Disgrace

Rating:
Summary: Well Deserved Booker
Review: After resigning in disgrace from his University position, David Lurie, an expert on the Romantics, becomes involved in his daughter's post-colonial difficulties. The Byronesque professor's life is gradually transformed over the course of this spare novel. He begins his exile planning an opera about Byron and one of his loves Teresa - he is left with a guitar and the mournful voice of a lonely middle aged woman. He arrives at his daughter's farm in time for her brutal rape. His next visit finds her 'staying on' under the protection of her rapists relative. The novel is filled with ambiguity and nuance. The reader will find it difficult to leave the characters and their shifting relationships between the covers.

Rating:
Summary: fascinating but full of enigmas
Review: When I read the first 4 chapters, I felt the protagonist David was a disgusting professor. However,reading the chapters about after he moved to his daughter, I realized he is one of ordinary fathers who are very much concerned about daughters, try to build good relationship in vain. As I'm a mother who has trouble to understand a grown -up daughter, I have begun to share his feelings. At the same time, this book gives me a lot of enigmas. For example, why does Lucy decide to give birth to a baby? Why does he sleep with Bev? Why does he see Melanie's father?

Rating:
Summary: A true modern masterpiece; the best Booker winner I've read
Review: I cannot recall a book so rich in theme and symbol and yet with plot and character so grounded in the here-and-now. Charting one man's fall from--and reclamation of--grace, "Disgrace" weaves metaphor that is ironic, blunt, disturbing and, ultimately, timeless around two events that could not be more contemporary: sexual harassment of a co-ed by an aging professor; and an attack by native South Africans on a white farm.

David Lurie is a professor of "Communications" at a Cape Town university. His specialty is Romantic poets, in particular Byron. At age 52, twice divorced and finding gratification, if not fulfillment, in orchestrated liaisons with prostitutes, Lurie is a trivial version of the Byronic hero he studies. Despite his professorship, Lurie, by his own admission, is no teacher. He prefers the tag "scholar." He is in fact a manipulator, a controller.

One evening he has a chance encounter with one of his students, a 20 year-old co-ed named Melanie. He invites her for dinner and seduces her. Melanie is quickly repulsed by the idea of romance with a man more than twice her age. Lurie, though, pursues her with what he perceives to be heroic ardor. Melanie soon falls into depression. Her tatooed, goateed boyfriend-another Byronic cartoon-and her fundamentalist father--another teacher by profession, controller by action--confront Lurie and urge Melanie to file harassment charges against him. In an act of deluded Romantic martyrdom, Lurie confesses without apology to the affair, practically daring university authorities to dismiss him from his post. They oblige.

He finds refuge at his daughter Lucy's farm in the rural East Cape. There he strongly resists adaptation to country life. The dirt, the smells, the absence of stylized beauty and decorous behavior disgust him. He wrongly fears for his daughter's happiness and rightly, as it turns out, for her safety. He mistrusts and resents her African tenant, Petrus, a purely natural force with his two wives (one who is half his age-see Melanie) and inexorable ambition to gain sway over the white woman he must labor for. Lurie is even vexed by the most heartfelt of Lucy's emotions, her simple love of animals and her warm regard for the physically repugnant Bev Shaw, an amateur veterinarian ironically qualified only to perform euthanasia on the stray and discarded pets she volunteers to take in and nurture.

In a story replete with irony, perhaps the greatest is Lurie's repulsion at the realities of the Romantic ideal he so ardently embraces. The Romantics believed that grace could only be attained in nature, the more primitive the better. Lurie, against his own developed taste, encounters, both by horrible chance and by engineered design, nature's nasty, brutish but ultimately regenerative forces. Along the way, his long-held notions of beauty, art and love ebb, inflate, distort and evolve, until Lurie emerges quite literally) from the ashes, re-formed: no longer teacher, but learner: no longer manipulative, but accepting; no longer taking, but giving.

To fully appreciate this book, I found myself charting the inter-woven relationships of Lurie and Melanie, Lurie and Lucy, Lucy and Petrus, Lucy and Bev, Lurie and Bev, Lurie and Byron, Byron and his mistress Teresa. Three general kinds of love in widely varied shades dominate: Romantic love; parental love; and "natural", "elemental" love. Duality abounds: art and artifice; scholarship and reality; brutality and tenderness; torment and succor. This is a book so dense with ideas that I had to write a review just to organize my thoughts and try to appreciate its scope. A true modern masterpiece, and the best Booker winner I have ever read (apologies to Salman Rushdie, Keri Hulme and Kashuo Ishiguro).

Rating:
Summary: So Much Disgrace, So Little Time
Review: Depending upon your definition of disgrace, it is almost surely inevitable in each our lives. It certainly is in this book, a multi-layered examination of post-Aparthied South Africa, familial relations, our place in nature and the weaknesses we face as mere mortals. Surprisingly, it's not as depressing as one might think. With disgrace comes a certain recognition of having done something wrong. Otherwise, it's not digrace, just badness. Therein lies the optimism this book ultimately provides. I loved clear and simple style in which it was written, yet avoided moralizing. Like South Africa, nothing is as simple as black and white and Coetzee doesn't let the reader off the hook that easily either. Disgrace is a wonderful book which deserves all the accolades it's recieved.

Rating:
Summary: Easy to read, enjoyable but disturbing
Review: This story was about the lives of a white schoolteacher and his daughter who run a farm in South Africa. The schoolteacher, David, disgraced after a soured affair with his student, took refuge in his daughter, Lucy's farm. He became more involved in his daughter's life than he expected to be and came to see the ugly and down side of a life he had never experienced before.

The book, though easy to read, was disturbing as we could feel the helplessness of both David and Lucy in a situation which they both have no control over. Through David and Lucy, the book has offered us a glimpse into a part of the lives of whites in South Africa. I enjoyed the book, save for a nagging thought in my mind. As I have limited knowledge of the history of South Africa, I could not help but wonder how balance is the view in this book. Of course, this book being a fiction, need not provide two sides of issues raised in the book, so my advice is, read and enjoy. There is no doubt that this is an enjoyable, though disturbing read.

Rating:
Summary: A jolt of hard-won pleasure, in spite of it all
Review: The photograph of the author in the back of the book told me everything I needed to know: a gaunt man with cold eyes, beard carefully trimmed, lips tense, mouth unyielding; he is the very picture of his own prose: orderly and hard, grim and sharp. Callous, remorseless, mercenary, the language of _Disgrace_ is not repressing any deeply felt emotions, because it never even let them through the door in the first place. This is the writing that can kill dogs, if it has to. It will kill them humanely, but without regret. The writing is clean without being sterile, meaningful without being profound, evocative without being lyrical. The wording is nude, but not naked, the difference being one solely of composure. The text expounds upon itself (without knowing it) on page 122 (and what nudeness is ever lovelier than the transparent charm that discloses Beauty, but does not recognize that it, in and of itself, is its source?), "melody without climax; the whisper of reptile scales on marble staircases."

The jolt of hard-won pleasure that this book provides comes in the form of irony, the irony of David Lurie himself. He begins the most dispassionate of men, a man who prefers prostitutes to the mess and fuss of a relationship, favoring a childish lover with hips "as slim as a twelve-year-old's," who lays slack during lovemaking, to a grown woman with the capacity to "work herself into a froth of excitement." He likes his women to be exotic...with the one condition that they be utterly predictable, with no history, no depth of character carved by pain, the anthropomorphic "noble savage." And yet, this is a man whose soul is stirred by Byron, and not simply Byron, but Byron in Italy, Byron at arguably his most tragic and tempestuous (and to any scholar sitting by with her or his Norton's in hand who would like to dispute this point with me, do e-mail me; we WILL throw down. Don't make me bust out the "Don Juan," but I will if I must; make no mistake. ).

Clearly, this is a man whose life and personality have not yet caught up with his soul...and I do mean yet. What a painful pleasure to watch Lurie unfold, to come into his own, to move from a deliberate life to living deliberately. From a pretentious hyper-intellectual to a fallen, defiant figure that can mourn for the plight of common sheep, Lurie ascends. This is a man saved by love, humbled by it, opened by it, and, ultimately, defeated by it too. Why did I love him? To the end he remains somberly yet radiantly flawed, and always, always unredeemed, even by his own immortal longings, which he does realize, on an intuitive level. Was he his own ghostly Byron, longing for his Teresa? No, I think he was his own Teresa, longing for his Byron, long lost, long dead. Would I have been his Byron, had I the art? Oh, yes I would; you had better believe I would; in a frigid instant. But even as his Byron, I would still have been a corpse, a mere thought. Lurie reminded me, in a way, of Tess of the D'Urbervilles, slowly stripped and diminished by Fate into mere raw materials, but raw materials that are still capable of recognizing, with tacit horror, their own helplessness and misery.

In _Disgrace_, Coetzee reveals a blind universe, a rote, accidental existence that is subsequent, slavish and cruel. His characters scrape by in the most menial, groping, naked struggle imaginable, and their daily lives consist of pointless accidents, chaotic collisions of unrelated events, thwarted hopes and bitter disappointments, punctuated by slow, stark moments of despair in which they realize the truth. They cannot influence any of the circumstances that control them; their lives are meaningless exercises in pain. Hence, either stupefaction, methodical calculation or predatory animalism become the only states of being they can bear. The actual is unaccommodating, and nothing is truly possible. As Lurie thinks to himself, "One gets used to things getting harder; one ceases to be surprised that what used to be as hard as hard can be grows harder yet."

With a long, low shriek of pain, our masks as readers of this saga are stripped away, possessions are stolen from our homes, Reality digs so far down that it realizes it is in its own grave, and it will die here, and it will bury you with it, will consume you, and ingest your identity and your ideas of order, and stomp your hopes and tear your tongue out of your face and maul your soul...and then ask you what you make of it. And you will make of it what you can, even if that is nothing, and you will find yourself violated in your darkest places, and even so you will find yourself (who knew?), to use Lurie's word, "enriched," in spite of everything, or maybe even, in a colossal twist of Fate, because of everything somehow.

I did not love this book. I am this book, as are you, as is each of us, whether we know it, whether we accept it, whether we like it...or not. And as for the raw-boned, bewhiskered man with the eyes deep as sacrificial pits, I knew all along that I recognized him. In conclusion, I dare you NOT to read this book. But be sure and let me know how that works out for you.

Rating:
Summary: Hats off to a true artist
Review: There was much to appreciate in this book. The story was gripping, the language was poetic, the themes were many and would provide much for a good discussion to mine.

Much keeps running through my head which makes me realize he is an artist. It was brave to make his hero so unlikeable, so unloveable and yet,obviously, so sexy. (What is wrong with the reader for thinking that?) The entire read is propelled by the question of what is wrong here? What is wrong?

The author trolled deeply into the human experience and wove the tale and made reading it a soul-stirring experience. I also appreciate the fact that it was told with economy. Not one minute of my time was wasted reading this story.

Rating:
Summary: Brilliant exercise in melancholy
Review: I doubt I have ever come across a more melancholic book than this one. A man who doesn't have the spirit of his age, Voltaire once observed, gets all the unhappiness of his age. University lecturer David Lurie is an alien in the New South Africa, but as a teacher of poetry by dead male Europeans he would be an alien at any streamlined politically correct university in the Western world. He is in a state of personal crisis, too, as he does not get women's love for free anymore but finds he has to pay for it.

The beginning of the story in middle class Cape Town is not unconventional, but as Lurie leaves the city to stay with his daughter on her farm, the story gradually moves to heights of desolation. Lurie and his daughter are attacked and she is raped by their black neighbours - but she feels one has to accept this as part of the new order of things, and it doesn't keep her from working together with the men who raped her. Lurie finds this unacceptable and shows some bravery in confronting the attackers, but nobody understands him anymore.

Coetzee's language is simple and clear, without any pretentions. Its stark beauty suits the inner landscapes of despair which he depicts. The book ends on a note of profound resignation. Kafka once asked why people whose life is horrible don't change it. "It's because they can't do it; everything that is possible, happens after all; only that is possible which happens."

Rating:
Summary: Disappointing, retro view of women ...
Review: I'm afraid this book didn't work for me at all, despite the compelling subject matter. The author's minimalist style seems to be his excuse for not doing the work he needs to do to make the reader understand the context of the story. The most egregious failure here is the inexlplicable reaction of the daughter, Lucy, to getting gang-raped and impregnated by three roving native African rapists.

Look, I'm sorry, but this was completely unbelievable -- particularly as the character was supposed to be a lesbian. The author didn't create characters that live and breathe and seem plausible -- the dirty old man Lurie is more charmless than any lecherous professor I've ever come across. Lucy and her behavior are simply not credible at all. Really lazy, unsuccessful story telling. The black characters I won't even comment on, but I don't think we'll be seeing them premiere on Oprah any time soon. This novel is a rag-bag of oft-repeated liberal white elitist cliches, start to finish. It failed to move me on any level -- even intellectually, as the author was too lazy to give us enough background on South Africa to make it resonate as a historical document. There wasn't even enough landscape description to bring the place alive.

I suppose the Booker committee is made up of middle aged white intellectual males, who could on some level relate to this caricature of a protagonist. This book just failed to satisy on any level. It didn't even shock me, it was just so predictable.

Rating:
Summary: A Booker book that deserves the prize
Review: I don't know what I think about _Disgrace_. I've certainly never seen a book with so many layers written in such a determinedly spare way. There are a lot of tiny points that jar, but I'm lead to the conclusion that Coetzee meant them to, by showing how the layers of the world create some strange plot threads when you see them all together.

What I mean is that a character's action when viewed as a personal narrative may seem to make little sense, but becomes a necessary part of reading the book as parable. Alternatively, the parable is broken apart by the vibrant and real (all the more real *because* they are opaque) characters Coetzee creates. The dogs, Lucy, the rapes, South Africa, and the relationships of fathers and daughters manage to be both potent as symbols and potent as real objects in the space of the book.

The book is the hangover after the party. The early morning feeling of depressed and shallow emotion. The landscape of living in the world you've made, even when you don't like the world very much at all.

I don't understand it or my reactions in response to reading it. Which is the highest compliment I can probably pay.