Disgrace

Rating:
Summary: very dissapointing for a booker prize
Review: Coetzee being awarded the booker prize the second time i was really expecting something extraordinary as a writer from him. But he turned out to be a big dissappointment after i read the book. The book came nowhere near "Feasting, fasting" by Anita Desai... which lost to coetzee for the booker prize.

Though the book deals with complex issues like sexual harrassment, animal rights, relationships etc etc.... and also written very well, it definitely does not leave a lasting impression on ones mind by the end of the read.

The book comes to an abrupt halt and the character of Lucy is pretty confusing and disgusting.

A big big dissapointment.

Rating:
Summary: Powerful and Terrifying
Review: This is the first book of Coetzee's I have read, and I found it startlingly powerful. And incredible. The simple prose belies the complexity of the story, which I feel can be appreciated at many different levels. At the beginning, I was reading it simply because it had been recommended to me. It was entertaing and fast paced and I was satisfied. I couldn't see how it was the novel of "the new South Africa" as one reviewer claimed. Then, as I progressed into the story, and as I became more involved with the characters, it struck me how much more there was to Disgrace. Most notable about the book to me, though, was the emotion it was able to bring out of me. I literally found myself sick to my stomach over Lurie's and his daughter's reactions to the attack which occurs about halfway through the novel. It was not the attack itself, but their reactions to it which moved me. I feel there is something very special about an author who can arouse those kinds of feelings in me, not over an attack, but over abstractions such as characters' emotions. Disgrace is the type of book I would like to read again, beginning not from the perspective of seeking entertainment, but knowing already some of the messages the book carries, and looking for those in all the details and characters of the novel. Needless to say, I highly recommend it.

Rating:
Summary: The Mercy of Autonomy
Review: Coetzee is a masterly writer, but he's a harsh master, unwilling to grant his creations any lasting comfort. David Lurie, the hero of Disgrace, suffers punishment out of proportion with the suffering he has inflicted, and this seems to be the point. Suffering is not a zero-sum game. The pain we inflict may be revisited upon us a thousand-fold, or we may entirely escape retribution. There is no justice and there is no abiding judge; the innocent, in the form of a crippled dog, are not offered reprieve.

While reading the book I thought of Chekhov's injunction, that we must have "compassion down to our fingertips," and I wondered how such a commandment applied to Coetzee. Perhaps I misread, but in Disgrace compassion takes a decidedly non-interventionist form. Coetzee allows his characters to stubbornly choose their own paths, even when such paths must lead to misery.

This autonomy is an illusion, of course: Coetzee is writing all the dialogue, all the actions. But the characters seem to establish themselves as independent forces within the writer's mind, as all good characters must, as Byron's lover Theresa stands apart within David Lurie's mind, singing for her lost poet.

Lurie must allow his daughter to choose her own fate, despite serious misgivings about her choice. Likewise, Coetzee allows his protagonist to be his own man: unlikeable, brilliant, stubborn. Lurie claims to be too old to learn new tricks, but this is plainly wrong. His attitude toward animals changes utterly, and his attitude toward the offence he commits early in the book.

Forgive the long-winded spiel; I just finished the book and am working out some thoughts in text. The book should be read; there is no more important writer in English today than Coetzee.

Rating:
Summary: Disgrace- simply written with multiple complex themes
Review: Disgrace is a short book written in simple prose but the multiple themes it contains are very thought provoking and stay with you long after you have finished.The anti-hero starts off by being extremely unlikable - a 'dirty old man'- self-centered, uncompromising and self distructing. At the end I didn't dislike him as much and almost felt sorry for him. I found the book very intense - the psychological nature was amazing- dealing with the individual character, all types of relationships, role reversals and corruption in a country in turmoil, animal rights issues.The rape assault scene was very difficult to read as well as the passages dealing with animal disposal. The book projects a very unhappy view of life and people with little joy but perhaps in the end acceptance of the reality the author perceives.

Rating:
Summary: WHITE MAN'S BURDEN
Review: "Disgrace," Coetzee's prize-winning offering to the literary world, is a disturbing book - which is a very mild way of saying that it jolts you out of your complacencies, sends a chill down your spine and keeps coming back to haunt you even when you put it away. It places scenes before you that you'd rather turn your eyes away from. And it unwraps matters that would generally be swept under the carpet in polite society. The pattern of shame and disgrace suffered by david Lurie is repeated with Lurie's daughter as the sufferer. It is almost as though she were paying back for the sins of her father. She bears it all in silence, refusing to complain, taking it as the price that she, being white, must pay for living in a black country. Personal relationships thus get meshed with local and national politics and with racial history. It is no longer the story of individuals but of two races split by a colour divide.

"Disgrace" is heavy with symbolism, drawing constant parallels between the human and the bestial (Bev Shaw and her dog clinic), making the reader wonder which of the two species is more humane. It is a novel that focuses attention on the sorrows of being human in a world that is essentially inhuman, a world that is unable to understand and reach out to individuals caught up in an existential web of loneliness and pride.

As he narrates the story of the main protagonist, the writer, John Coetzee, interweaves it with the story of a nation coming into its own, throwing off age-old shackles of the apartheid curse. This, in different hands, would probably be an optimistic theme, welcoming the dawn of a new era. But Coetzee is aware of the Savage God that takes birth, replacing one chaos with another. Disgrace, which begins as the story of a professor of English driven by Eros, ultimately turns out to be the tale of the white man in South Africa. What happens when the reigning majority is reduced to a minority, a hounded, unwanted minority? What price does it have to pay then for the sins of the past?

To put it differently, what happens to the master when he is overthrown? What is the retribution? How do the erstwhile slaves take revenge? The history of the country thus becomes metaphorically entwined with that of individual characters. Racial hatred is laid bare and the harsh, ugly realities of post-apartheid South Africa, horrifying and frightening, are foregrounded.

So the novel is about the aftermath of decolonization as much as it is about the aftermath of Desire. In electing an anti-hero as the main protagonist, Coetzee draws our attention to what human beings really are. Like Lurie, they go wrong and fall from their pedestals - simply because they are human, fallible, flawed creatures: "...how are the mighty fallen!" says a character in Disgrace. But, through sacrifice, love and compassion there is the hope of redemption, at least partial. This is the underlying Christian theme, the saving grace that lifts ordinary mortals to a higher plane, enabling them to have intimations of immortality in a world that is undeniably mortal.

Narrated in a bare minimalist style, spare and precise almost to a fault, the narrative does not falter or linger over superfluous words or emotions. There is no moralizing, no sentimentality or gimmickry. The author believes in understatement: his symbols are loaded, the power of suggestion is strong and unignorable. Indeed, Coetzee knows how to hold his readers' attention, how to write an award winning book, how to produce a masterpiece. We love it, even if the masterpiece is one that niggles at our conscience and makes us uncomfortable!

Manju Jaidka

Rating:
Summary: FATAL DESTRUCTION
Review: From one of the most important South African writers of today, this novel deservedly won the prestigious Booker Prize for 1999. It's a book on contradictions and moral dilemmas in post-apartheid South Africa, on the difficult coexistence of the various ethnic groups, on the question of the role of whites in history, and not only local history. At fifty-two, divorcee David Laurie - a professor of English literature at the Cape Town University - loses his job and the esteem of friends and colleagues because of a relationship with a student ending up with an accusation of sexual harassment. David becomes a forced guest of his daughter Lucy, in her country farm. She is an independent and strong woman, whose existence is the perfect example of all contradictions and hopes of post-apartheid: despite the violence sustained on the part of three assailants, Lucy accepts it. Not so her father David, who cannot come to terms with it. A dramatic account of inner turmoils.

Rating:
Summary: Trials
Review: In this superbly crafted book, Coetzee juxtaposes the trials of an aging, lusty professor with those of his daughter, who struggles to maintain a farm. The professor, David, brings 'disgrace' upon himself through his relations with one of his female students and his refusal to 'change his nature' leads to his dismissal from the university. His daughter has 'disgrace' thrust upon her, after an attack on her farm. The story which unfolds in this novel is captivating and the book is very hard to put down! I highly recommend it. Coetzee--much like Nabokov-- paints very human characters, some with more failing than 'average', yet he does not seem to pronounce judgment on any. Instead he tells a story about life, where good and evil are, as in real life, not clearly marked.

Rating:
Summary: Disgrace or Despair?
Review: An extremely tightly written novel that should be read but definitely not a "comfort" novel. The portrayal of the black South Africans is chilling. Professor Lurie's love for his daughter shines throughout the book but he can't seem to come to the realization that he has seduced another father's much-loved daughter. There is much to discuss here and this is an excellent choice for a book group. Not everyone will enjoy it but each will have an opinion.

Rating:
Summary: Can grace come from disgrace?
Review: I read this book the moment it became available in the United States, immediately upon its being chosen as the recipient of the Booker Prize. I had previously read all of Coetzee's novels except the first two. This particular novel is, in many ways, the bleakest, most uncompromising, hair-raising thing I have ever read. Coetzee does not comfort the reader, and he seems to find no consolation for the enduring and continually evolving horrors of the world in art, idealism, knowledge, or reason. In fact, most of the epiphanic moments in each of his novels seem to come from the most basic things in life: vegetables, animals, earth, sky, weather. Relationships with others are, at best, tenuous and fraught with pain, terror, guilt, remorse, and often, anger and an uncontrollable rage. Yet, at the same time, the writing is spare, lucid, and often surpassingly beautiful - at times, it is indeed overwhelmingly powerful. This book, like all of Coetzee's others, raises many more questions than it answers. And shouldn't this be the way art makes us react? Why read something that presents an "answer" or "solution" to you in a gift-wrapped (and therefore, false) format? I read to question myself and my own life and choices. Coetzee forces you to examine yourself, your beliefs, your emotions, fears, wants, "needs" and desires, your thoughts, your political sentiments, your relationships with yourself and with others (and that includes, on an equal basis, animals, of which group humans are the most consciously cruel, and at times, the most unconscious, members). His vision is comparable to Beckett's in his fiction - where comedy comes truly from pain and horror, and where one is forced to examine one's own reactions as a reader to the most minute detail and nuance. Read this book. It will enrich you as a living being. Months later, and it is still working on me, and inside of me.

Rating:
Summary: A great disappoinment
Review: I found this book a great disappointment because of the high critical praise and Booker prize it has received. This reception, too, is disappointing because it illustrates how readers in the west still rely on colonialist South Africans for the so-called "bitter truth" about post-apartheid South Africa. The novel is one long bitter lament of a sexist, literary white man for whom black Africans are the presumptuous, threatening "others" who exist only as threatening land grabbers and mentally deficient rapists.In defence of the author, some readers may grant Coetzee an ironic point of view, which detaches him from his anti-hero, David Lurie. But this claim is countered by the fact that the novel really becomes energized when he is discussing Wordsworth and Byron, and not when he deals with his relationships with other characters, or with political realities. How can we take a character, or an author seriously, when he makes a point of noting in the shopping cart of the single woman who is chairperson of his former department a box of sanitary napkins! And how can we respond to the author's finally declared love of animals, when the human beings, men and women, who have suffered from his priveleged position, never earn serious attention, much less sympathy.