Disgrace
by J. M. Coetzee
Summary
David Lurie is fifty two, twice divorced, and teaching communications at a Cape Town technical university where the Romantic poetry he cares about has been reduced to an elective nobody takes. He has an affair with a student, is reported, and refuses at the disciplinary hearing to express any contrition, which he regards as a matter of principle and everyone else regards as arrogance. He loses his job.
He goes to stay with his daughter Lucy, who runs a smallholding and a dog kennel in the Eastern Cape. Three men come to the house. What they do to Lucy, and what she then decides about it, is the centre of the novel, and her refusal to act as her father thinks she should is where the book becomes genuinely difficult.
Coetzee writes in a flat, exact present tense with no consolation anywhere in it. There is no redemption arc, and the closest thing to grace in the book involves Lurie helping to euthanise unwanted dogs.
This is a hard, cold and very short novel about a country trying to work out what is owed and to whom. It contains sexual violence, described without sensation and without evasion. It is widely regarded as his masterpiece and is not remotely a comfortable reading experience.
It is under two hundred and fifty pages and can be read in a day, which is not the same as being easy. Recommended for readers willing to be argued with rather than reassured, and a permanent fixture of university courses on South African literature for good reason.
Historical Context & Significance
Disgrace won the Booker Prize in 1999, and J.M. Coetzee became the first writer to win it twice, having taken it in 1983 for Life and Times of Michael K. He did not attend either ceremony.
The novel landed in South Africa three years after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and detonated. The African National Congress denounced it as racist, citing its depiction of the rape of a white woman by black men, in a submission on racism in the media. Many white South Africans were equally disturbed by what they read as a verdict of no future. Coetzee left for Australia in 2002 and has rarely commented.
He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003. The debate about whether Disgrace is a pessimistic novel about post apartheid South Africa or a novel about a man incapable of understanding it continues.