Disgrace

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Summary: Please read spotlight reviews before this
Review: Let me start off by saying that J.M Coetzee's talent as a writer is unrivaled, his economic writing style demands emotion and engages the reader and his skill at scratching at the festering wound that is modern South Africa (for the over 40) is phenomenal. But that's just it, Disgraces social commentary is limited by Lurie's age, you can't teach an old dog new tricks. And Coetzee doesn't try, or South Africa doesn't, they merely force him to repent and be saved. South Africa is not really like that though, not if you're under 40. for Lurie, in his arrogance and intellectual snobbery, South Africa is a place of hatred, violence, racial-tension and, to a man in his position, closed doors. He shows us a South Africa where people live in an underlying, subconscious fear, a place where, in order to deal with it, theft must be seen as a relocation of wealth rather than a personal assault. I live in South Africa and my views, as a white male, are vastly different. My best friend is a black girl and my girlfriend lives on a farm, their views are vastly different too. Yes there is violence and theft but to us South Africa is a wealth of opportunity. I go to University in Grahamstown, not 20km from Salem, Disgrace's setting, and find open doors where Lurie finds closed ones.

The other problem I have with Disgrace is the characters. Lurie is well researched and, while not wholly likeable, believable and unnervingly human. However, Disgrace's secondary characters seem under-developed and not particularly convincing. Lucy, Lurie's ex-hippie, lesbian, farmer daughter, is a mad extreme of real characteristics and her reactions to her predicament seem used only to make Disgrace's point. Only one of her could possibly exist in South Africa and thus her reason for existence seems to slip away.

All in all Disgrace is a good book. It is superbly written and it does what many books today don't, it makes you think. Should you read Disgrace? Without question but my argument is this: please look at Disgrace not as THE window into South Africa, but merely a window, one that encompasses only a small part of the white South African experience. Lurie is marginalized but that is not mostly the case. South Africa is so much more than this, it is the new land of opportunity.

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Summary: Coetzee and the Nobel "Ideal of Direction"
Review: DISGRACE is a fascinating novel, easily read, clearly traversed. JM Coetzee has won the Booker Prize, the 1999 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, and now he has been awarded the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature for DISGRACE. Yes, this is a fine novel which, though transparent in appearance, delves into major issues of academic impropriety, racism, rape, animal abuse, and the South African political arena. It is an important book.
What defines the Nobel Prize in Literature? We all know the Nobel Prize for Peace and how it is awarded. But in investigating how for more than one century since Nobel's Will created the highly regarded Prize named for him, the types of books awarded seem so varied and we discover that there is no ONE direction for selecting which is the best book. Alfred Nobel himself deemed the award "for the person who, in the literary field, had produced 'the most outstanding work in an ideal direction'". In truth the prize is awarded to an author who demonstrates this 'ideal direction' for his output, not just for the novel cited. That being said, JM Coetzee seems eminently qualified for his Nobel Prize. He continues to write books that may be about particular tales but are in essence global metaphors challenging us to carefully compare our own microcosms and see the relationship to the universals nascent there.
DISGRACE, briefly, follows a year in the life of David Lurie, a University professor of poetry teaching in the governmentally reduced liberal arts portion of education in Cape Town to a group of less than interested students, students who mirror the ennui now present among the universities of the world who place Computer Programming and peripheral sciences and economic courses shelves above the importance of the arts. At 52 Lurie has failed in two marriages, spends his frustrated spare time in ... for hire afternoons, and cruising the young female students on his campus. When in a moment of foolishness he has a brief affair with a young student which of course is discovered and results in his expulsion from the university - his Disgrace for his appetites of the flesh - Lurie elects to take leave to the Eastern Cape where his sole child, a Lesbian daughter Lucy, has set up a hippie existence on a farm. Unable to cope with the country life Lurie decides his goal is to write an opera about Lord Byron in Italy but has not the talent to create his ideal. He gradually adjusts to the rural life until a vicious attack by three South African men joltingly alters his and his daughter's life , and Lurie is both physically and emotionally scarred. How he pulls himself together, repairs his relationship with his daughter, comes to grips with the "new" South Africa and its requisite parceling of land reforms, etc and finds the window to his own soul which has been fogged (and even denied) throughout his life - these elements make up the bulk of the novel.
Coetzee's ability to maintain with extreme clarity the flow of his story is only one of the many graces of his talent. His way with words is terse yet poetic. "..in my experience poetry speaks to you either at first sight or not at all. A flash of revelation and a flash of response. Like lightning. Like falling in love." "..we cannot live our daily lives in a realm of pure ideas, cocooned from sense-experience. The question is not, How can we keep imagination pure, protected from the onslaughts of reality? The question has to be, Can we find a way for the two to coexist?" "War, Atrocity: every word with which one tries to wrap up this day, the day swallows down its black throat." "The blood of life is leaving his body and despair is taking its place, despair that is like a gas, odourless, tasteless, without nourishment. You breathe it in, your limbs relax, you cease to care, even at the moment when the steel touches your throat." And these are but a few of the moments that make us stop in awe of the gifts of a wordsmith such as Coetzee.
DISGRACE, then, is first a fine novel, second, a work of poetic beauty, and third, a doorway into exploring many of the challenges in thought we all face on daily. Knowing that our perceptions are in like study in such unknown regions and cultures such as South Africa merits the Nobel nod for "ideal of direction". We are one universe. A reminder of that is prize-worthy.

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Summary: Pure, plain, and painful
Review: For the first half of this book, set in South Africa with all the complexities of issues one would expect from that locale, I truly didn't like it and didn't understand what all the hype was about. Then something shifted, and I began to understand that the author's purpose was different from the usual. Coetzee isn't interested in having his readers 'like' his protagonist - and we don't. David Lurie is no one's hero, least of all his own. After a lackluster life, an affair with a student is exposed and he rather deliberately participates in his own resignation in disgrace.
For no clear reason other than to write something on Byron, he heads to the middle of nowhere to his daughter's farm, where she leads what appears to be a simple rural life. Nothing could be further from 'simple;' indeed, it's dangerous, and events take a particularly nasty turn.
This is a complicated and bleak novel that explores the nuances of disgrace, regret, responsibility, and shame. Hard to read, in fact at times hard to figure out why readers continued to read, but worth every word by the end.

Rating:
Summary: A Stark, Stimulating Read
Review: "Disgrace" is not an easy read nor a comfortable one. Yet it leaves you thinking about some very serious issues-apartheid, familial love, redemption-for a long time.
David Lurie is the quintessential anti-hero. A 52-year old twice divorced professor in post-apartheid Cape Town, he exists instead of really lives. His job is at a dead-end (he is a Romantic Poets scholar who is teaching communications) and his so-called satisfying sexual relationship with a black prostitute recently has ended. Out of boredom or self-loathing, he seduces a student and ends up being booted from the University.
He escapes the city to his daughter's smallhold in rural South Africa. His daughter represents much of what he would loathe in the world-she's overweight, very earthy, gay. But he loves her so much. And it is this love for her that redeems him in the reader's eyes. After an afternoon of unimaginable violence, he goes to great lengths - and unsuccessful ones-to protect his daughter.
I would recommend "Disgrace" to those who gravitate towards serious-themed (particularly racial) books. It is not a comfortable read-but it is ultimately a satisfying one.

Rating:
Summary: Beautifully bleak
Review: The title of this complex novel applies to post-apartheid South Africa, symbolized by the main character, David Lurie. It's not just about disgrace in the sense of shame, but dis-grace in the sense of discarding grace in order to achieve something else. Lurie's personal journey highlights the problems of contemporary South Africa, such as the impotence of the minority Westernized culture that ruled for so long and the brutal changes that accompany the evolution toward a new society.

There's a grim ironic justice in turning the exploitive standards of the former white regime against the white populace in the person of Lurie's daughter, Lucy, who is the victim of the ultimate colonial horror fantasy. But there's more to her than a victim. On a metaphoric level, her lesbianism is a rejection of the old establishment embodied in the predatory maleness of her father and of his urban culture, in favor of a return to the land that Lurie cannot fathom. This is a factor in Lucy's decision to become, in essence, a privileged concubine to her wily neighbor Petrus.

Lurie, as proxy of the values and virtues (or lack thereof) of the former ruling minority, can do nothing in response to his personal downfall and Lucy's exploitation by Petrus. It's cathartic and fitting that he abandons his previous ways and settles into a quiet decline, a life purified by abasement and marked by his awakened compassion for animals, a life in which he must give up everything, including his daughter.

In decades of empty academic and erotic pursuits and in his response to his "trial" by the university, Lurie (arrogant and corrupt like the old South Africa) showed no inclination for the kind of community that is essential if the new South Africa is to prosper. I think it's appropriate that Lucy and her unborn child will become part of a community at the end of the novel. It's a seemingly graceless existence that she is more than half-coerced into joining, yet which she accepts pragmatically. In the context of the novel, her fate is probably a necessary evil. It is her multiracial family that will build the new South Africa, while the old, personified by her father, can only watch from the sidelines, purged, purified, and powerless.

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Summary: Excellent Introduction to Nobel Prize Winner
Review: If you're looking for an introduction to the work of the new Nobel Prize winner J.M Coetzee [Coat-zee-uh] this is an excellent book to start with. This, like most of his books, can be devoured in a single sitting. But while the prose reads easily, the story is extremely challenging emotionally. Moreover, Coetzee's themes relating to a South Africa in flux are as weighty as any of the great writers. For such a lucid storyteller who can cover issues of this gravity I think you have to go back to Steinbeck.

You might also try Michael K as an introduction to Coetzee's work.

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Summary: A compact book that packs in so much
Review: This is the first J M Coetzee book that I have read. Usually, with due respect to the committee and winners, Man Booker Prize books do not sit very well with me- save for a couple. This book is surprisingly, an exception.

In a mere 200+ pages, Coetzee packs many important themes like aparthied, father-daughter relationship, when should a parent "let go" of his/her children, abandoning city life for a simple rural living, when is a child considered old enough to be held responsible for his wrongdoings, should one take revenge against an assault et al. Just far too many of them for me to list all here. There is an austerity about his prose which grips me. Recommended read.

Rating:
Summary: Disgust
Review: Nobel Prize (...). They picked Yassir Arafat too, and then nominated George Bush Jr. This depressing, tedious tale plods through a joyless life of joyless sex and academic constipation. The dramatic thrust, if you can call it that, comes at the end, with our "hero's" final realization that it's okay to kill dogs, or maybe it's only necessary, or maybe killing dogs represents his liberation from something or other. I think a better ending could have occurred on page 2, with Professor Lurie hanging himself.

Rating:
Summary: astounding literature.
Review: I am still reeling from the experience of reading "Disgrace." I sobbed through it and actually felt physically transported for the few hours during which I read the book. Afterwards I was in a sort of daze which was difficult to shake myself out of.

There's a whole world in this book - which I suppose is true of any great work of literature. But what I appreciated most about "Disgrace" was that it simultaneously explores the most intimate depths of personality, shame and guilt and courage and helplessness and narcissism, while showing that the tragedy of apartheid, and by extension all Empire, remains still very much alive - and violent - and continues to work itself out through the lives of ordinary people, long after the "regime" has been changed.

Rating:
Summary: Simple on the surface, with many levels underneath
Review: "Disgrace" could be taken at face value, like so many novels: it is a quite simple story about a man who makes what the contemporary world regards as a huge mistake, that costs him his prestigious position at a South African post-Apartheid university. This mistake is followed by several more, in what can be described as some highly self-destructive behavior, and the protagonist is eventually forced to find a way to fill the void left behind by the abandonment of his career. His choice is to spend some time out in the country with his recently separated lesbian daughter and to volunteer at a local animal shelter. His encounters with new characters along the way, and a series of violent events that occur at his daughter's home, open his eyes up to new emotions, his own character flaws and the troubles of his country.

Taken on the surface, the short novel seems so uncomplicated, but if you dig down even just a bit, there are so many themes interwoven into this one tale: is the punishment for a professor having a relationship with a student befitting of the crime? what does a middle-aged man go through as he loses his looks and charm? there are the topics of divorce, lovers, broken relationships, animal rights, violence, lesbianism, divided south african society, the way black and white society work in such different ways, feminism, contemporary forms of hypocrisy, the benefits and drawbacks of volunteer work, making major life choices, rape, music, poetry... so many "small-scale" themes that add up to one large reflection on today's world, both in south africa and in the world at large. My only criticism might be that the novel touches SO many topics that one can only ask if some of them are covered a bit too superficially or were added purposefully for the sake of giving the novel a slightly wider appeal, but the author pulls it off by providing the novel with viewpoints at many levels, psychological, personal, inter-personal, inter-group and societal.