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J. M. Coetzee

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Disgrace: A BBC Radio 4 Good Read Paperback – 7 April 2000

by J.M. Coetzee (Author)

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After years teaching Romantic poetry at the Technical University of Cape Town, David Lurie, middle-aged and twice divorced has an impulsive affair with a student. The affair sours; he is denounced and summoned before a committee of inquiry. Willing to admit his guilt, but refusing to yield to pressure to repent publicly, he resigns and retreats to daughter Lucy's isolated smallholding.For a time, his daughter's influence and the natural rhythms of the farm promise to harmonise his discordant life. But the balance of power in the country is shifting. He and Lucy become victims of a savage and disturbing attack which brings into relief all the faultlines in their relationship.

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Since its formal inception in 1993, Vintage Canada has become Canada’s best recognized and bestselling paperback list, renowned for its world-class authors, top-notch design, high standards of quality and excellent value. Vintage Canada takes its name from the New York-based trade paperback publishing house, Vintage Books, which was formed in 1954 by Alfred A. Knopf. Vintage Canada publishes in quality paperback editions, selecting its books primarily from titles originally published by Knopf Canada and Random House Canada.

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What is remarkable about Coetzee’s vision as a novelist is that it remains intensely human, rooted in common experience and replete with failure, doubt and frustration ― Guardian

Exhilarating... One of the best novelists alive ― Sunday Times

Book Description

Winner of the 1999 Booker Prize

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ 0099289520
Publisher ‏ : ‎ VINTAGE ARROW - MASS MARKET; 1st edition (7 April 2000)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 224 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9780099289524
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0099289524
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 13 x 1.5 x 19.9 cm

Best Sellers Rank: 439 in African Literature (Books)
- 529 in Cultural Heritage Fiction
- 780 in Social Fiction

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4,971 ratings

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J. M. Coetzee

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J.M. Coetzee's work includes Waiting For the Barbarians, Life & Times of Michael K, Boyhood, Youth, Disgrace and Diary of a Bad Year. He was the first author to win the Booker Prize twice and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003.

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Susan Jane
A Challenging Book
Reviewed in Australia on 11 October 2015
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Having recently read J.C. Kannemeyer's authorized biography J. M. Coetzee: A Life in Writing; I was inspired to re-read some of this author's books. Disgrace is set partly in the Eastern Cape of South Africa, around Salem, an area my paternal ancestors settled so I've always had a soft spot for this book. It is not an easy book to read because it is extremely challenging and thought provoking dealing with issues such as sexuality and aging, rape, post-apartheid life in South Africa during the 1990s, the abuse of power, redemption and how the past influences the present. The writing is fluent and lyrical executed with clinical precision by a master craftsman. This book won the Booker Prize in 1990; the second time J.M. Coetzee was awarded the prize; he previously won it in 1983 for Life and Times of Michael K.

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donald grant lister
Special book
Reviewed in Australia on 3 October 2016
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D. H. Lawrence suggested reading a special book 6 times instead of reading 6 separate mediocre ones. Disgrace is on my little list of books to read 6 times(already read twice)

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Kindle Customer
Stunning book
Reviewed in Australia on 1 June 2021
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This is a short book but in 200 pages JM Coetzee's intense, economical writing packs so much in covering modern South Africa, power and how it is used and how people learn and adapt as they lose power.

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Diogenes
Menacing, Brilliant
Reviewed in Australia on 17 July 2017
A tightly-written portrait of an uncompromising man in middle-age decline, set against the backdrop of modern South Africa. the growing sense of menace and nihilism is almost unbearable - but brilliantly done.

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七海光一
この作品自体が、一編の詩である
Reviewed in Japan on 5 October 2005
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まず持って英語が素晴らしい。これほど平易な表現でこれほど人の複雑な感情が伝えられるのかと、驚嘆するほかない。これ一編がひとつの詩であると考えて良い。効果的な英語表現に興味のある人は、この作品から相当学べるはずだ。作品自体も、人にとっての性、生の意味を相当深いところで捉えていると思う。主人公のデヴィッドと、娘のルーシーはある意味相似形で、お互いの中に自分を見ているのだと考えられるが、そこにポストアパルトヘイトの南アフリカにおける社会的現実がオーヴァーラップする。出来れば、原文の英語で読んで欲しい秀作である。

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Max
A masterpiece
Reviewed in Canada on 17 January 2019
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Disgrace is an example of how a novel can confront complex topics without being an “issues” kind of book, and tackles difficult personal issues with great compassion. Lurie is not given to us a conventionally likeable character, but for all his flaws he has an underlying decency. His daughter is a brilliant and fascinating character, and one of the great things about the novel is how all the characters have a certain unpredictability about them. An incredibly moving ending as well.

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Karime Nava
Es una gran historia
Reviewed in Mexico on 11 November 2020
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Woooow la historia, está muy bueno <3

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dmiguer
After Apartheid
Reviewed in the United States on 21 June 2024
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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.

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Kingdom_of_Tea
Etwas für Kritischdenkende
Reviewed in Germany on 23 January 2021
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Südafrika ist schon ein spezielles Land, wo die Uhren ganz anders ticken. Dieser Roman hat es zumindest erwirkt, dass mir jede Menge kritische Fragen durch den Kopf gegangen sind und ich mir über vieles Gedanken gemacht habe, was wohl sonst nicht der Fall gewesen wäre. Es liest sich jedenfalls sehr flüssig und regt das Interesse an.

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