Disgrace (Paperback)

~ (Author) "FOR A MAN of his age, fifty-two, divorced, he has, to his mind solved the problem of sex rather well..." (more)
Key Phrases: Bev Shaw, Professor Lurie, Cape Town (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

David Lurie is hardly the hero of his own life, or anyone else's. At 52, the protagonist of Disgrace is at the end of his professional and romantic game, and seems to be deliberately courting disaster. Long a professor of modern languages at Cape Town University College, he has recently been relegated to adjunct professor of communications at the same institution, now pointedly renamed Cape Technical University:

Although he devotes hours of each day to his new discipline, he finds its first premise, as enunciated in the Communications 101 handbook, preposterous: "Human society has created language in order that we may communicate our thoughts, feelings and intentions to each other." His own opinion, which he does not air, is that the origins of speech lie in song, and the origins of song in the need to fill out with sound the overlarge and rather empty human soul.

Twice married and twice divorced, his magnetic looks on the wane, David rather cruelly seduces one of his students, and his conduct unbecoming is soon uncovered. In his eighth novel, J.M. Coetzee might have been content to write a searching academic satire. But in Disgrace he is intent on much more, and his art is as uncompromising as his main character, though infinitely more complex. Refusing to play the public-repentance game, David gets himself fired--a final gesture of contempt. Now, he thinks, he will write something on Byron's last years. Not empty, unread criticism, "prose measured by the yard," but a libretto. To do so, he heads for the Eastern Cape and his daughter's farm. In her mid-20s, Lucy has turned her back on city sophistications: with five hectares, she makes her living by growing flowers and produce and boarding dogs. "Nothing," David thinks, "could be more simple." But nothing, in fact, is more complicated--or, in the new South Africa, more dangerous. Far from being the refuge he has sought, little is safe in Salem. Just as David has settled into his temporary role as farmworker and unenthusiastic animal-shelter volunteer, he and Lucy are attacked by three black men. Unable to protect his daughter, David's disgrace is complete. Hers, however, is far worse.

There is much more to be explored in Coetzee's painful novel, and few consolations. It would be easy to pick up on his title and view Disgrace as a complicated working-out of personal and political shame and responsibility. But the author is concerned with his country's history, brutalities, and betrayals. Coetzee is also intent on what measure of soul and rights we allow animals. After the attack, David takes his role at the shelter more seriously, at last achieving an unlikely home and some measure of love. In Coetzee's recent Princeton lectures, The Lives of Animals, an aging novelist tells her audience that the question that occupies all lab and zoo creatures is, "Where is home, and how do I get there?" David, though still all-powerful compared to those he helps dispose of, is equally trapped, equally lost.

Disgrace is almost willfully plain. Yet it possesses its own lean, heartbreaking lyricism, most of all in its descriptions of unwanted animals. At the start of the novel, David tells his student that poetry either speaks instantly to the reader--"a flash of revelation and a flash of response"--or not at all. Coetzee's book speaks differently, its layers and sadnesses endlessly unfolding. --Kerry Fried --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly

As a writer, Coetzee is a literary cascade, with a steady output of fiction and criticism (literary and social) over the last two decades. This latest book, his first novel in five years, is a searing evocation of post-apartheid South Africa; it earned him an unprecedented second Booker Prize. An uninspired teacher and twice divorced, David Lurie is a 52-year-old poetry scholar-cum-"adjunct professor of communications" at Cape Technical University. Spooked by the flicker of twilight in his life trajectory, he sees himself as an aged Lothario soon to be "shuddered over" by the pretty girls he has so often wooed; he is disappointed in and unengaged by the academy he now serves by rote; and he cannot locate the notes for his opera, Byron in Italy, in which he has placed so much reluctant hope. He is, even at his best, a man of "moderated bliss." So when he seduces Melanie Isaacs, a lithe student from his poetry elective ("She does not resist. All she does is avert herself"), he believes her to represent the final object of his desire, his last act of lush, Romantic desperation. And then he is found out. This not uncommon outrage earns him a dismissal and censure from the university committee he refuses to cooperate with in hopes of saving his job. He immediately shoves off for Salem in the Eastern Cape where his daughter, Lucy, manages a dog kennel and works her smallholding, harvesting a modest crop. Here David hopes to cleanse himself with time-honored toil. But his new life in the country offers scarce refuge. Instead, he is flummoxed to discover an unfamiliar Lucy-principled, land-devoted, with a heroic resignation to the social and political developments of modern South Africa. He also memorably encounters Petrus, Lucy's ambitious colored neighbor and sometime assistant. Petrus embodies the shifting, tangled vicissitudes of a new national schematic, and forces David to relate to the broad segment of society previously shrouded by the mists of his self-absorption. But a violent attack on the estate irrevocably alters how the book's central figure perceives many things: his daughter and her bewildering (to him) courage, the rights of South Africa's grossly aggrieved majority, the souls of the damaged dogs he helps put down at the local Animal Welfare League and even the character of Lord Byron's mistress and the heroine of his operatic "chamber-play." But this is no tale of hard-earned, satisfying transformation. It is, rather, a paean to willfulness, an aria on the theme of secca, or the drying up of "the source of everything." In Coetzee's tale, not a single note is false; every sentence is perfectly calibrated and essential. Every passage questions the arbitrary division between the "major and minor" and the long-accepted injustices propped up by nothing so much as time. The book somehow manages to speak of little but interiority and still insinuate peripheries of things it doesn't touch. Somber and crystalline, it "has the right mix of timelessness and decay." It is about the harsh cleansing of humiliation and the regretfulness of knowing things: "I lack the lyrical. I manage love too well. Even when I burn I don't sing, if you understand me." To perceive is to understand in this beautifully spare, necessary novel. First serial to the New Yorker. (Nov.) FYI: Viking accelerated the pub date after the Booker Prize was announced on October 25.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics); 25th Printing edition (October 31, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0140296409
• ISBN-13: 978-0140296402
• Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 5.1 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (353 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #159,646 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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176 of 189 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A true modern masterpiece; the best Booker winner I've read, August 15, 2000

By	Thomas F Wells (Chislehurst Kent UK) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Disgrace (Hardcover)

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).

33 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Grace and Disgrace: Biblical and Kabbalistic Themes, February 26, 2001

By	James Gollin (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

56 of 61 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Disgrace, January 23, 2002

By	Melvin Pena (Evanston, IL United States) - See all my reviews

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.