Disgrace: A Novel Paperback – November 1, 2000

For a man of his age, fifty-two, divorced, he has, to his mind, solved the problem of sex rather well. Punctually at two p.m. he presses the buzzer at the entrance to Windsor Mansions, speaks his name, and enters. He goes straight to the bedroom, and undresses. Soraya emerges from the bathroom, drops her robe, slides into bed beside him. 'Have you missed me?' she asks. 'I miss you all the time,'He continues to teach because it provides him with a livelihood; also because it teaches him humility, brings it home to him who he is in the world. The irony does not escape him: that the one who comes to teach learns the keenest of lessons, while those who come to learn learn nothing.He is mildly smitten with her. It is no great matter: barely a term passes when he does not fall for one or other of his charges. Cape Town: a city prodigal of beauty, of beauties. Does she know he has an eye on her? Probably. Women are sensitive to the weight of the desiring gaze.He is tall and wiry; he has a thin goatee and an ear-ring; he wears a black leather jacket and black leather trousers. He is older than most students; he looks like trouble. 'So you are the professor,' he says.'Melanie has told me about you.' 'Indeed. And what has she told you?’ ‘That you …. her.''Professor, I wonder if you can help us. Melanie has been such a good student, and now she says she is going to give it all up. It has come as a terrible shock to us. It seems such a waste, to spend three years at university and do so well, and then drop out before the end. I wonder Professor, can you have a chat with her, talk some sense into her?''We are talking about a complaint by Ms Melanie Isaacs.’ She has never liked him; she regards him as a hangover from the past. 'There is a query about Ms Isaacs's attendance. According to her she has attended only two classes in the past month. She also says she missed the midterm test. Yet according to your records, her attendance is unblemished and she has a mark of seventy for the mid-term.’‘Even if you are what you say, a moral dinosaur, there is a curiosity to hear the dinosaur speak. I for one am curious. What is your case? Let us hear it.' He hesitates. Does she really want him to trot out more of his intimacies? 'My case rests on the rights of desire,' he says. 'On the god who makes even the small birds quiver.’************This is the second Booker Prize win in 1999 by J M Coetzee, the 2003 Nobel Prize laureate. It is a gripping tale of a 52 year old professor David, now twice divorced, who finds his favorite prostitute out of the business and approaches an undergraduate student 30 years younger than himself. He struggles in his English poetry class and its bored students, while his mind wanders to Melanie in the room. She is wary of him although they have already had sex. The setting is in Cape Town South Africa at the school Coetzee taught at for 15 years. There is no hint this was his part of his personal experience.He begins to stalk her around the campus and home. She skips class and he falsifies records to show attendance. Her boyfriend comes to his home and classroom as a menacing presence. She arrives at his house and asks for a place to stay. Although he is reluctant due to the appearances and possible consequences to his professorship he can’t help himself but to agree. Shortly after he learns that Melanie is withdrawing from college and receives a phone call from her father. Soon the word gets out among students, staff, faculty and family. Refusing to repent he’s dismissed and left to fend for himself.He visits his daughter Lucy who is a self sufficient farmer in Eastern Cape. He volunteers at an animal welfare clinic and takes a job at their neighbor Petrus’s farm. A home invasion takes place and he is powerless to affect the outcome. Earlier he had argued that the nature of man was uncontrollable. A merciless scene of violence ensues unsuitable to describe. He reflects on the pitiless conditions of post-apartheid South Africa and considers them lucky to be alive. After the attack David begins to suspect that Petrus, the small landholder who lives in a former stable and works for Lucy was somehow involved.Ironically his daughter’s violation is analogous to his own earlier actions, and she wants no part of the retribution although grieviously harmed. David seems unaware of the reversal in roles. He meets one of the predators at party of Petrus. Coetzee miraculously carries this plot forward with simple prose but profound meaning. Lucy’s refusal to report details of the assault is met with incredulity by David yet she stands firm; she is the one who has to live there and no longer a child. Improbably David returns and meets with Melanie’s father to explain himself and is invited to a family dinner.Back in Cape Town his home has been ransacked and anything of value removed. Melanie’s father advised that God has plan for him. He resumes writing his operetta libretto about Byron in Italy, but revises it from a male conquest to a middle aged memoir of the woman he sailed off to Greece to escape. He works on the piano to invent a score but abandons it for an African banjo. Attending a drama Melanie is playing in he is followed by her boyfriend again. In a visit to Lucy he finds she plans keep the child of her rapist, related to Petrus. A question remains how it will be resolved.Although in the beginning this is akin to Nabokov’s ‘Lolita’ describing a sexual obsession, but without the aspect of pedophilia, it evolves into something different. It’s about unequal power relationships and a journey to understand life in post apartheid Africa. There’s an excellent 2008 movie with John Malkovich that follows the storyline and dialogue faithfully. Coetzee is absolutely brilliant in this novel. He was criticized by various pundits of literature in South Africa and the West for being a throwback to apartheid opinions in its depiction of the indigenous people but that’s beyond the realm of his art.

If Disgrace is "about" anything, it is about the difficulties women face in third world countries and their need of protection from the "right" men. Main character David's daughter Lucy disregards her father's offers of protection out of hand and instead settles on more local help, almost to the point of fatalistic hypocrisy. Her standards for her father are much, much higher than she requires of the local men in her area, and she rejects him at every turn. This seems to be because she can get what she thinks she "needs" only from them, and not him, which forces her standards lower--much lower. David's motives throughout the novel have been selfish, but he can rationalize this when he imagines he's being "helpful". The core of the novel is whether or not any of David's help at any point that he offers others, or that he imagines he's offering, are actually selfless or not. This can be crass, as when he forges the attendance records of one of his students to hide an affair, or more nuanced when he's trying to be a good father with Lucy. The novel is basically a series of tests to see how selfless David's various attempts to "help" others are, holding him up to standard that's quite a bit higher than the other characters, but it comes from his disgrace that marks the start of the novel. The writing is very clear and effortless. There's nothing superfluous or overstated. If you want a simple morality play, then this certainly fits the bill. Is Lucy applying consistent moral standards to the men in her life and is David being selfish even when offering aid? You be the judge.

*This review contains spoilers!*In Disgrace, J.M. Coetzee artfully navigates the complicated liminal spaces that exist in a world structured by binaries: African/White, old/young, past/future, even living/dead. David Lurie, a shamed Professor of English at a Cape Town university finds himself in the consistently unsustainable position of attempting to live beyond these entrenched oppositions, and Disgrace traces the effects of his resistance.David is an intensely unlikable protagonist - his utter lack of moral compass remains steadfast throughout the novel. When we meet him, he is perpetrating a scandal that will define the trajectory of the novel - at best, it might be called an inappropriate professor/teacher relationship, at worst a series of unapologetic date-rapes. He leaves his University after refusing to accept the terms of his punishment (therapy and perhaps more importantly, repentance) and retreats to the country to live with his daughter Lucy. There, he only gets to live a few weeks of country life before their household is violently disrupted by a break-in during which Lucy is raped by two men. The rest of the novel deals with the aftermath - both Lucy's reaction, and David's resistance to it.Certainly, a large chunk of the book deals intimately with the political landscape of South Africa, and in particular focuses on the complicated race relations between the white people and the native Africans. Though this takes place long after Apartheid has ended, Coetzee makes it strikingly clear that history has a way of resisting being laid to rest. The climax of this particular trajectory occurs when Lucy reveals that she has begun to view her rape as restitution: "What if that is the price one has to pay [...]? They see me as owing something" (158). This moment in which Lucy allows herself to be subjugated, to submit to a side of oppositions, is the moment in which Coetzee fully realizes the inflexible nature of the system.In the last few pages of the novel, Coetzee writes of David's reflections upon his volunteering job euthanizing dogs: "What the dog will not be able to work out [...], what his nose will not tell him, is how one can enter what seems to be an ordinary room and never come out again. Something happens in this room, something unmentionable: here the soul is yanked out of the body; briefly it hangs about in the air, twisting and contorting; then it is sucked away and is gone" (219). With this quote, Coetzee grasps the heart of the matter that he has spent a novel untangling. Life, or at least the life that he describes, takes place within that brief liminal period. Nothing is absolute, and the ostensible binaries that structure the world are proven to fall apart under scrutiny. And yet, though nobody is actually born to live within one side of these binaries, it is a structure imposed upon all humans from birth. We see resistance to this in every action David takes: from attempting to live without age, to refusing to accept or deny his charges, to vehemently chasing down Lucy's rapists, to moving from country to city without finding wholeness in either.How do we resist this without falling apart? Coetzee doesn't seem to propose an answer to that - as we watch David resist and still fail, resist and still become utterly subjugated, we are forced to come to terms with the fact that living beyond the inflexible structure of the world is absolutely unsustainable. Thus Coetzee doesn't provide an answer, he is just here to give us the lay of the land.However, just because he writes of an unlikable character dealing with unsolvable problems does not mean that Coetzee doesn't speckle Disgrace with disarming moments of heart. Importantly, amongst the bigger issues that he grapples with, Coetzee also sets a narrative cadence that allows for moments of lovely reflection on particulars of life and relationships. One that is really perfect, I think, is a line describing a short car trip with Lucy: "He sits beside her, eating the sandwiches she has made. His nose drips; he hopes she does not notice" (71). Here, Coetzee's narrative power for developing character and relationships is palpable. We still might not feel tenderness for David, but his humanity is tangible.Unlike many other novels that begin with a morally ambiguous character, Disgrace is not about redemption or recuperation. David remains unlikable, Lucy remains subjugated, her rapists remain at large. In this way, Coetzee is able to reveal the thrust of a complicated issue without offering a solution. Thus, Disgrace becomes much more than a political statement about race relations in South Africa - it is also a portrait of the shared human condition itself. By blurring binaries that exist in absolutes almost everywhere in the world, Coetzee powerfully reveals the heart of problem everybody must learn to live around. People here can call him a misogynist, a rape-apologist, or any other number of words ending in "-ist," but I do not think that is the case. Coetzee writes David Lurie not as an emblem, but as a warning - this is what happens when a society makes human nature itself an unsustainable condition.