Disgrace
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Product Description
Now a major motion picture starring John Malkovich.
A divorced, middle-aged English professor finds himself increasingly unable to resist affairs with his female students. When learned by the college authorities, he is expected to make an apology and repent in an effort to save his job, but he refuses to become a scapegoat in what he sees as a show examination designed to reinforce a stringent political correctness.
He preempts the authorities and leaves his job, and the city, to spend time with his grown-up lesbian daughter on her remote farm. Things between them are strained — there is much from the past they need to reconcile — and the situation becomes critical when they are the victims of a brutal and horrifying attack.
In spectacularly powerful and lucid prose, Coetzee uses all his formidable skills to engage with a post-apartheid culture in unexpected and revealing ways. This examination into the sexual and political law lines of modern South Africa as it tries desperately to start a fresh page in its history is chilling, uncompromising and unforgettable.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 made language in order that we may communicate our thoughts, feelings and intentions to each additional.” 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 literary 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 intricate–or, in the new South Africa, more treacherous. Far from being the refuge he has sought, small 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 perfect. Hers, but, is far worse.
There is much more to be explored in Coetzee’s painful novel, and few consolations. It would be simple to pick up on his title and view Disgrace as a intricate effective-out of personal and political bring shame on and responsibility. But the leader 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 like. 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 persons he helps dispose of, is equally trapped, equally lost.
Disgrace is nearly willfully unadorned. 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 straight away 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
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I read this book because it had high ratings and for the most part I agreed with them when I had finished. I do reflect the characters could have behad a bit more life too them, but it was still excellent. If you want to another read a book that goes straight to your heart, read Stolen Moments by Barbara Jeanne Fisher. . .It is a gorgeous tale of unrequited like. . .for certain the like tale of the nineties. I proposed to give the book a quick read, but I got so caught up in the tale that I couldn’t place the book down. From the very beginning, I was fully caught up in the heart-wrenching account of Julie Hunter’s battle with lupus and her growing like for Don Lipton. This like, in the face of Julie’s impending death, makes for a tale that covers the range of human emotions. The touches of humor are fantastic, too, they add some nice contrast and lighten things a bit when emotions are running high. I’ve never read a book more deserving of being published. It has rare depth. Julie’s tale will remind your readers that life and like are precious and not to be taken for granted. It has had an impact on me, and for that I’m grateful. Stolen Moments is written with so much sensitivity that it made me want to weep. It is a spellbinder. What terrific writing. Barbara does have an exceptional gift! This book was edited by Lupus specialist Dr. Matt Morrow too, and has the latest information on that disease. ..A perfect gift for a name who ongoing college late in life, fell in like too late in life, is living with any illness, or trying to know a loved one who is. . .A gift to be cherished forever.
Reader’s Rating: 4 / 5
This book…this book. I can’t get some of the scenes out of my mind. I suppose what struck me most is the dogs, and human treatment of animals. We (the human race) have been a Disgrace. I see that disgrace as ever more vital that the professor’s disgrace.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
Well, on a lark I bought 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 excellent lord I reflect I just wasted a levelheaded 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 delight in this book have to be the most dull ancient fossils this planet has produced. Anyway, back to being juvenile.
Reader’s Rating: 2 / 5
It’s kind of hard to feel sympathy for the protagonist of this novel, an ancient man who likes to bed young girls and worries that his status as a grandfather will make him unattractive.
If dirty ancient 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.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee is one of the worst novels I have ever read. It does not have a clear message; there is nothing to learn out of it. It is better to spend the time watching a excellent movie or any TV program than reading this silly novel. It was the winner of the “1999 Booker Prize”, what may me reflect that the “Booker Prize” is valueless.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5