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Disgrace

By John Maxwell Coetzee

(195)

| Audio Cassette | 9781840323870

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Book Description

From the author of Waiting for the Barbarians and the Booker-Prize-winning Life & Times of Michael K, a dazzling new novel--his first in five years

Disgrace--set in post-apartheid Cape Town and on a remote farm in the Eastern Cape--is deft, lean, quiet, and brutal. A hearContinue

From the author of Waiting for the Barbarians and the Booker-Prize-winning Life & Times of Michael K, a dazzling new novel--his first in five years

Disgrace--set in post-apartheid Cape Town and on a remote farm in the Eastern Cape--is deft, lean, quiet, and brutal. A heartbreaking novel about a man and his daughter, Disgrace is a portrait of the new South Africa that is ultimately about grace and love.

At fifty-two Professor David Lurie is divorced, filled with desire but lacking in passion. An affair with one of his students leaves him jobless and friendless. Except for his daughter, Lucy, who works her smallholding with her neighbor, Petrus, an African farmer now on the way to a modest prosperity. David's attempts to relate to Lucy, and to a society with new racial complexities, are disrupted by an afternoon of violence that changes him and his daughter in ways he could never have foreseen. In this wry, visceral, yet strangely tender novel, Coetzee once again tells "truths [that] cut to the bone." (The New York Times Book Review)

"The kind of territory J.M Coetzee has made his own. . .By this late point in the century, the journey to a heart of narrative darkness has become a safe literary destination . . . Disgrace goes beyond this to explore the furthest reaches of what it means to be human: it is at the frontier of world literature."--Sunday Telegraph (UK)

14 Reviews

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  • 2 people find this helpful

    It took some time and some rumination for me to love the book. While I was reading it seemed nothing HAPPENED, but it's a great story once it sinks in. Try Human Stain if you liked this one.

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    annemarie said on Oct 4, 2006 about the Paperback edition | Add your feedback

  • 1 person find this helpful

    devoured in 4 hours while travelling. A bit amused by the fact that female characters seem all so profound and inexplicable while male ones so straightforward, all in all, but great, great writing, I shall look for more Coetzee very soon.

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    floriana said on Jun 7, 2011 about the Paperback edition | Add your feedback

  • A divorced, middle-aged English professor finds himself increasingly unable to resist affairs with his female students. When discovered by the college authorities, he is expected to apologise and repent in an effort to save his job, but he refuses to become a scapegoat in what he see as as a show tr ... (continue)

    A divorced, middle-aged English professor finds himself increasingly unable to resist affairs with his female students. When discovered by the college authorities, he is expected to apologise and repent in an effort to save his job, but he refuses to become a scapegoat in what he see as as a show trial designed to reinforce a stringent political correctness.
    <br/>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.
    <br/>In spectacularly powerful and lucid prose, <em>J.M. Coetzee</em> uses all his formidable skills to engage with a post-apartheid culture in unexpected and revealing ways. This examination into the sexual and politcal lawlines of modern South Africa as it tries desperately to start a fresh page in its history is chilling, uncompromising and unforgettable.

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    Richard B said on Jan 5, 2012 | Add your feedback

  • Terrific and terrible!
    Disgrace for Him, She, You, We...I'm looking for who was wrong but I'm in no hurry!
    Coetzee is a fantastic storyteller.He tells of "the troubling tensions between generations ("Lucy says I can't go on being a father for ever"), sexes ("The question is, does he have it in him t ... (continue)

    Terrific and terrible!
    Disgrace for Him, She, You, We...I'm looking for who was wrong but I'm in no hurry!
    Coetzee is a fantastic storyteller.He tells of "the troubling tensions between generations ("Lucy says I can't go on being a father for ever"), sexes ("The question is, does he have it in him to be the woman?")and races". His sentences are unforgettebles:"You do not see this, and I do not know what more I can do to make you see.It is as if you have chosen deliberately to sit in a corner where the rays of the sun do not shine".

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    skyzzy 67 said on Aug 28, 2011 about the Paperback edition | Add your feedback

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