Rating: 
Summary: Thought-provoking, though painful "mid-life crisis" story...
Review: Very interesting story that follows a man in his mid-life. With youth slipping away the main character faces a number of rather sad (though note he is seeing it from a negative perspective) realizations. The book's actually a bit of a downer (I read it recenlt while on holiday in Bali. We rented a home there, and it included a small library. "Take or leave a book," the owner of the house instructed, but, he wrote, do not remove "Disgrace"). Naturally I was curious and read Disgrace. Not coincidentally, the owner of thes house where I stayed is about the same age as the lead character David (in the book), with a daughter (similar to David's daughter) about the same age as well. Read it (it is worth it and beautifully/thoughtfully written) but don't expect it to cheer you, especially the ending....darn, so easily it could have gone another way, allowing the reader to let out a breath of relief. Inside, you close the book and sadly wonder.....
Rating:
Summary: Not his best, but still good!
Review: This is not Coetzee's best work, but the story of the fallen Professor resonates with me because of my own job at a university (not that my life would ever mirror the lead character's if I have anything to do about it). Like many of his books, this book is difficult to read. It is not because of any fault of Coetzee's style but because of his story and the violence that erupts ever so briefly, but enough to transform the work into a survival tale that once again leaves the reader uneasy about the way in which one can become so easily a victim or so easily disgrace themselves. The way the characters' lives change so quickly makes you recognize the fragility of each of our own lives and how it can all change in an instant and not necessarily through some spectacular act, but through the everyday things most of us never experience but that occur daily, violence, rape, giving in to impulses etc.
Rating: 
Summary: a hard, honest book.
Review: Not an easy read, but a good one. This is a hard, honest book that has been in my mind since I read it. I don't particularly like the characters, but I believe them, and I wish I could argue with them myself. My only criticism, is I wish it had a stronger end.
Rating:
Summary: It should be called "Pain."
Review: Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee, is, I think, the most painful novel I've ever read. The last pages were so incredibly hard to endure, I really couldn't stand to think about it at all and nuried myself in a magazine article to avoid dwelling on it. The story follows a white, disillusioned South African communications professor, who is fired for harassment. He goes to a rural area of the country to live with his adult daughter, who has a small farm in a volatile region. Shortly after rriving, they are the victims of terrible violence by three black men. The professor stays on, but his relationship with his daughter is poor and deteriorates as she refuses to handle the
aftermath of the incident as he wishes. At her asking, he helps out at an animal center, where one of his jobs is helping the proprietor put dogs to sleep whom no one wants and then taking their bodies to the incinerator. It doesn't get happier, just sadder. It's overwhelmingly painful. It's very well written and flows well. Coetzee is a ompelling novelist, but this one was nearly too much to endure. It reminded me somewhat of The Age of Iron, the first one of his I read, which is also about South Africa, ever-present pain of death and the ongoing societal issues of race.
Rating:
Summary: Brilliant Critique of Modern, Rational Man
Review: Well educated, proud, rational, practical, David Lurie fancies himself a reasonable man, somewhat alone, but "happy" with his discretionary income and his somewhat comfortable albeit futile professorial position. He lives the life of a voluptuate, a sensuous predatory playboy whose life gets derailed during a sex scandal. Expelled from the university, Lurie must venture into the wildnerness and find redemption by developing a sense of community and empathy. Told in rigorous, spare prose, the novel is never preachy or boring. It is a lean masterpiece and very much worth of the 1999 Booker Prize.
Rating: 
Summary: A hard read
Review: What drew to this novel was the title and the fact that it was touted as one of eleven best books of the year by the New York Times Book Review. That's what drew me. What I was in store for, I was unaware. A well written book by J. M. Coetzee--Disgrace, is the story of a man and his view of the world. The story takes place in South Africa, where David Lurie, a professor of Communications at Cape Technical University, is faced with his disgrace. Now divorced, he has relations with whores, faculty members, and a student. His downfall is Melanie, a student that he practically rapes when he visits her home. He has no feelings but his own. It is as if something overtakes him, and he gives in to his impulses. Melanie leaves school and the faculty finds out about this affair. He is ousted from the university and leaves for the uplands of the Eastern Cape to visit his daughter, Lucy. Lucy is a work of art herself. She owns a farm where she grows flowers and sells them in town. She also takes in animals and cares for them. She is raped when three men come into her home. Her field hand, Petrus, knows of the men and David is enraged. He wants Lucy to turn the men in but Lucy says this is not the way of the land. She wants to stay here and survive. She, like him, makes decisions based on her own disgrace. He would not tell the truth about his demise, and she decides to carry the child conceived from the rape. They both have to accept each other's decisions and move on. As David has been on the farm a while, he has encounters with Bev Shaw, the somewhat vet in these parts of the world. She loves animals, but hates to put them to sleep when sick. David works with her and they have relations. He feels sorry for her and gives her what she wants. He has nothing left of himself. This is a hard story to explain. I think when you read this story-you may perceive a different view. It was a dark, dark, story of someone who lives with loneliness and his concious is his friend. He has no friends to confide in, not even his daugh
Rating:
Summary: Problematic
Review: The prose is precise and clean, skillful, like a surgeon's knife. My take on this thesis is that for post apartheid South Africa to work, white people like Lucy will have to suffer and endure the consequences of racial punishment for centuries of oppressing blacks. For the professor, it might mean one has to start from the beginning, as a simple sentient being, like an animal, like the dogs he helps kill. Animals have souls, too, he realizes. And that's what he becomes at the end. The novel is Unsentimental, harsh, bleak. I buy it. What I can't abide is his character development. What an unsympathetic character. The author sees him as a sensualist. He's not... (Sensualists are passionate. He is not. He lacks passion, as he is described.) His sexuality is based on dominating women and exercising power. I found him cold and cynical and humorless. I couldn't believe he could love anyone, not even his daughter. I'd have loved to see the novel written from Lucy's point of view. She would have been worth knowing; she's more difficult; the choices she makes are powerful, ambiguous, complex. How she would have made a better omniscient narrator. Of course, it would have been a much harder novel to write. Too hard perhaps. But she would have made a more compelling character.
Rating:
Summary: Best Read
Review: It is the frist time I read a book as bleak as this,the characters so despondent,so helpless ,so complex and above all so human. The author portrays how easy it is to fall in the rut, to give up fighting and to resign to our fate.He makes us face facts and facets of human character we are not comfortable with.
The book haunts long after we have finished reading it.A must read.
Rating: 
Summary: Not for everyone
Review: Yes, the book is beautifully written, but the subject matter is at best depressing: brutal rape, seemy sex, and bad family relationships. The characters are unlikable, and their realtionships frustratingly strained. There is nothing redeeming in this novel. One look at the number or used copies available will tell you that this book is very hard to love. As a Booker prize winner, this was a BIG disappointment.
Rating:
Summary: Drop-Kicked It Down The Stairs
Review: Yes, this book is beautifully written, just as a bejewelled dagger is breathtaking--as you plunge it into your heart. I found this book incredibly wounding to read--and I've never said this before in response to a book. I read this book for a bookclub and had to will myself to read it. I finished it off in two short sessions--not because I couldn't put it down, but because I didn't want it to ruin more than one or two days in my life. The minute I read the last painful word I threw it across the room and kicked it downstairs into the garage, where I didn't have to look at it. Yes, I believe it is important to understand what is going on in South Africa, and this book illustrates the complex situation quite well, but the author seems intent on piling on as much misery on the reader as he possibly can. (i.e. killing dogs and then watching their legs being hacked up so they won't get stuck on the conveyer belt as they are being fed into the flames...) Maybe this book is best viewed as an intellectual exercise for those who have a hard time accessing their emotions because of their own numbness and dispassion in life. But as for me, there's enough misery out there as it is. I would rather hold my hand over a sizzling fry pan for several hours that read a book like this again.
| 
