Disgrace

J M Coetzee

Editions

Reviews

Uncompromising and bleak, this is the very opposite of escapist fiction – but there is so much to this book that I found it enormously rewarding.  It is a depressing and, apparently, faithful portrait of modern South Africa, and of the human condition – and I thoroughly enjoyed it.  Coetzee’s style is a joy to read, and he has put so much into this relatively short novel, that there is plenty to keep the reader thinking long after the story has drawn to a close.

David Lurie, an academic, has fallen foul of the authorities as the result of an affair with one of his students.  He leaves his job to visit his daughter Lucy on her farm in the Eastern Cape, where a sudden and brutal attack shatters the sense of calm which Lurie is beginning to recapture.

The restraint with which Coetzee describes the attack on the farm – the turning-point of the novel – makes it all the more horrifying, and his narrator’s inability to understand the world and the people close to him rings horribly true.  The notion of disgrace is brilliantly explored – but never explicitly, always through characters and events, and this approach is one of the novel’s many strengths. - review by Dan Fenton

A tale of the personal disgrace of scholar David Lurie, of his uneasy relationship with his daughter Lucy, and of the savage attack that forces them to reconsider their lives in the South Africa of the 1990s.  On a larger scale (although never belaboured), the novel considers disgrace politically, socially, culturally, and paints an unrelievedly bleak picture of the options open to that society.  Coetzee’s prose is terse, direct, brilliant…and never gives the reader an easy out; indeed, he never gives the reader any out at all.  A masterpiece of the most demanding sort. - review by Karen Wadman

It would give nothing critical away to say that the moment of redemption at the end consists in the central character acquiescing in the putting down of a lame dog. Well, Coetzee is a remorseless, pitiless observer of the human condition and this book is no exception. It is brilliant, of course, like his other books - spare, terse, exact prose; situations imagined with the utmost clarity. If you like a lean catharsis, fine: look elsewhere for entertainment. - review by Johnny de Falbe