Good Books Lately | Disgrace

Disgrace
J.M. Coetzee. Penguin USA: 2000 (paperback). ISBN: 0140296409. 220 pages.

In this 1999 Booker Prize-winning novel, Coetzee writes about the new South Africa with great precision and daring. Disgrace is the story of David Lurie, a modern languages professor who finds himself displaced from Cape Town University College after the discovery of his disastrous and arguably cruel seduction of a female student. He decides to spend some time with his daughter, Lucy, on her small farm/animal shelter in Salem. There, while David considers writing something on the last days of Byron and attends unenthusiastically to his chores on the farm, a brutal attack invades his peaceful life with his daughter and changes everything. This slim novel is written in spare, lean, plain prose that contrasts sharply with the complex and tangled issues it raises. It would be interesting to read Disgrace with Double Down and Michael Frayn's Headlong as all three novels feature protagonists whose academic lives remove them from the larger world. And yet, this is more than academic satire; it is more than a social justice novel; it is more than just another journey into the heart of darkness. It is the painful history of a disgraced century told with tenderness and grace.

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