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


From Publishers Weekly
As a writer, Coetzee is a literary cascade, with a steady output of fiction and criticism (literary and social) over the last two decades. This latest book, his first novel in five years, is a searing evocation of post-apartheid South Africa; it earned him an unprecedented second Booker Prize. An uninspired teacher and twice divorced, David Lurie is a 52-year-old poetry scholar-cum-"adjunct professor of communications" at Cape Technical University. Spooked by the flicker of twilight in his life trajectory, he sees himself as an aged Lothario soon to be "shuddered over" by the pretty girls he has so often wooed; he is disappointed in and unengaged by the academy he now serves by rote; and he cannot locate the notes for his opera, Byron in Italy, in which he has placed so much reluctant hope. He is, even at his best, a man of "moderated bliss." So when he seduces Melanie Isaacs, a lithe student from his poetry elective ("She does not resist. All she does is avert herself"), he believes her to represent the final object of his desire, his last act of lush, Romantic desperation. And then he is found out. This not uncommon outrage earns him a dismissal and censure from the university committee he refuses to cooperate with in hopes of saving his job. He immediately shoves off for Salem in the Eastern Cape where his daughter, Lucy, manages a dog kennel and works her smallholding, harvesting a modest crop. Here David hopes to cleanse himself with time-honored toil. But his new life in the country offers scarce refuge. Instead, he is flummoxed to discover an unfamiliar Lucy-principled, land-devoted, with a heroic resignation to the social and political developments of modern South Africa. He also memorably encounters Petrus, Lucy's ambitious colored neighbor and sometime assistant. Petrus embodies the shifting, tangled vicissitudes of a new national schematic, and forces David to relate to the broad segment of society previously shrouded by the mists of his self-absorption. But a violent attack on the estate irrevocably alters how the book's central figure perceives many things: his daughter and her bewildering (to him) courage, the rights of South Africa's grossly aggrieved majority, the souls of the damaged dogs he helps put down at the local Animal Welfare League and even the character of Lord Byron's mistress and the heroine of his operatic "chamber-play." But this is no tale of hard-earned, satisfying transformation. It is, rather, a paean to willfulness, an aria on the theme of secca, or the drying up of "the source of everything." In Coetzee's tale, not a single note is false; every sentence is perfectly calibrated and essential. Every passage questions the arbitrary division between the "major and minor" and the long-accepted injustices propped up by nothing so much as time. The book somehow manages to speak of little but interiority and still insinuate peripheries of things it doesn't touch. Somber and crystalline, it "has the right mix of timelessness and decay." It is about the harsh cleansing of humiliation and the regretfulness of knowing things: "I lack the lyrical. I manage love too well. Even when I burn I don't sing, if you understand me." To perceive is to understand in this beautifully spare, necessary novel. First serial to the New Yorker. (Nov.) FYI: Viking accelerated the pub date after the Booker Prize was announced on October 25. Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Middle-aged professor David Lurie shuffles numbly through the shifting landscape of postapartheid South Africa. After he gets fired for sleeping with one of his students--and refusing to express remorse--Lurie finds shelter with his grown daughter and is exposed to a social reality that threatens more than his own sense of security. Winner of the Booker Prize, Coetzee's eighth novel employs spare, compelling prose to explore subtly the stuttering steps one man takes in a new world. (LJ 12/99) Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.


New York Times Book Review, November 28, 1999
There is more in "Disgrace" than I can manage to describe here. But let me end by suggesting Coetzee's most impressive achievement, one that grows from the very bones of the novel's grammar. This novel stands as one of the few I know in which the writer's use of the present tense is in itself enough to shape the structure and form of the book as a whole. Even though it presents an almost unrelieved series of grim moments, "Disgrace" isn't claustrophobic or depressing, as some of Coetzee's earlier work has been. Its grammar allows for the sublime exhilaration of accident and surprise, and so the fate of its characters - and perhaps indeed of their country - seems not determined but improvised. Improvised in the way that our own lives are; improvised in a way that recalls the subject of Coetzee's 1994 novel, "The Master of Petersburg," the novelist whom we know as Dostoyevsky. Coetzee won an earlier Booker prize for "Life & Times of Michael K." Last month's award made him the only writer ever to win it twice. "Disgrace" surely deserves such recognition. But that may, in time, come to seem among the least of this extraordinary novel's distinctions.


The New Yorker, November 15, 1999
Coetzee is the most cerebral and, with the exception of Breyten Breytenbach, the least given to sentimentality of the talented novelists to have come out of South Africa. He writes with a dark, impacted intelligence-the kind that has led critics to describe his books as "obscure" and "difficult" even as they admire the seriousness of his intentions. Indeed, many of his novels, including "Waiting for the Barbarians" and "Life & Times of Michael K.", which won the Booker Prize in 1983, have a weighty, allegorical tone. "Disgrace" has just made literary history by winning Coetzee an unprecedented second Booker, and what seems striking about it, right from the start, is its almost unnatural sense of poise, the way it takes you by the hand and leads you through unrecognizable terrain only to pull the ground out from under you with such accumulated force that by the time you come to the last sentence you feel as if you'd lost your bearings, and you aren't sure how useful they'd be now, anyway. "Disgrace" is not a hard or obscure book-it is, among other things, compulsively readable-but what it may well be is an authentically spiritual document, a lament for the soul of a disgraced century. Coetzee, whose style has often been called "thrifty," writes with a scalpel-like economy of effect; his sentences are coiled springs, and the energy they release would take other writers pages to summon. He rarely pauses for comic relief or for making nice to a character, and the waking nightmare of his novels offers little to those who long for heartening assurances. But, whereas some of his earlier work bordered on the overtly sermonic, "Disgrace" has the schematic power of a fable without the "Listen, children" preachiness. Coetzee has condensed the metafictional and moral concerns of his other novels-the nature of literary realism amd the solitary confinement of the self, the cathartic potential of art as set against brute actuality, the interaction of parent and child as a microcosm of domination-and found an innovative means of imbuing narrative itself with metaphysical purpose. We can certainly sense the import of his themes-they spring up like bitter stalks between the narrow spaces in his prose, leaving you in a state of chastened reflection.


USA Today
A revelatory, must--read portrayal of racial fortunes reversed.


Time
A subtly brilliant commentary on the nature and balance of power in his homeland... by a writer at the top of his form.

FROM OUR EDITORS

The New South

"Another incident in the great campaign of redistribution," mutters the protagonist of J. M. Coetzee's Booker Prize-winning novel, Disgrace, as he discovers that his house has been ransacked and looted during a long absence. This incidental muttering, almost an afterthought, lies at the thematic and emotional center of this short but powerful novel. As with all of Coetzee's work, the new South Africa is a looming presence, both literally, as the story's setting, and thematically, as its characters struggle to adapt to a culture that has been remade, often violently, from the bottom up. And while Disgrace offers a lot on the larger themes of power, redistribution, reformation, forgiveness, and more, it is at heart a finely tuned and often bleak portrayal of one man who realizes that he has become outmoded and outdated.

Professor David Lurie bears no small resemblance to Coetzee himself: a late-middle-aged white South African professor with more than a little charm. It is therefore somewhat alarming when we discover, in the novel's opening pages, that Professor Lurie has taken to visiting prostitutes after the disintegration of two marriages and that he makes a habit of seducing his students. Like the opening of Mike Leigh's film "Naked" (when we witness the protagonist's attempt to rape a woman in an alley), the latest affair with a girl in his class on the Romantic poets is not viewed through rose-tinted lenses: "She does not resist. All she does is avert herself." Coetzee leaves little room for doubt that the professor is using his power and influence over the girl, against her wishes; and when his career swiftly unravels after she lodges a formal complaint, it's hard to feel much sympathy for him. This, then, must be the "disgrace" of the title, thinks the reader, and in a simpler novel, it might be. But this is only the beginning, as Lurie travels into the countryside to find refuge with a daughter who is managing a farm on her own in a dangerously isolated part of South Africa. It is in this new setting where the real disgrace occurs; Professor Lurie's troubles have only just begun.

It doesn't take long to grasp the larger implications of a story about a South African white man being judged by a culture that no longer accepts behavior that has been accepted for years. These implications become more complicated when a series of black characters, beginning with Lurie's daughter's neighbor, Petrus, appear. Disgrace is filled with power dynamics—between men and women, whites and blacks, even humans and dogs—and Coetzee is skilled at giving just enough detail and analysis to outline the issues without lecturing us.

Even when Coetzee does outright instruct, it's well worth it: "Scapegoating worked in practice while it still had religious power behind it. You loaded the sins of the city on to the goat's back and drove it out, and the city was cleansed. It worked because everyone knew how to read this ritual, including the gods. Then the gods died, and all of a sudden you had to clean out the city without divine help. Real actions were demanded instead of symbolism." It is this new setting, where the gods have died and symbolism—including that of his beloved Romantics—often falls on deaf eyes and ears, where Professor Lurie finds himself; and Disgrace portrays his efforts to make sense of this strange, atonal place.

Coetzee is a master stylist, able to integrate themes into the movement of his story in ways that will cause envy in novelists of lesser powers. To incorporate Coetzee's chosen themes seamlessly into a novel triple Disgrace's length would be an accomplishment; to do so in 200 pages without ever seeming heavy-handed—partly thanks to a brilliant subplot of Lurie's efforts to write an opera based on Byron—is nothing short of a miracle. Disgrace is one of those rare books that will satisfy a reader on nearly every level, from the universal issues of power and retribution to the more local versions specific to the new South Africa to the truly personal: the trials of one man who is certainly no saint but perhaps not so different from many of us.

—Jake Kreilkamp

ANNOTATION

Winner of the 1999 Booker Prize.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

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)

About the Author:

J. M. Coetzee's books include Boyhood, Dusklands, In the Heart of the Country, Waiting for the Barbarians, Life & Times of Michael K, Foe, and The Master of Petersburg (all available from Penguin). Coetzee's many literary awards include the CNA Prize (South Africa's premier literary award), the Booker Prize, the Prix Etranger Femina, the Jerusalem Prize, and the Irish Times International Fiction Prize.

FROM THE CRITICS

Penelope Mesic - Book Magazine March/April 2000

Disgrace is a superbly constructed work of pain and candor, and although it involves events that require the largest generosity, it has as its hero a man gripped by habbits of petty selfishness.

Dallas Morning News

Disgrace is an act of literature ... further proof that Mr. Coetzee stands with the very best writers in the world today.

Wall Street Journal

The most powerful novel this year.

Newsweek

A slim novel with a bleak powerful story to tell ... Coetzee writes with a cool, calm lucidity that fends off despair, and his characters find a kind of peace in acceptance, if not hope.

Boston Sunday Globe