoing social transformation in post-apartheid South Africa. The country's moral decay, the ambiguity of personal identity, and racial tolerance are all issues dealt with here. I have not read a book so poignant, yet convicingly conveying the complexities of the social complications of a nation struggling to succeed. It is full of tragic optimism, which leaves the reader depressed, yet hopeful. It was no surprise, therefore, that Coetzee earned the much coveted booker award for this amazing effort.
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Summary: the full impact hit the next day
Review: I was so gripped by the crisis the characters were going thru while reading that the reality of this book didnt hit me...and hard...until I was driving down the street the next day. This is a brutal, powerful, beautiful, frustrating story that I expect will stay with me forever.
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Summary: Stiff dialogue, cardboard characters.
Review: To be fair, Coetzee is (usually) a great writer. He has a tendency to string sentences together well, and Disgrace was a quick read, a real page turner in the true sense. In the main character's case, I wondered how much one must suffer for one's misjudgment. However, some practical realities of novels hurt the author here. One of those realities is the characters themselves. They must be somewhat vivid and somewhat original. In Diagrace, I really didn't care much about the characters at all, with exception to the mysterious Petrus. The main character and his daughter seem to bicker constantly (the daughter even calls her father by his first name. Odd.). Coetzee also introduces characters who suddenly disappear, and we're never told what happened to them. The dialogue is also stiff. You would think that they are reading an article from a medical journal. These two flaws hurt an otherwise interesting novel with an interesting theme.
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