Disgrace

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Summary: In another time and place...
Review: History and personal journeys walk hand in hand in J. M. Coetzee's The Man Booker Prize winner 'Disgrace'. Telling the story of single man, the South African writer managed to give us a deep portrait of life in his country post-Apartheid.

David Lurie is a professor who, after having a relationship with a student, is fired. His only refugee is his daughter's farm in the countryside. His idea was to spend only a couple of days there, but after a violent event he is forced to stay there, analyzing their father-daughter relationship, to learn who to live in a farm, but, above all, to live in a different country.

Were 'Disgrace' only Lurie's personal journey to self-discover it would be a great novel, but as soon as Coetzee brings politics and racial issues in the novel, it is lift to another level. The story and characters are quite well developed. The three acts of the novel are very clear, and interlinked. The last part is the best, when all the turmoil comes to a conclusion --very plausible, by the way.

When David and Lucy --his daughter-- face an act of extreme violence, they are left helpless. And so is the reader. At a certain point, one can't believe in what is happening. You feel as shaken as them. The aftermath is very well developed and believable --not to mention the twists in the last pages.

Halfway through the book, when they are talking about it, its consequences and what can be done, Lucy says that in another time and place it would be different. David asks what place is that, and she replies 'This place being South Africa'. If you had any doubts that you'd been reading a political book so far, your queries are dissipated. At this moment the writer shows all his cards.

Coetzee is not looking for reasons or solutions, he is advising what his country came down to be, and that now 'black' and 'white' people have to live together and come to terms with each other. For this matter, Lucy and her 'neighbor' Petrus have a fine purpose. Each represents one racial group, occupying the same piece of land, having to stand the each other.

With 'Disgrace' Coetzee created a sort of fable that is perfect for our time of intolerance. Don't expect a teary ending. Like life, he makes no concessions. With his down-to-earth book, Coetzee's ideas are kept with us long after you've finished the novel.

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Summary: Wonderfully Unappreciative
Review: Well, on a lark I purchased this book and read it quickly. I wasn't sure what to expect but forced myself through it. Definately not my element; I'm used to wizards and dragons and such--this sort of fiction to me I have not a whit of appreciaton for. Maybe I need to become more educated to apprecaite this work, but good lord I think I just wasted a solid 6 hours of my life reading that. Please, Mr. Coetzee, I know you're winning awards and all, but deliver us from this dreary reality and write about some dragons and wizards! I'm thinking in my blissful ignorance that the only people who would enjoy this book have to be the most boring old fossils this earth has produced. Anyway, back to being juvenile.

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Summary: Unforgettable
Review: Coetzee is that rare artist who can combine the personal and the political in such a way that neither suffers. This book is schematic but never for a moment unbelievable. One of my favorite books.

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Summary: A profound philosophical fable
Review: I have read this book as a philosophical fable that pits two fundamentally different world against each other. The protagonist - a professor in English Literature - is representative for the symbolised world - mediated by language, images, and abstract principles - we all live in. It is not a perfect world, but despite all its implicit violence and unfulfilled yearnings, it is the world we know best and love most. That is why David Lurie after all instills some sympathy is the reader.

The other world is represented by the ubiquitous dogs in the story and by Lurie's daughter, who lives a modest life in a rural setting. Animals have never been admitted to the symbolised world of human beings. Their life is lived outside the whirlpool of signs and meaning. It is a 'dumb' world, if you like, but with its own kind of somatic intelligence: they are in touch with the earth, with their own unarticulated being. The deep and unbridgeable schism between the 'real' and the 'symbolic' (to use Lacanian categories) is epitomised by the unability to communicate about and to come to a shared understanding of what father and daughter experienced during a violent assault at the farm. Lurie tries to convince Lucy that she has to prosecute the perpetrators, but she refuses to articulate the violation, to personalise it and to let her actions lead by abstract principles such as 'justice', 'friendship' and 'fatherhood'.

Whilst her motives remain opaque to the reader, we understand that this is more than waywardness or fatalism. There is a certain kind of primal strength in her behaviour that draws respect and awe. The tension between these two worlds is not resolved by the end of the novel. Despite all the upheavals, Lurie remains stricken in his familiar universe of language and Lucy encapsulates herself in the mute routines of the rural life and traditional customs. Maybe the father's fascination for song is an indication that he has an intimation of the pre-cognitive origins of our life world that his daughter seems to inhabit. But is only an intimation and by the end of the book David and Lucy have drifted off in their private universes.

'Disgrace' is an uneasy and provocative book. Coetzee confronts us with impossible choices that incrust themselves in one's mental armoury: a powerful strategy for renewal.

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Summary: Truly an award wining book
Review: One sometimes wonder why certain books get awards and others don't. I purchased DISGRACE with some trepidation having been stung several times by books that were lauded by others and turned out to be less that interesting reads for me.

Coetzee is an amazing writer. As another reviewer mentioned, this book stays with you. You rehash the characters in your mind. I'm still debating with myself about the ending and would love to get into a book club or group discussion about it so I could share other readers views.

To mimic the comments of other reviewers, it is one of the best novels that I have read in recent years. For some reason, I thought of THE READER when I completed this book. Both delve into the psche of a society and a culture. Coetzee takes a deep look at South African culture in this work. It's a great read. Though short in pages it will remain with you for a long time.

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Summary: Depth in simplicity
Review: The story, written in the third person voice, develops along the events David Lurie, 52, self-proclaimed disciple of nature poet William Wordsworth, encounters. If there is one word to characterize the events depicted, it could only be hardship -- hardships that arose from being expelled from the university he worked as a professor (for a fling with one of his students), from not being capable of controlling his sexual impulses, from getting vandalized and physically assaulted, from not being able to get through his loving daughter Lucy despite all his efforts, from having to succumb to the rules of life of the rural South Africa. All these allude to disgrace.

With simplicity and economy Coetzee evokes aggravation, sympathy, and elicits a deeper understanding of what it is to be human. His sentences do not span more than two lines most of the time, and he does not indulge in explaining neither the motives nor the psychology of his characters. Rather, the story is delivered matter-of-factly, as a sequence of descriptions of evolving events. The contextual depth one discovers upon reading is thus the more remarkable.

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Summary: stayed with me
Review: Although I read this book when it first was published, it has continued to haunt me. Not only is it well written, but also thought provoking and emotionally riveting. I felt that I knew these people and understood - if not agreed with - their viewpoints. Coetzee made them real, flawed and familiar. Highly recommended.

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Summary: Can Most People be Wrong? Yes
Review: This is truly an exercise in one-dimensional story telling in every aspect. The prose is sing song. The characters vacuous. The grand philosophical statement hackneyed and trite. The book is "stuffed" with sweeping generalities and major contradictions in character structure. The girl willingly beds the professor -- and more than once. The daughter is a dyed in the wool masochist that is portrayed as a liberal wise woman, concerned with the good of all humanity. Are we to believe there is justification in rape by an oppressed people against its oppressor, and yet sin in a summer/winter fling? And about this middle-aged character: Soooooo? he is getting his last flings. Good for the old guy. If Melanie was concerned about her grades, she should have studied harder, not used a particular positiion as a cheat sheet. There is little or no exposition in this book so as to render it colorless. Characters come and disappear before we have a clue as to why they were there at all. The symbolism is so heavy handed that only a child would be impressed by its connectivity. And this got the Booker Award and he got the Nobel? I have been to South Africa. This says nothing. It says nothing about post apartheid and has nothing more than a puerile view of morals and the human condition. And finally...the most frightening thing about this novel is that it got so many five star reviews and was awarded. Can we not read anymore? The last is a rhetorical question. I sat in a bookstore and read this in one sitting. My cafe latte was quite nice.

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Summary: coetzee's disgrace
Review: Far and away the best book I have read in decades - not the most enjoyable, but splendid none the less.

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Summary: In a State of Disgrace.
Review: Post apartheid, South Africa is in a state of flux: a violent country in which a melting-pot of diverse cultures are struggling to come to terms with each other; a cauldron of conflicting forces and tensions bubbling to the surface as the balance of power shifts from one social system to another. Set in Cape town, "Disgrace" is a painful, disturbing exploration of the fissures running through the new South Africa in the aftermath of apartheid. The novel sends out a dismal, discouraging message that political change in South Africa has had virtually no effect in eradicating human suffering.

David Lurie, Professor of Communications at Cape Technical University, is on the carpet following a sexual liaison with a student. Lurie acknowledges his guilt before a Hearing, but is unwilling to express regret and consequently is dismissed. Disgraced, he finds a temporary haven at his daughter Lucy's farm in Eastern Cape to give himself some leeway and to continue his work on Byron. Lurie busies himself working on the farm, also assisting at an animal welfare shelter. However, his settling-in period is shattered when Lucy and he are brutally attacked, and Lucy sexually violated, by three black men. Helpless to intervene and save Lucy, Lurie's downfall is complete. Bleak characters inhabiting a bleak moral landscape!

Written in spare prose, the novel works on a symbolic level: Lurie's fall represents the fall of legalised white supremacy in South Africa. The savage attack on Lurie and Lucy at the farm and the massacre of the dogs, suggesting that the cruel oppression of apartheid has been replaced by rampant lawlessness and disorder, brings to the surface the fractures in Lucy's relationship with her father. Lurie represents the old world: Lucy, the uncertain future of the new, post apartheid South Africa. Lurie's regressive outlook is reflected in his efforts to persuade Lucy to leave the farm because of the potential danger in staying on and his suspicion that Petrus, her coloured neighbour and assistant, is conspiring to take over her farm. - The A.N.C. have strongly condemned Coetzee's portayal of the black-on-white rape of Lucy as racist and accused him in the novel of urging whites to quit the country to break free from the barbarity of black rule.

Lucy flatly rejects her father's views. Committed to the land, Lucy reconciles herself to going with the forces for social change simmering in the new South Africa, refusing to adopt the siege mentality of reactionary farmers like Ettinger, by turning her farmhouse into a fortress. Petrus represents the transition between the old order and the new South Africa, the momentum for social change, (builds his own house, buys land which he couldn't do under apartheid), yet still retaining his traditional rights to polygamy in marriage. His relationship with Lucy reflects the shifting of power in the new South Africa. Lucy recognises that she is dependent on her neighbour Petrus for protection and that the way forward is to learn to live with him - uncertain though she is of his motives and intentions - and with the changes that are looming, if she is to survive on the land. Gripping - except for the stuffy bits on Byron!