Disgrace

Rating:
Summary: A masterful blending of substance, style, and message
Review: In my short lifetime of reading, I have found that a good book generally distinguishes itself by one of three key elements: substance, style, or message. Some books are a pleasure to read simply because of their gripping plot; others because of the author’s gifted prose; and yet others because they make an important statement about society or human nature. It is rare to come across a book that masterfully blends all three elements together, and such a book is rightfully called not simply good, but great.

J.M. Coetzee’s novel Disgrace, recipient of the 1999 Booker Prize, is a gem of a book that begs to be read and re-read. It is tightly written, filled with meaning, and suspenseful throughout. In its short span of 220 pages, we develop an at times painful compassion for Professor David Lurie, a fifty-something divorcé in Cape Town, South Africa, whose more or less ordinary existence suddenly falls apart through a series of unfortunate events. First his successful career is threatened by accusations from a young student with whom he has had a brief affair. Seeing his professional life going up in flames, he retreats to his daughter’s farm for a short visit that soon takes on a feel of indefiniteness. But while he is there, the two of them fall victim to a violent attack, the consequences of which threaten to tear the two of them apart.

The novel is an unflinching examination of human desire and emotion. We follow David through his lustful affairs, his loneliness, his anger and resentment, and his stubborn defiance in the face of threat and opposition. And somehow along the way we find ourselves caring for this seemingly unsympathetic character. For despite his moral flaws, he is a character who holds to his principles and perseveres. And whether he is wrong or right in the reader’s mind, it is clear that his heart is in the right place as he struggles for what he believes is right.

On a broader scale, the novel is also a frank portrait of modern South Africa, a country riddled by racial issues in a new, emerging era in which old paradigms no longer exist and new models have yet to be defined. Coetzee depicts this phenomenon at a very personal level in his account of the seemingly cooperative relationship between Lurie’s daughter and her African neighbor who assists in the management of her farm. Despite the cordial ties between the two and the sense that they operate as equals, there is a thick, underlying tension throughout the narrative. While her neighbor outwardly displays friendship and caring, there is a persistent uncertainty about his true intentions and where his loyalties lie. And beneath the surface of their relationship, there are deep social issues that point to a society in transformation that is far from discovery racial harmony.

Ambitious, compassionate, at times harsh, and courageous throughout, this is the kind of book that reminds readers of what great literature can achieve.

Rating:
Summary: dirty old men
Review: It's kind of hard to feel sympathy for the protagonist of this novel, an old man who likes to bed young girls and worries that his status as a grandfather will make him unattractive.

If dirty old men were exterminated, the world would be a better place. They should foist their sagging, decaying flesh on women their own age. I'm sorry I spent money on this book.

Rating:
Summary: Missing Something...
Review: J.M. Coetzee has an impeccable record for producing works of literary merit, but the knock against him comes from an overly practiced tendency to preach to his audience. In his streamlined novel, Disgrace, Coetzee avoids sermonizing altogether but delivers a work of startling severity. At its heart, Disgrace is a painful story about the changing world of post-apartheid South Africa that delivers truth but not without considerable hurt to the reader.

David Lurie is a fifty-two-year-old professor who is eminently dislikable. Rejected after becoming overly familiar with his prostitute, Lurie soon finds himself involved with Melanie, a student in his Romanticism course. When the University discovers his affair, charges are brought down on Lurie. Though his associates offer him an easy out that would allow him to stay on staff, he rejects the proposal with a burst of effusive pride. Retreating to the backcountry home of his mid-twenties daughter Lucy, Lurie hopes to escape the scandal of the city and start his life over. Yet notions of a serene rural setting prove false when a trio of black men attacks the pair. Lurie is beaten and humiliated, but Lucy is violated far more deeply.

A self-viewed intellectual, with all the snobbery of a city elite, Lurie finds himself grasping with straws trying to understand his daughter's world and her reaction to it. Like his offspring, he sees the changes that apartheid is brining, namely the black farmer's move to regain control of his traditional lands, but Lurie is utterly opposed to Lucy's acquiescence to the transformations. It takes an act of stunning violence to shake the mental foundations of Lurie's rational, but even this shift in thought brings no real results. He wears his humiliations like a suit of armor, and it seems nothing can pierce its potency.

While Disgrace creates a world of piercing truthfulness, it also creates a character in Lurie who is repeatedly stung by the exactness of his world but learns little and changes even less. For all its harsh reality, Coetzee's novel fails to convince even its protagonist of the story's lessons. If the point of the books is only to make the reader think, then it certainly succeeds in its goal; but for this reader at least, something more is necessary for a book to be grand. While an utterly readable book, with a plot delivery that is remarkable in its clarity, Disgrace falls a bit short.

Rating:
Summary: Disgrace
Review: J.M. Coetzee is one of those modern authors, who like Graham Greene (in my reckoning), is incapable of producing bad fiction. Though alike in perhaps no other way, I am consistently amazed reading their novels at the high standard of literary quality they maintain. That said, Coetzee's 1999 novel "Disgrace" is another outstanding performance. It is an intensely human story, with a main character whose trials and tribulations seem to force readers to qualify their praise of the novel by making moral judgments on him. Written in the sparsest imaginable prose, "Disgrace" manages to convey a tremendous amount of information and emotion in the fewest possible words, making the novel apparently easy to read, but difficult to understand. Dealing with issues of aging, gender, sex, power, race, scholasticism, family, and contemporary political and economic scenearios, Coetzee's novel transcends its South African setting, capable of speaking to practically any audience.

"Disgrace" tells the story of David Lurie, a 52 year old English professor with literally nothing going for him - His teaching is uninspired, his scholarly output is uninteresting, his department has been gradually phased out, and he gratifies his baser urges once a week with the same prostitute. Spotting this prostitute, Soraya, out one day with her children, David himself is spotted, and his comfortable, prosaic routine is shattered. He begins an affair with Melanie, a student in his Romanticism course. Brought up on charges of sexual impropriety, David resigns from his university position, and moves to the hinterlands to live with his daughter Lucy, a homesteading farmer and animal caregiver. The remainder of the novel follows David's attempts to put some semblance of a life together.

David's interactions with others frame his post-teaching life. David's problems stem from his high, even standoffish self-regard as an intelligent man, closed off from mainstream society and its traditional difficulties. The fraught socio-economic relationship between Lucy and her ambitious neighbour, Petrus, is especially trying in the aftermath of South African Apartheid. Animals play a large part in David's reacculturation - Lucy and her friend, Bev Shaw, are involved in amateur doctoring and anaesthetizing sick animals - David is forced to consider in a profound way the relationship and likenesses between humans and beasts in the modern age. On the animal tip, David's anxieties also involve human sexuality - in the aftermath of his school scandal and his uncertainties surrounding his daughter and his genetic legacy, David must rethink sex, love, and life.

Scholastically, "Disgrace" is informed heavily by David's professional interest in Romantic Era poetry. His personal interest in writing a chamber opera on Byron and various telling references to and citations of Wordsworth throughout the novel provide a literary framework for the novel. It suggests that David's quest for renewal both begins in and must escape his 18th and 19th century studies in order to reconcile himself to the changing modern world.

"Disgrace" is a novel I could keep talking and talking about. When I first finished reading it, I had an extremely unusual reaction. It may be pretentious to say, but I feel that this is the kind of novel that carries within it so many important issues and universal themes, that it may well eventually take a place in literary history occupied by the likes of "The Great Gatsby," one of those novels that our children and their children will be reading and studying well into the future. In short, Coetzee's "Disgrace" is an essential novel.

Rating:
Summary: Intriguing Twists of Literary Technique?
Review: I have to confess that the novel's main character is depressing and that anyone who wants a quick fix of "uplift" will not find it here. However, I do believe that several redemptions take place; they are subtle and underneath the words and patterns of words, sounds, rhythms of which Coetzee is a master. What I found to be intriguing and what others interested in literary tradition may be fascinated by is Coetzee's attempt to represent in the character of David Lurie an entire literary/historical epoch: the Romantic movement and all the passion that it unleashed at its time that is no longer available to any of us, other than in remnants ... because that "time" is, definitively, past. It's difficult to rate how successful the attempt is to transform a piece of history into a character in which readers believe. Lurie's daughter, Lucy, is clearly the type represented in Wordsworth's Lucy poems (Lurie is after all a competent Wordsworth scholar). Lurie himself is a more well-rounded character than his daughter who, in her own way, is more emotionally remote than and more difficult to enter, imaginatively, than her ironically erudite father. However, although Lurie is quite believable -- he is not likeable, unless the reader believes that there exist the faintest of signs that can be interpreted as hints of an enormous inner transmogrification that Lurie experiences but would refuse to describe directly. The book is so much a challenge that I will revisit it several times as well as introducing myself to its predecessors. What more can a reader ask of a writer I wonder?

Rating:
Summary: Great writing, but hugely depressing
Review: I read this novel in two days whilst on holiday, and I found it very readable and absolutely gripping. Coetzee has some great insight into people and a very observant eye.

But this book loses two whole stars for me as a result of its utterly depressing mood alone. The world David Lurie inhabits seems so bereft of hope, so mean-spirited and miserable, where not only people but simple events and accidents conspire against him, that by the novel's end you feel thoroughly down as a result of just having entered it.

I think part of the problem is that Lurie himself is so jaded and hopeless in his acceptance of all the events that blight his life. Never once is there a philosophical question, never does he seems to ask himself why life is so hard or why people can be so mean, he just seems like some damaged but unquestioning piece of flotsam carried along on a river of misery. And thus the world view of the book seems to be that people are really that disappointing, and life is so harsh.

So - great writing, and utterly intriguing, but in my personal view, a novel such not immerse its reader in such nihilistic cynicism. In that respect, Disgrace is a not a book of very good character.

Rating:
Summary: Bewildering story about an inscrutable misogynist.
Review: Perhaps misogynist is too strong a word to describe David Lurie the main character of "Disgrace", for he doesn't seem to despise women. He lacks understanding and respect for them, treats them like objects of desire or derision.

David Lurie's character is fascinating in that he's hard to describe. He appears to lack motivation, yet is driven by something within himself. He seems self-absorbed, yet uninspired to improve himself.

The story begins as David practically forces a reluctant student into a brief affair with him. Even as his prey expresses blatant disinterest in him, he proceeds recklessly, almost as if he is using the immoral circumstances as a catalyst for a momentous change in his life. Well aware of the consequences he will face, he just doesn't care.

He staggers through the next few months, reconnecting with his daughter at her home in the country. It is important to note that this story takes place in South Africa because tragic events unfold in a manner that might not occur in America.

For the most part I enjoyed the book because David Lurie is an enigma and I felt the need to know and understand him better. In the end, I was still perplexed by his character.

I wavered between three and four stars for this story. I wanted give it higher marks because of the fascinating main character. I wanted to rate it lower because the author uses choppy sentences abundant with commas, even in each character's dialogue.

I'd recommend the story purely for the character study. But don't expect David Lurie to undergo any sort of rebirth. He is who he is.

Rating:
Summary: An Aptly Named Book
Review: Told in the present tense with a simple writing style, "Disgrace," is one of the most disturbing books I have ever read -- this is not a criticism.

There is "Disgrace" at so many levels in this book: the main character is caught having an affair with his student, the violence against an innocent woman, and the death of countless animals.

This book is an important one. It tackles the big issues: racial, political, sexual orientation, and the causes behind what appears to be senseless violence (against both humans & animals). It takes a serious look and poses many questions about the consequences and aftermath of apartheid.

Rating:
Summary: An Aptly Named Book
Review: Told in the present tense with a simple writing style, "Disgrace," is one of the most disturbing books I have ever read -- this is not a criticism. There is "Disgrace" at so many levels in this book: the main character is caught having an affair with his student, the violence against an innocent woman, and the death of countless animals.

This book is an important one. It tackles the big issues: racial, sexual, and violence (against both humans & animals). It also takes a serious look at the consequences and aftermath of apartheid.

Rating:
Summary: moving and unsettling masterpiece
Review: This may seem a fairly simple book: David Lurie, male chauvinist professor, gets suspended for sexual harassment, retreats to his estranged daughter's farm, tries to pick up the pieces there and makes some discoveries about himself and the world around him. The story is an easy read, there are no diversions into philosophy or literary experiment. But ..... this simplicity is deceptive and only superficial. Those who do not take the trouble to read between the lines, will perhaps be wondering why this book was awarded the Booker Prize. Those who read more carefully will find that underneath the story lies a marvellously complex novel that is both very moving and unsettling. When David Lurie retreats to the country in disgrace he is suddenly a nobody and a fairly useless one at that, for he knows nothing of farming. He is forced to see himself and those around him in a new perspective. So far so good. Then there is a very brutal attack on the farm and we are suddenly reminded that we are in one of the most violent countries in the world: South Africa, a country that has to come to terms with itself in a new role just the same as David Lurie does. And despite the brutality and the violence there is tenderness, too, as Lurie develops a strange affection for the stray dogs he has started to look after. Nowhere does this tenderness come even near to sentimentality, however, which shows Coetzee's remarkable craftmanship. I loved this book and it is one of my all time favourites.