 
|
|
 |
|
Disgrace: A Novel
by J. M. Coetzee
| List Price: |
$15.00 |
| Price: |
$9.75 & eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25. |
| You Save: |
$5.25 (35%) |
|
|
Paperback
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)
ISBN13: 9780143115281
Condition: NEW
Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices
Coming in 2009, the major motion picture starring John Malkovich
Written with austere clarity , Disgrace explores the downfall of one man and dramatizes with unforgettable, almost unbearable vividness the plight of South Africa-a country caught in the chaotic aftermath of the overthrow of Apartheid.
David Lurie is hardly the hero of his own life, or anyone else's. At 52, the protagonist of Disgrace is at the end of his professional and romantic game, and seems to be deliberately courting disaster. Long a professor of modern languages at Cape Town University College, he has recently been relegated to adjunct professor of communications at the same institution, now pointedly renamed Cape Technical University: Although he devotes hours of each day to his new discipline, he finds its first premise, as enunciated in the Communications 101 handbook, preposterous: "Human society has created language in order that we may communicate our thoughts, feelings and intentions to each other." His own opinion, which he does not air, is that the origins of speech lie in song, and the origins of song in the need to fill out with sound the overlarge and rather empty human soul. Twice married and twice divorced, his magnetic looks on the wane, David rather cruelly seduces one of his students, and his conduct unbecoming is soon uncovered. In his eighth novel, J.M. Coetzee might have been content to write a searching academic satire. But in Disgrace he is intent on much more, and his art is as uncompromising as his main character, though infinitely more complex. Refusing to play the public-repentance game, David gets himself fired--a final gesture of contempt. Now, he thinks, he will write something on Byron's last years. Not empty, unread criticism, "prose measured by the yard," but a libretto. To do so, he heads for the Eastern Cape and his daughter's farm. In her mid-20s, Lucy has turned her back on city sophistications: with five hectares, she makes her living by growing flowers and produce and boarding dogs. "Nothing," David thinks, "could be more simple." But nothing, in fact, is more complicated--or, in the new South Africa, more dangerous. Far from being the refuge he has sought, little is safe in Salem. Just as David has settled into his temporary role as farmworker and unenthusiastic animal-shelter volunteer, he and Lucy are attacked by three black men. Unable to protect his daughter, David's disgrace is complete. Hers, however, is far worse. There is much more to be explored in Coetzee's painful novel, and few consolations. It would be easy to pick up on his title and view Disgrace as a complicated working-out of personal and political shame and responsibility. But the author is concerned with his country's history, brutalities, and betrayals. Coetzee is also intent on what measure of soul and rights we allow animals. After the attack, David takes his role at the shelter more seriously, at last achieving an unlikely home and some measure of love. In Coetzee's recent Princeton lectures, The Lives of Animals, an aging novelist tells her audience that the question that occupies all lab and zoo creatures is, "Where is home, and how do I get there?" David, though still all-powerful compared to those he helps dispose of, is equally trapped, equally lost. Disgrace is almost willfully plain. Yet it possesses its own lean, heartbreaking lyricism, most of all in its descriptions of unwanted animals. At the start of the novel, David tells his student that poetry either speaks instantly to the reader--"a flash of revelation and a flash of response"--or not at all. Coetzee's book speaks differently, its layers and sadnesses endlessly unfolding. --Kerry Fried
| Customer Reviews: |
|
| |
| I agree with "a reader" from Albuquerque NM... |
| Customer Rating: 1 out of 5 |
 |
|
who says that this book is "a time bomb of nastiness."
Hated it.
|
| Burned, burnt. `Lucy!' he shouts. |
| Customer Rating: 5 out of 5 |
 |
|
"Disgrace" is the second novel I've read by South African writer J.M. Coetzee. "Slow Man" was the first. The novel takes place in post-apartheid South Africa. It concerns David Lurie, a communications professor in Cape Town who has a paltry affair with one of his students. David, a mid-50s divorced man still fancies himself as a ladies man despite emerging physical evidence that hints otherwise. He's a narcissist and infected by the arrogant belief that a woman's beauty isn't hers alone, but must be shared with others. If she already has a partner to share it with then she should try sharing it as widely as possible. The affair is discovered and a hearing is convened to determine whether or not to remove him. He pleads guilty to whatever charges lodged against him, but doesn't repent a la Meursault in "The Stranger." During the hearing in his screed he outlines the reasons for his affair, but doesn't say he's sorry. In spite of that the members attending the hearing tell him they'd recommend a lighter sentence and thus spare his job if show contrition. He does not. Consequently, he loses his job, packs up and heads to the countryside to live with his adult daughter who's living there with a female lover. Lucy, his daughter, runs a kennel and owns a farm selling vegetables to make a living. There the protagonist finds trouble and the novel pivots in a controversial direction that has garnered the author some criticism. I leave it up to the reader to discover what happens. "Disgrace" is certainly a novel of great distinction winning the Booker Prize in 1999. It's also a fast read. I liked its length of over 200 pages particularly satisfying. So, if one's interested in reading a novel that poses difficult questions about father-daughter relationship and allowing one's child to make her own decision no matter how much you disagree with it begin reading "Disgrace." The novel was also made into a movie last year starring John Malkovich--now there's somebody who enunciates.
|
| Remarkable |
| Customer Rating: 2 out of 5 |
 |
|
Remarkable.
Remarkable that this book won a Booker Prize.
I've been meaning to read Coetzee for some time, after seeing the prizes he's won, and had high expectations. Perhaps this is not considered one of his better works, but based on other reviews, I see that inexplicably, some people actually liked this book.
The characters were not only dislikeable, but completely unrealistic.
We're to believe that Lucy after being gang-raped, would continue to live on her farm, even though she acknowledges that in so doing, she is likely to be attacked again.
The lectures on English literature made the novel even harder to bear.
I find it a Disgrace that such a novel wins the Booker Prize, when other greater novels such as Rohinton Mistry's "A Fine Balance" or perhaps Frank McCourt's "Angela's Ashes" do not.
|
| cargofrog |
| Customer Rating: 4 out of 5 |
 |
|
This is a very interesting account of a man's trials in life. It takes place in South Africa. This is a mix of aging, culture, and inner struggle between subjective and objective feelings. It is difficult to give up something or someone that your love, but true love is letting go at times.
|
| Brief Yet Very Strong |
| Customer Rating: 4 out of 5 |
|
|
I'm not quite sure how I feel about this book. For a very short novel (not even 250 pages long), it was surprisingly powerful. The narrator, however, was not terribly likable... but not completely hate-able either. I think more than anything what really took me by surprise was the abundance of sex and violence. Not to mention all of the poor dogs... It was a sad and horrifying book, and still very interesting. It made me more curious about South Africa as a setting, too.
|
|
