Customer Reviews

Disgrace

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I cannot recall a book so rich in theme and symbol and yet with plot and character so grounded in the here-and-now. Charting one man's fall from--and reclamation of--grace, "Disgrace" weaves metaphor that is ironic, blunt, disturbing and, ultimately, timeless around two events that could not be more contemporary: sexual harassment of a co-ed by an aging professor; and an attack by native South Africans on a white farm.

David Lurie is a professor of "Communications" at a Cape Town university. His specialty is Romantic poets, in particular Byron. At age 52, twice divorced and finding gratification, if not fulfillment, in orchestrated liaisons with prostitutes, Lurie is a trivial version of the Byronic hero he studies. Despite his professorship, Lurie, by his own admission, is no teacher. He prefers the tag "scholar." He is in fact a manipulator, a controller.

One evening he has a chance encounter with one of his students, a 20 year-old co-ed named Melanie. He invites her for dinner and seduces her. Melanie is quickly repulsed by the idea of romance with a man more than twice her age. Lurie, though, pursues her with what he perceives to be heroic ardor. Melanie soon falls into depression. Her tatooed, goateed boyfriend-another Byronic cartoon-and her fundamentalist father--another teacher by profession, controller by action--confront Lurie and urge Melanie to file harassment charges against him. In an act of deluded Romantic martyrdom, Lurie confesses without apology to the affair, practically daring university authorities to dismiss him from his post. They oblige.

He finds refuge at his daughter Lucy's farm in the rural East Cape. There he strongly resists adaptation to country life. The dirt, the smells, the absence of stylized beauty and decorous behavior disgust him. He wrongly fears for his daughter's happiness and rightly, as it turns out, for her safety. He mistrusts and resents her African tenant, Petrus, a purely natural force with his two wives (one who is half his age-see Melanie) and inexorable ambition to gain sway over the white woman he must labor for. Lurie is even vexed by the most heartfelt of Lucy's emotions, her simple love of animals and her warm regard for the physically repugnant Bev Shaw, an amateur veterinarian ironically qualified only to perform euthanasia on the stray and discarded pets she volunteers to take in and nurture.

In a story replete with irony, perhaps the greatest is Lurie's repulsion at the realities of the Romantic ideal he so ardently embraces. The Romantics believed that grace could only be attained in nature, the more primitive the better. Lurie, against his own developed taste, encounters, both by horrible chance and by engineered design, nature's nasty, brutish but ultimately regenerative forces. Along the way, his long-held notions of beauty, art and love ebb, inflate, distort and evolve, until Lurie emerges quite literally) from the ashes, re-formed: no longer teacher, but learner: no longer manipulative, but accepting; no longer taking, but giving.

To fully appreciate this book, I found myself charting the inter-woven relationships of Lurie and Melanie, Lurie and Lucy, Lucy and Petrus, Lucy and Bev, Lurie and Bev, Lurie and Byron, Byron and his mistress Teresa. Three general kinds of love in widely varied shades dominate: Romantic love; parental love; and "natural", "elemental" love. Duality abounds: art and artifice; scholarship and reality; brutality and tenderness; torment and succor. This is a book so dense with ideas that I had to write a review just to organize my thoughts and try to appreciate its scope. A true modern masterpiece, and the best Booker winner I have ever read (apologies to Salman Rushdie, Keri Hulme and Kashuo Ishiguro).

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.

Once I started this stark and somewhat disturbing short novel, I couldn't put it down and well understand how it won the fiction prizes that it did. J.J. Coetzee, the author, is a white South African and brings the reader right into his world. The protagonist is David Lurie, a 52 year old English professor at a university in Capetown. Twice divorced, he leads a solitary life, indulging his rather mild sexual appetite with prostitutes. When he has an affair with a student, he is discovered and disgraced. Rather than make a public repentance, he resigns.

This background takes up about a quarter of the novel, but it only sets the stage for what comes next as Lurie then goes to spend some time with his grown daughter in the countryside. She lives alone, raising dogs and selling produce and her life seems simple but satisfactory. Suddenly, there is an act of violence which turns their lives around. Lurie is forced to understand still more aspects of the concept of disgrace as well as place all of this in the context of what is happening in modern South Africa in the area of race relations.

David Lurie is not a likeable character. And yet he's a human being with all the warts and foibles that make him real. The author's clear prose manages to unveil many levels of meaning as the reader becomes involved in the story. There wasn't a wasted word, each scene saying much more than the action revealed. Every minor character had a purpose, including the animals in a shelter where Lurie volunteers his time. This is not a happy book but the reading of it was very satisfying. When it ended I wasn't smiling, but I felt I had gained a deeper understanding of human nature as well as a snapshot of life in South Africa today.

I cried upon completing "Disgrace," not necessarily for any of the characters in the book but because this story brings home the difficulty of living. Without sentimentality, without emotional manipulation, J.M. Coetzee draws the reader in to a captivating story laden with such weighty questions as the balance of power, sexual and racial politics, animal rights, the question of whether or not a soul exists. Set in post-Apartheid South Africa, the questions of human rights, the distribution of wealth and resources, and shifting power differentials require the reader to set aside both biases and an easy allegiance to political correctness, and read with heart alone. This book reminds me of "The Reader," by Bernhard Schlink, for its sparse prose and thick, ethical, pondering that takes the reader to a difficult but ultimately very worthwhile place.

In Disgrace, Coetzee writes a novel of moral regeneration. For his protagonist, Coetzee presents a womanizing professor in his early fifties, David Lurie. His story in many ways parallels that of the biblical David. At first proud and defiant, David Lurie eventually comes to recognize his moral failings and asks for forgiveness. Like King David, he goes to Salem (Jerusalem). Like King David, he composes poetry, accompanying himself on a stringed instrument. And is it going too far to suggest that the volunteer animal doctor, Bev Shaw, the only character who is consistently referred to by her full name, is a play on the name of King David's last concubine, Abishag?

For the names are full of significance. David's last name, Lurie, and that of the student he becomes involved with, Isaacs, together allude to the 16th century kabbalist, Isaac Luria. The Lurianic kabbalah explores the mystical connections of language, and David Lurie's conception of language emphasizes this mystical element. He is a professor of "Communications", but he rejects the notion that language had its origins in the need to communicate. He sees language as originating in music and sees as its function the filling of the human soul. One can think of language as "enchantment" or "incantation" to capture this connection to music. In a striking passage, Lurie reflects that he would like to like to hear the story of Petrus, the African farmer who helps run his daughter's farm, but not in English. I expected Lurie to reason that English was the language of the colonialist, but that isn't where he is headed. Lurie sees English as a dead language, where the words have lost their mystical power, and can no longer give voice to spiritual truth.

In the Lurianic kabbalah, there is a notion of a flawed Creation, in which the divine light was placed in vessels which were unable to contain it, and the vessels shattered. This motif is picked up in the scene from the play in which Melanie Isaacs (the student who becomes involved with Lurie) appears. In this scene, Melanie comes on stage as a job applicant in a beauty parlor, and promptly manages to short the lamps, causing a terrific blast of light, and then plunging the theater into darkness.

The title "Disgrace" can be understood as an absence of grace. The word "grace" appears three times in the novel, each time in a context which indicates the absence of grace. It is first used to refer to a dying dog who is not given a "coup de grace"; there is no mercy, there is no grace. "Grace" appears next in a conversation between David and his ex-wife, Rosalind, who asks about the companion of Lurie's daughter. The companion is named "Helen", but Rosalind gets it wrong and calls her "Grace". It is the sort of slip which is so meaningless that it must mean something, otherwise Coetzee wouldn't have stuck it in. And here it clearly refers to the absence of Grace in the life of David's daughter. The final time that grace is used is with respect to a dog in Bev Shaw's animal shelter; it's "period of grace" is about to expire, and it will be put to death. Once again, "grace" is only used to refer to its absence.

One central idea of the Lurianic kabbalah is that in order to create the world, God had to "make space" for creation by contracting. There is a reflection of this process, by which a human must contract the ego in order to make room for God. In each of the stages that Lurie goes through in this novel, from losing his job, losing his possessions, losing his sense of himself as a protector and a creator, he experiences a process of contraction. This appears to be a disgrace ("How the mighty have fallen," says Melanie's father to David, quoting King David), but in fact it is a precondition for making David alive to the possibilities of spiritual regeneration. So that the final scene of the book, when David's contraction of the self becomes complete, comes through as final moment of grace.

This is a work well deserving of its accolades and very likely one of the best books that I'll read this year.

"Disgrace" is a book that, somehow, never allows you to get your bearings. The charm of this book is Coetzee's amazing ability to effortlessly shift moods, from dark humor to interpersonal interaction to political insight. His writing is light, precise, never verbose, and always razor-sharp.

Disgrace is the story of David Lurie, a Capetown professor who's middle-aged philandering puts him into a situation that his pride and confused idealism won't let him gracefully escape; he therefore loses his job and his reputation. This leads him on a journey to rediscover himself, his relationship with his daughter, and eventually the unfolding chaos of his changing country.

Laurie is a protagonist filled with flaws, but one with whom the reader ultimately can relate. We cringe in the beginning as we watch his self destructive behavior unwind his life, then watch as Cotezee's expert literary voice takes the novel in unexpected directions. Indeed, the first and second halves of the books are like two different novels. The story of David Laurie becomes the story of South Africa.

In reading this novel one is hit hard with the complex racial and political reality of modern South Africa; in many ways this is not a work of hope. Throughout it all Cotezee avoids being judgmental, wallowing in stereotypes, or ducking difficult truths.

In summary this is a brilliant novel: a well-crafted quick read with realistic, flawed, sympathetic characters.

As a South African who usually avoids reading South African novels, I reluctantly purchased this book, only after it won the Booker Prize - based on the fact that I have read all Coetzee's other novels and I usually read Booker Prize winners. The book was so compelling I started and finished it in one sitting. In all, the book deeply unsettled me through the ordinariness of the language which managed to avoid my noticing its hard, dark "realism- clothed" pessimism before it had shaken my (self-imposed) positive worldview to the point where I almost wondered, "Maybe I really should leave the country once and for all". This is an "adapt or die" kind of book which is well-worth reading,and re-reading. It is the only book I've read in a year which managed to make me think, really think, about my life and my country, and I thank Coetzee for that.

A friend recommended this book to me, and from the beginning, with its pitiful seduction scene, I was prepared to dislike it, and the primary character, intensely. This changed, however. Both David Lurie and his daughter consistently make choices and elect to live lives that are to say the least, uncomfortable, open to question, and painful to experience vicariously. But isn't this what opening ourselves to the challenges of literature is really about? It has been some time since I read a novel so well-crafted that I left with sympathy, but not affection, for the characters. This gave me the ability to really think about the book, both while and after I read it. I couldn't sleep for an hour last night when I finished, considering the implications, the carefully layered symbolism, the situations created by the author. It may sound odd, but for once I am pleased to have been made extremely uncomfortable by a novel.

Excited at the prospect of reading a serious, contemporary novel, I leapt into the first pages of "Disgrace". Making an episode of "Eastenders" look like a comic masterpiece, this novel is a dark, miserable and distressing piece of soul-destroying fiction.

Although I found lead character David Lurie's behaviour at the trial a little unlikely, the themes studied briefly around generation relationships, prostitutes and teacher-student confidence were at the very least thought provoking and at most mind blowing. The differences between the attitudes of the men and the women at the trial, for example, are massive and yet Coetzee sums them up in one small sentence that generates extensive thought from the reader.

It is Coetzee's very abrupt and sparse writing style that is the revelation of the book. The strong racial issue of South Africa is hardly ever touched upon, but the reader is made completely aware of its existence with hardly a word uttered. Lucy's attack at the farm is never described, but you know exactly what has happened. Or, more precisely, you know exactly what David knows which means you are thinking the exact thoughts of a father traumatized by his daughter's trauma. Brilliant.

So what is wrong with "Disgrace"? Although mine are rather small concerns, I fear they held back the book significantly. David's unusual behaviour, from start to finish, always left me frowning. I think David's fall from grace, engineered rather unlikely by himself, is simply too big. Surely an intelligent man would never have so little foresight to create his situation. Surely such a serial philanderer would never get a conscience as fast as David Lurie does. Surely a woman such as Lucy would never react to her situation as she does.

I found myself thinking more and more about what each situation symbolized rather than what was actually happening. Finding only tenuous links in my own mind left me feeling unsure of the whole plot and story. The worst culprit of this confusing symbolism is that which comes with the ending. I really do not know what Coetzee is trying to say in the last chapter or so. At least, what I have come up with seems weak.

It is for me a disappointing end to a fantastic book. From the start the reader knows that they are reading genius. Throughout the reader is swept along on a bed of human tragedy. But finally the reader is defeated by just too much being left unsaid by Coetzee.

I certainly recommend this book to anyone and I wish I could give it a really good score, but the author simply lost me too much.

This novel extends the achievements - both linguistically and narratively - that Samuel Beckett began earlier in this century with his series of every-darkening, ever-shrinking novels. Ironically, however, Coetzee has found a way to do so without discarding "realistic" character development or narrative line. This is the most "realistic" of all of Coetzee's novels (even more so than Age of Iron with its Dostoevsky-like haunting double) - yet at the same time it is the most stripped. Everything in this book is pared down to its bare essence - while he also manages to utilize references to and thematic elements of Romanticism. I read this book with my eyes pried open as if by nails, and followed it to the zero sum of despair, disgrace and terror. But I found the book strangely beautiful, elegant and lyrical at the same time. I see this book as a series of extremes balanced in such a way as to truly present what it is like to live at this moment as a citizen of the world. Forgive me, but this book is truly, as a friend of mine likes to say, "Greek." Terrible and beautiful are its effects on one's mind and spirit. You will not read another book like this any time soon. If you are not prepared, however, to experience what Emily Dickinson described as the feeling of "zero at the bone," then pass this book by. But you will be missing an essential spiritual experience (and I'm not talking about religion).

Disgrace is one of the most terrifying portraits of the human race you will ever read.

Coetzee is truly a master. (For his definition of that word - or "Dostoevsky's" definition of it - see The Master of Petersburg.)