Disgrace

Rating:
Summary: What's the Buzz?
Review: I heard a lot about this book and felt that I was missing something by not reading it. I don't get it. I found the protagonist to be difficult to identify with. I found other characters not well developed--so I could not "feel" for them. The topic of rape was touched on--but there was no resolution for me the reader. I understand that part of the story was a documentary on life in South Africa--so in that I can appreciate some of the plot and conflict within the story. Perhaps you will enjoy the story more if you have visited the area. The one saving grace for the book was the fact that it had a theme regarding the dangerous consequences of bad judgement. We have all been in situations that didn't seem to "be a big deal" but later ended up being ordeals. This is a good example of a bad decision costing much.

Rating:
Summary: South Africa's problems after apartheid
Review: The novel "Disgrace" by J. M. Coetzee written in 1999 is about the new South Africa after apartheid. Coetzee shows the tremendous differences that have come about in his country, by choosing protagonists with special characters without any compromise in their behaviour. And all characters in the novel are members of different ethnic groups in South Africa, for example David Lurie the main protagonist in this novel belongs to the English group of inhabitants. He is 52 years old, twice divorced and now works after the education reform, as a adjunct professor for communication. Formerly he was a professor of romantic poetry. He is a member of the English people in South Africa. David is fanatic worker on Byron and it seems that Byron who had a lot of affairs with women has become David's idol. David has problems in his relationship with women. In the beginning of the novel he meets Soraya, a prostitute, every Thursday. Soraya is a member of the Asian people in South Africa. An intellectual Christian white man with a good family background goes to a coloured Muslim prostitute with two children and to one who is most probably married. Later he has sex with one of his students. For moral people this is streaky and we must also consider that South Africa is a conservative country where these kinds of incidents are taboo and immoral. But Coetzee narrates things and events as they are. And this is the reality in South Africa , the way how people behave, feel and live. David says several times in the novel that he is too old to change his behaviour. And you can also see that he is a man with ideals which he holds even in difficult times, too. This costs him his job. The committee gives him the chance to apologise for having sex affair with one of his students which reminds a bit of Lolita. Her name is Melanie Isaccs and she also belongs also to the Asian group of people like Soraya. The "innocent" young girl and the old "angry" professor?! But he doesn't want to apologise for something which he doesn't consider wrong. Now, what does the author intend to tell the reader with this? Should we stand to our ideals even if it can costs us our job, life or status? David doesn't even change his attitude to blacks even after the three African guys rape his daughter Lucy. Here he was absolutely helpless. He couldn't help his daughter in any way whatever. This must be one of the worst things which could happen to a father. But he keeps on to be liberal.

Lucy, David's daughter is the second main protagonist in the novel, after David. In her youth she was a hippie girl and moved with her commune away from Cape Town. After a time she settled in the eastern cape with her girlfriend Helen. David helped her to buy a farm. Now her relationship to Helen is broken and she lives like bureau-frau alone at the farm till David moves to her. Although she has an English father and most probably good education, she decides for life as a farmer. In this novel she is a member of the Dutch people in South Africa, which was the powerful ethnic group during the apartheid, next to the English. The fact that Lucy lives as a lesbian in the countryside which is far more conservative than Cape Town, I find admirable. But this is the only thing which I find admirable in this character in the novel. I can't understand her decision and even think of it. She is raped by three guys and doesn't even blame them. David wants to sell his apartment and give the money to his daughter to go to Holland. But she doesn't want it and rejects his offer. She wants to stay at the farm. And further, she becomes pregnant and doesn't want to abort. It also strikes me that someone does good because she feels guilty for something that happened in the past and for which she wasn't responsible. She doesn't go to the police because she thinks that this is the revenge for the suppression of the blacks. She cares for the dogs because if she would be born as dog in her re-birth, she doesn't want to be treated the way they are treated now. I think this a wrong motivation for doing anything good. And the tip of the glacier is that she is ready to marry Petrus her African neighbour and give him her farm as dowry. Petrus has already two wives and Lucy would be the third one. One of the rapist, who raped her, is a relation of Petrus and lives with him and is protected by Petrus. This is more than humiliating. But this is the price Lucy is ready to pay for her security and for the security of her child. At the end of the novel I really get angry because of Lucy's decision. Another point which I hadn't expected is the change of the nice neighbour Petrus who gave Lucy always a hand, to a real monster without any human values. The question Coetzee doesn't answer in his novel is, if Petrus planned this? and did he only pretend to be nice? or did he change through the incident? and was he involved in the rape? The historical piquancy is that for example a white intellectual works for a black farmer for wages. Or that an African now own his land and hasn't to work for the whites for his livelihood. Another message which Coetzee tells the reader, now after apartheid, is that this is the right way but this is only just the beginning. South Africa has tremendous problems which are the results of apartheid. For example the high unemployment rate, the poverty of lots of people and the consequence are the high criminality rates. South Africa is Also one of the countries with the highest HIV-infection rate. All in all, I find Coetzee's novel disgrace a good one!

Sen Velady 00-12-28

Rating:
Summary: Why do I miss this book, so much
Review: Its only 250 or so pages long, so it reads real quick, yeah, yeah, yeah, Booker prize....that, I know. But what is there about THIS book that leads me to think of it as a masterpiece?? What is so great about THIS book that I feel really deprived and lost, not being able to read this wonderful author's words any more. It can't be the sparse storyline, with rapid convulsions of plot, then lots of dialogue and soul searching. It can't be the somewhat unique method of describing the rather pitiful main character in the third person. No, it's something else. Perhaps this author's spartan storytelling begs the reader to fill in the gaps, leaving everything to the imagination...what few chosen words are used to describe the terrible events, all push the right buttons and we are horrified and emotionally drained but what we have read. The main character, a real lowlife, lives such a complete disconnect from his job, family, other women, you just want to reach into the pages and smack this guy silly and say, "snap out of it". I mean I'm really rooting for the professor and hoping beyond hope that he reconciles with his university's tribunal and later with his distraught daughter...but alas it doesn't happen. This is ultimately exasperating. Do I dare mention cathartic???

Rating:
Summary: Sad-sack South Africans Fail to Illicit Sympathy
Review: Everyone seems in love with this piece, which unfortunately may cause this review to seem as simple knee-jerk contrariness. Nevertheless, I feel this is an incredibly overrated book. The characterizations are among the weakest I have seen in print, with the unloveable cast of Eors existing solely as talking heads to deliver uninspired, unbelievable dialogue. The motivations and feelings of characters are spoonfed to us almost with violence, suggesting the author thinks his audience shares the perceptiveness of tree moss. What ever happened to the Show Don't Tell maxim, ringing shrilly even in the ears of mediocre talents at a night class, nevermind a Booker-level author? There was not one moment were I was free to draw conclusions from a character's actions or statements -- the solution was unfailingly rammed down my throat in the next line. I also found myself surprisingly unmoved and unaffected by the brutality of the main plot device -- unusually so, considering how I normally react to similar scenarios in film and fiction. I think this is because the characters were so hackneyed (The twice divorced college prof and the lolita? The lesbian earth mother? Mind if I borrow the cookie cutter for Christmas?), and so poorly drawn to the most minute lack of believable human detail, that I was unable to invest the slightest emotion in them. The whole thing smacked of laziness, and I was able to finish it in a single sitting, so little work was asked of me. If there is some great reference or irony elevating this piece that I am utterly missing, I must be a complete fool -- something I'm sure it will seem to the majority, what with the reams of praise this book is generating.

Rating:
Summary: A Somber Examination of the Downward Leg of Life's Journey
Review: I have had to wait several weeks after reading this book to write a review, so powerful was its effect upon me. The sheer force of Coetze's writing is simply overwhelming.

My first encounter with this author occured when I read "Waiting For The Barbarians" while travelling in Peru in late 1982. Also a study of an aging man in an unforgiving life circumstance (who is also living in a country with a deteriorating social and political climate), that novel relied upon a vaguely surrealistic narrative structure to set the tone. It was perfect reading for travel in Peru at that time as the country itself was undergoing its own phantasmagoric transformation due to the social distress brougt on by the onset of escalating terrorist activity throughout the Sierra.

"Disgrace" however is flat out realism at its most devestating. The last few pages in particular will stay with me for the rest of my life. Here Coetze evokes the death chamber of a canine extermination unit with a focus not only on the experience of the humans adminisitering the lethal injection over and over again to untold numbers of unwanted animals, but also on the animal's anticipatory awarness of its fate. This writing is thanatological poetry which articulates as its first priority the role of acceptance in life and what consequences ensue when acceptance is absent or pathologically expressed.

Coetze is an observer of tremendous range. But his keenest insight is into the experience of failing and ultimately failure. Into the indignity and shame that adhere to failure and are attributed to it. And by extension, into the abjection that accompanies the process of final failure, death.

Rating:
Summary: Engaging, drab, dripping in futility
Review: Coetzee's novel is as dry and barren as its setting, the burnt landscape of the East Cape of South Africa. DISGRACE is a difficult read from beginning to end, but a satisfying one.

David Lurie, professor of communication of a university in Cape Town, has an affair with a 20-year-old student, and when their relationship falls apart, he pays dearly for his misuse of power. He cooperates with the university's authorities, who want something more than he can give, and banishes himself to his daughter's farm/kennel at what seems to be the edge of the world.

Father and daughter suffer a brutal attack, and though the pain and shame of the event should bring the two together, they're driven apart -- she by his fathering, he by her wish to keep the attack quiet and remain on the farm.

I admire much in this novel, especially the character of David Lurie. He pays out far more than he owes. The image of fire engulfs him, in the poetry of Byron, the fire during the attack, and the burning of dogs. Unlike the phoenix, however, Lurie is unable to rise again. He can save no one, nothing. The ending is pure heartbreak.

Coetzee skillfully weaves his tale without hammerhanded comment on racism and class, though, like the poor people living in the shanties not far from the Lurie farm, they're there.

Rating:
Summary: Unbearably saddening
Review: Such a gritty read, I cannot but shed a tear for my home country, even while living far away. Coetzee's book epitomizes the feeling of futility and tragedy that always overwhelms me whenever I'm in South Africa, yet it's earthy truth is so enticing. There could be thousands of books written on similar real South African stories, but Coetzee effectively covers the range of personalities, from the "liberal" daughter Lucy, to the "Boer" Ettinger character, to the pitiful savage black attackers, and all the mediocre people in between. Living in South Africa, you cannot but identify with all of them in some way. The "dog-man" interraction was particularly poignant, leaving me wondering who is more pathetic, the humans or the animals. To evoke such emotions so sharply in such a relatively light book is truly a testimony to Coetzee's brilliance - I couldn't recommend this book more highly.

Rating:
Summary: I should have read this book sooner!
Review: A book like this is timeless and teaches lessons that guide one through difficult choices in life. Why, for example, would a college professor risk everything to have an affair with a student? Is it self-indulgence? Perhaps. Here is a man who's ego takes on tragic proportions. His entire life has been self-indulgent. He has moved in service of the ego, at a time when Jung would have him investing psychic energy into the Self. In David, we find a lack of contentment and meaning in life, on the level of King Lear. Yet there is something heroic in his soul, something yet that points to redemption. He takes responsibility.

Where others would hide behind lawyers, or use emotional abuse and blackmail to destroy their lover and save their career, (thus continuing the pattern of self-indulgence), David takes on the mantle of his actions, and is driven, or rather pulled back into a relationship with his child, one that has long been broken, distant, and avoided. It is here, in the country, where healing can begin.

As a father, I had trouble reading about a man who seduces students. My child is going to college, and I would be angry at any professor who used their authority to manipulate them in this way. David was at first, for me, a lonely and amoral man. Yet the fact that he chose to accept his sins, rather than deny them, or pay others to cover them up, is to be applauded. In the end, David is able to feel again, he has regained his humanity, as displayed in his empathy for a dying dog. The book shows what truth and honor can do, bring us out of the darkness, and into the light of humanity.

Rating:
Summary: Engrossing
Review: I finished this book in a weekend. It is written in plain, simple language, and presents the life of a middle aged professor essentially going through a mid-life crisis in Cape Town, South Africa. Following an affair with a student at school, Lurie visits his daughter in the country to get away from the scandal. However, trouble follows, as Lurie and his daughter are subject to a racially motivated crime on her small farm. The crime leaves Lurie floundering, as he tries to pick up the pieces of his life.

I thought this was a thought provoking book, and a very engrossing read. It raises questions and thoughts about the political and social atmosphere in South Africa today. Very worthy of the Booker Prize!

Rating:
Summary: For a Bad Taste, Read This
Review: There must be redemeeming material in this novel, as it is esteemed already. However, I could not find it. More simply, it left me with a bad taste. All characters are pathetic and in my eye, found no redemption. This is based on gut feeling alone, obviously: ugh.