A fascinating, fast read. A Professor has an affair with a student. Upon being caught, he refuses to answer questions from his inquiry. He refuses to give in to the university's need to censure him. He knows he's wrong but is unwilling to allow the University to drag him through a confession or an acceptance of guilt. I find his crime abhorrent but want to be on his side in wanting to maintain his privacy. He is willing to give up his tenure and his pension for his right to privacy. He of course wins by losing his case. The rest of the novel also has intricacies that make the reader stop and see the many passions and weaknesses of out humanity.

There are different levels of disgrace -- those that are deserved and those that are not, both of which are at the heart of this book. Coetzee tells the story of the womanizing Professor Lurie with brutal honesty tempered by tenderness. He is flawed as is his country of South Africa. It is through restored grace that they will accomplish their dignity, but only after paying a heavy price.

Themes of rape as a means to gain power and both human and animal cruelty make this a disturbing book to read. The complex issues of human and societal frailty make for compelling reading, especially combined with the nonsentimental precise prose that delivers much in few words. Coetzee is a two-time Booker Prize winner and a master storyteller. I look forward to reading more of his books. ( )

This is a beautifully written novel, powerful and unforgettable. David Lurie is often an unsympathetic character, his actions and justifications are hard to understand sometimes, however as the novel progressed I began to like him more, and share his frustrations, over his daughters decisions. This is a dark novel, it concerns the difficulties of a time in Sounth Africa when there was still a great deal of inequality and bitterness about the faults of the past. The violence, that David and Lucie come up against, and what happens as a result, is a powerful example of the tragedies of that complex nation, but along with the horror and anger of what is done by three men, is a bitter understanding of why that has happened. This is a story that could only have been written about people in South Africa. ( )

Dark but a great read. ( )

Reviewed by Mr. Overeem (Language Arts)
For two years, my esteemed comrade Mr. Boland has implored me to read DISGRACE. This weekend, I did. It is truly among the best novels I have ever read. Coetzee is a white South African emigrated to Australia, and, among other things, this novel is about life in post-apartheid South Africa. But that's just scratching the surface: it's also about culture clash, gender, aging, animals, parenthood, sexuality, ethics, mortality, morality, and much more. And, despite its complexity, it's intensely readable; I consumed its 220 pages in about three hours. However, it's not the place to go for easy answers about human nature--which is why Mr. Boland's students will be lucky if they get to read it as a class. The 1999 Booker Prize Winner. ( )

David Lurie is a 50-something university professor, twice divorced. He's not particularly skilled at relationships. Perhaps he doesn't even understand what a relationship truly is, since early on he assumes that weekly encounters with a prostitute constitute some kind of more permanent bond. When the prostitute leaves town, David finds himself without female companionship and makes the even more egregious error of striking up an affair with a student. Of course this is discovered, and David leaves the university in disgrace. He visits his adult daughter Lucy, who runs a small farm and dog kennel in a rough and sometimes dangerous part of rural South Africa. At first it seems David will ease into the slower pace of country life, come to terms with the wrong he has done to others, and potentially make peace. But Coetzee has other plans, and visits upon David and Lucy an horrific act of violence resulting in even more disgrace, this time affecting both of them. Their emotional recovery -- individually and collectively -- is at the center of this novel.

David is not a particularly likable character. He is so interpersonally inept that he nearly always makes the wrong choice. I didn't really care whether he recovered from his ordeal; in many cases he got what he deserved. Lucy, on the other hand, was a more sympathetic figure. A lesbian abandoned by her partner just before David's arrival, she is fiercely independent. She is committed to making her farm successful, despite the danger of being a woman alone in that part of the country. She resists David's attempt to protect her (a natural response for a father, but still unwelcome). And yet despite her independence and strong will, when faced with a situation requiring legal action, she prefers to give in and try to make peace herself. She succeeds to some degree, but with tremendous personal sacrifice.

Disgrace raised up many ethical and moral issues, prompting me to consider how I might handle similar situations. Interesting reading. ( )

Unsettling book, has unsympathic characters, but I was interested in the daughter being away/independant situation with my own daughter recently going away to live in the country and start a new life. Worth and easy to read but not a great book. ( )

HEAR NO EVIL, SEE NO EVIL, SPEAK NO EVIL

Rather than literary allusions, J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace is filled with overt literary references. It is as if the decline in culture that the narrator, David Lurie, sees in such circumstances as the change in his duties from teaching “Literature” to teaching “Communications” is reflected in his own life. He no longer relies on shared culture to give meaning to literary works in the classes he teaches, or even to the narration of his own story. Instead, he overtly explicates the literary texts for his students, as well as for the reader. However, David often misconstrues the import of his own narration, as well as his own actions. Essentially, David does not understand the concept of evil, and therefore does not recognize it in either the outside world, nor in himself. Because he is unable to recognize it, he is defeated by it. The trajectory of David’s story is foreshadowed by the list of his published works:

…the first on opera (Boito and the Faust Legend: The Genesis of Mefistofele), the second on vision as eros (The Vision of Richard of St Victor), and the third on Wordsworth and history (Wordsworth and the Burden of the Past).

Disgrace, p.4 . Despite writing an opera about Mefistofele, he does not hear the evil of his own soul, but like Faust is willing to sell his soul to the devil in order to satisfy his worldly desires. His next work shows that he believes there is something sacred about his own animal desires. He calls his desires “eros” (“I became a servant of Eros.” Disgrace, p.52), and thus cannot see that they are mere lust, as signaled to the reader by the name of the beer—Meerlust-- he serves to Melanie in his apartment. Disgrace, p.12. His last completed work, on Wordsworth, shows that he cannot bring himself to speak evil about himself; he sees the pain around him not as caused by his own acts or omissions, but simply as a “burden of history.” This image of the three monkeys is reinforced in the note from his daughter Lucy:

I think of you as one of the three chimpanzees, the one with his paws over his eyes.

Disgrace, p. 161. In his description of his affair with Melanie Isaacs, we see that he has not so much seduced her as he has overwhelmed her. He notes that she does not seem a willing sex partner, but he presses her anyway. Although he does not technically rape her, he is in fact guilty of precisely the behavior that is rightfully condemned by the university; he has used his position of power as a professor to exploit a student. While he admits his guilt in that he has violated a policy, he feels it a point of pride that he will not feel guilty about his actions. He is so proud of his refusal to let the university community dictate what he will think (even at the price of losing his job and pension), that he fails to understand that he did in fact do an evil thing to Melanie.
David is so ignorant of evil, that he believes Satan can be recognized by the clothes he wears and his mode of transportation. He thinks Melanie’s boyfriend is Satan, describing him:

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 looks like trouble….Light dances on his black eyeballs.

Disgrace, p.30. In the class session where the boyfriend accompanies Melanie, David quotes from one of Lord Byron’s poems:

He stood a stranger in this breathing world,
An erring spirit from another hurled;
A thing of dark imaginings, that shaped
By choice the perils he by chance escaped.
***
He could
At times, resign his own good for others’ good,
But not in pity, not because he ought,
But in some strange perversity of thought,
That swayed him onward with a secret pride
To do what few or none would do beside;
And this same impulse would in tempting time
Mislead his spirit equally to crime.

Disgrace, p. 32, 33. The allusion in this poem is to Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost. David asks the class what kind of creature is described in the poem. David makes it seem like the boyfriend is recognizing his own nature when he answers that the creature who “does what he feels like. He doesn’t care if it’s good or bad. He just does it.” Disgrace, p.33. However, it is more likely that the boyfriend recognizes David in those lines. After all, it is David who does whatever he wants to, despite the rules, and despite Melanie’s manifest unhappiness. Indeed, most of what we learn about the boyfriend is mere conjecture by David. It is unlikely that the young man is Melanie’s “boyfriend.” Most likely he is just a concerned friend. There is no objective indication that he is her boyfriend—nowhere is it shown that they hold hands, or kiss, or are anything more than friends. It is David’s own unreliable mind that makes up the back story of an intimate relationship between Melanie and the “boyfriend.” Similarly, David assumes the “boyfriend” vandalized his car and sent the note accusing David of being a Casanova; however, there is no objective proof of that. Many people could have known of the affair and done those things. Even if the boyfriend did do those things, he can be seen as an admirable figure who is trying to protect Melanie from her overbearing professor. We see this most poignantly when the young man throws spitballs at David when David is in the audience of the play, again trying again to intrude in Melanie’s life. David is wrong when he thinks Byron’s description of Satan fits the putative boyfriend. More importantly, David fails to see that the words describe himself. When David agrees to help Bev in the animal clinic, he finds it important that his daughter know that he is not doing so out of the goodness of his heart, but just because he wants to. His words echo the import of the poem:

‘All right, I’ll do it. But only as long as I don’t have to become a better person. I am not prepared to be reformed. I want to go on being myself. I’ll do it on that basis.’ His hand still rests on her foot; now he grasps her ankle tight. ’Understood?’

Disgrace, p.77. His daughter understands him perfectly, and answers him by quoting the phrase that society once used to describe Byron: “’So you are determined to go on being bad. Mad, bad, and dangerous to know.” Id.
David sees himself as a Byronic figure, although he concedes he is an aging one. David has a grandiose plan to create a chamber opera about Byron and his mistress Teresa Guiccioli that will be “a meditation on love between the sexes.” Disgrace, p.4. He sees himself like Byron, as a romantic, dashing, desirable man to whom the usual strictures and mores of society do not apply. Women are to be used and discarded, and should just feel grateful they were used by the great Byron/Lurie. Thus, he tells Bev he has left Cape Town in “disgrace,” but says it only in irony. Disgrace, p. 85. The way he describes the Hearing at the University, it is clear he thinks it is motivated by political correctness run amok. Even if he is right about that characterization, it does not alter that his behavior towards Melanie was disgraceful.
What happens to his daughter, Lucy, is more violent and shocking, but parallel to what he did to Melanie. One cannot help but think of the Biblical proverb, “He that sows the wind reaps the whirlwind.” Interestingly, he refers to the rape of his daughter as her disgrace. Although he gives lip service to the idea that she did nothing wrong (“There is no shame in being the object of a crime” Disgrace, p.111), her decision to not seek justice from the police and turn in Petrus’s rapist brother-in-law, is incomprehensible to him. The other side of that coin is his belief that Melanie would never have reported his behavior towards her unless someone else had pressured her to. Yet David may be wrong about Melanie. After all, he never really got to know her. She may have decided on her own to report him to the authorities. Melanie’s rejection of, and pressing charges against, David contrasts with Lucy’s acceptance of the marriage proposal of Petrus. The contrast is confirmed by the meanings of their names; Melanie means “dark,” while Lucy means “light.” Melanie’s rejection of David also contrasts with Byron’s rejection of Teresa. Instead of being like Byron, David is like the discarded Teresa. Even after David has abjectly prostrated himself before Melanie’s mother and sister in supposed apology, he still desires her (as personified by her look-alike sister, Desiree), and seeks her out at the play. Toward the end of the novel, David is reduced to the role he has assigned Teresa in his now degraded opera about Byron, absurdly plucking at the strings of a toy banjo, and insanely bewailing his thwarted desire for Melanie.
There are many aspects of David that would make a reader feel well-disposed to him. His literary inclinations suggest culture and imagination. His love for his daughter suggests tenderness. His treatment of the carcasses of the dogs suggests a kind of empathy. On the surface, David does not seem a bad sort, even if we have to make allowances for his peccadilloes. But upon closer examination, we see that David uses his knowledge of literature to give a gloss of romance and culture to his sordid life; that he fails to protect his daughter, of whom he has no real understanding; and that when he has the chance to put off killing a dog for a week, he decides not to.
The moment David decides to have the dog killed, all hope of redemption for him is gone. Dogs play a central role in this novel. The dogs that Lucy boards are raised not as pets, but as guard dogs in a society that is breaking down. Because of the role they play in protecting wealth from the disenfranchised, they are shot by the three rapists, who are seeking not only wealth, but also domination.

No time to finish—idea of comparison of the story in Milton’s Paradise Lost where Satan rapes his Daughter, whose name is Sin, and the child of that rape is named Death. Look at the hints—David forces himself on Melanie while in his daughter’s bed—another time when he is supposedly comforting Melanie, he almost says something like “tell Daddy about it.”

I got so much from this slim volume - on middle age, of sex, of racism, of fatherhood/daughterhood. It made me empathic, angry, sentimental. ( )

My thoughts on the story:

'Disgrace' by J M Coetzee is the most inspiring book I've read this year. On the surface, it's a story about a man and his relationship with the women in his life, particularly his daughter. It is about how he and his daughter cope (or do not cope) with the brutal attack they suffer. But dig a little deeper, and it becomes a story about the racial tensions and attitudes that exist in post-apartheid South Africa. It is a story about the need for accountability in a country that is still divided, about people who are struggling to find an identity in a new world. This book has a moral, but it doesn't hit the reader over the head with it. The story is laid out for all to see, and the reader is left to discern his or her own meaning.

My thoughts on the writing:

The story is written from David Lurie's point of view, in the third person and present tense. This worked well for me. The present tense gave the story a sense of immediacy, but the third person allowed me to take a step back from its brutality, and to view the characters more objectively. I think if it had been written in the first person, it would have been less successful. Lurie is a fairly unpleasant character and a first person narrative would have required too much sympathy from me. As it was, I could pity him. Coetzee's prose is lean. No words are wasted, but the pictures painted are vivid. I loved his figures of speech--so fresh and original, but not overdone.

I would love to be able to write like this! ( )

PLEASE NOTE: THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS

The first time I read Disgrace I hated it. It evoked so much anger and sadness I didn't care if it was brilliant - I wrote it off as a horrible book. How could a woman feel that, because of apartheid, she should allow her rapists to get away with their crime? How could she allow the man who may have organised the attack to take over her farm? Why did the rapists have to shoot the dogs in their cages?

I didn't want to see the movie, but a friend had a role in it and I felt obliged to watch it. I'm glad I did. After talking about it I realised that, although anger, disgust, and sadness were the emotions the story seeks to evoke, they'd obscured the ideas and insights offered. Of these there are many - I'll have to stick to just a few.

Coetzee skilfully depicts some of the racial and power dynamics and attitudes at work in post-apartheid South Africa. As a 52-year old white male and an expert in Romantic poetry, David Lurie is out of date and out of place in this social and political landscape. However, he has no interest in adapting, believing that his temperament is fixed and that no one has any right to make him change. Elaine Rasool, the head of his department at Cape Tech, sees David as a "hangover from the past, the sooner cleared away the better." Dawn, the secretary David sleeps with, has a view I've heard a few times - even though apartheid was morally bad, those were still, in some way, better days. In Dawn's case, she believes the law was better enforced during apartheid; now it's anarchy, and she wants to emigrate for the sake of her children.

In these attitudes is a reluctance or refusal to deal with the difficulties of SA today. Lucy's approach on the other hand, is more complex, more practical, but also far harder to accept. As a white South African she sees herself 'owing' something for the privileges she enjoys, for the stolen land she lives on. She allows her rapists to get away with their crimes because she sees them as 'debt collectors'. To her, violence is a reality of the place in which she lives, and if she wants to stay she must put up with it. Lucy, as Petrus says, is "forward-thinking".

The injustice of this is very difficult to accept, and I personally cannot do it. Nevertheless, what I think is interesting here is the similarities between David and the rapists and how the reaction to the attack as a whole can be compared to ideas about apartheid today.

David draws a parallel with the rapists in his attitude toward sex - it is sex, not companionship he wants from women, he feels he has a right to pursue it, and uses whatever means he has to get it. In the past, his looks were enough. Now he pays for it, as he does with Soraya, or abuses his power as he does with Melanie. The difference between David and the three black rapists is that David has this financial and social power to wield. He can fork out R400 for a blissful afternoon, as a lecturer he can coerce a reluctant young student into sleeping with him. The three black men have only their physical power, and therefore resort to violence. The result is that, even though their attitudes are similar, David is seen merely as another womanising bastard, while the attackers are loathed as barbarians. Social circumstances make black stereotypes self-fulfilling prophesies.

The reader, rightfully, wants justice, making Petrus' nonchalant attitude toward the attack infuriating. Yet his attitude is similar to the way many (privileged) South Africans view apartheid: it was bad, but it's over now and we must all just get on with our lives. Now the tables are turned - the white man demands justice and the black man tells him to get over it.

The idea of 'disgrace' in which so much of the novel is steeped, is not what we expect or what it should be. With the exception of David's disgrace after his affair with Melanie, it is the victims, not the perpetrators who are humiliated, broken down. The rapists leave Lucy a damaged and vulnerable woman; David is shamed by his inability to protect her and embarrassed by his physical wound; and of course apartheid has left millions disgraced by poverty, poor education and racial stereotypes.

In the end, I found that Disgrace had given me many tough questions to consider, but very few answers. Which is appropriate. There can be no easy solutions to healing the damage, the disgraces this country suffers from. One option, perhaps, is the course that David finds himself on - slowly broken down and humbled by his victimhood, by his time spent putting down stray dogs and cremating their bodies. He gives up on his grand opera, and starts from scratch with a simpler but more authentic one. He lets go of his lofty ideals, as he gives up the dog he was trying to save, and faces reality.

As brilliant as this book is, I would be reluctant to recommend it to most people, as it is painful to read, and a superficial reading could easily lead to racist interpretations. However, it's an important novel, especially for South Africans, and I hope readers will do their best to endure the pain of it and take the time to consider its ideas. ( )

No wonder J.M. Coetzee keeps winning awards! His writing is brilliant, moving, and powerful. In this small book he is able to explore the concept of disgrace. He exposes the disgrace of an aging man, the disgrace of his raped daughter, the disgrace of man's inhumanity to animals and one another, and the disgrace of vengeance. At last it becomes clear that one of the greatest forms of disgrace is to give up on life. So, in the end, one must be there for the lowly creatures, for one another, for the future, for other.......and for self. An absolutely wonderful read! ( )

Coetzee is, for me, one of the greatest living writers. His prose is so smooth, so beautiful, so compusively readable and penetratingly simple that it is a joy to read.

Yet again, his humourless, pessimistic, mental masturbations about seriously upsetting subjects permeates his gorgeous prose. Disgrace deals with a middle-aged professor, disgraced for sleeping with a student, dealing with the rape of his ?lesbian daughter......well you see what I mean. ( )

'Disgrace,' paints a vivid picture of South African life, and of persistently difficult post-apartheid race relations. And at its center is David Lurie, a divorced, 52 year old college professor left jobless by sexual scandal with one of his students. Fleeing Capetown for the country, Lurie moves in with his daughter who kennels dogs and sells flowers in the local market. And then an event of sudden and unimaginable violence occurs that forces them to confront their strained relationship.

You read a book like this and you want to draw simplistic morals, perhaps about the price of intemperance, or perhaps about the racial and sexual karma that even in the twenty-first century stains the collective soul. Perhaps there is some of that, but this book which, in the beginning reads like an innocent tale, unfolds with all the emotional complexity of a Faulknerian novel. And you realize that life will be as simple or as complex as you allow it to be, and you, for your part, are equally simplistic or complex.

You will feel uncomfortable, at times, reading this book, perhaps in proportion to the nearness of your age to the protagonist. But reading becomes compulsive, and it will speak its truth to you. From the very first sentence to the last, Disgrace is eminently accessible to the reader. There is something about Coetzee's sentence structure, his descriptive passages, that make this novel on the one hand an easy page-turner. Yet suddenly a paragraph will fall unexpectedly from the page with a cogent brilliance – it may be a description of how a dog receives its death in the animal clinic, or the way leaves rattle across the floor of a ransacked house – and the effect is astounding. One of the better works of new fiction I have read in a long while. ( )

With the new movie Disgrace about to start in Australia I finally got around to reading the novel that it is based on by J.M. Coetzee. I had not read any Coetzee before but having finished Disgrace I will be very much open to reading some more by him - always a good sign! There were two things on constant visual playback in my mind as I read this book. The first was John Malcovich as the lead character (based on the fact that I had seen his name and picture attached to the movie advertising) and secondly, scenes from my own visit to South Africa with my husband in 1995. I am sure both these things impacted on my reading of the novel. As I was reading it was like a movie was simultaneously playing in my head, the intensity of which rarely happens when I read a book.

While our trip to South Africa was pleasantly spent staying with locals and visiting their large cities and game parks I always had a sense of the underlying tension present in day-to-day life there. Even though we were actively shielded from the violence and uncertainty there I could still feel it about us and it was ultimately very unsettling. I felt this same presence in Disgrace even though the main action deals with a professor's infidelity and its aftermath as he escapes to his daughter's farm. I had a great conversation with my husband about this book, an indication that its themes were playing on my mind. I found the book to be very realistic with excellent dialogue and descriptions. Ultimately, for me, the book wasn't so much about an older man taking advantage of a younger woman (which he openly admits to and which is wrong in and of itself) but more about his lack of understanding of the motivations and longings of his daughter (and women in general) and most importantly, that every girl is someones daughter and should be accorded due respect. ( )

http://tinyurl.com/o2xbfk

I am absolutely, positively sure that I do not get all the deep meaning in this Booker Prize winning book from a Nobel laureate. I'm often stymied by the highly lauded material.

It's an odd one, this book. I think Coetzee is trying to unravel the tangled web that is South Africa and its race relations, but I have trouble understanding how the romantic dalliances of the protagonist apply to that. And, as a woman, it's difficult to read scenes of what I consider date rape with no acknowledgment of this from the writer throughout the course of the book. I understand the need to create a character who is complete and, while he does experience personal growth, does not embrace a way of thinking that is alien to him. Nonetheless... it is difficult to read and not shudder thinking about the readers who are young men and might think this is an okay way to live one's life.

But I suppose this is the strength of the novel. It never falls back on cliche. Each character is someone I've never met before in fiction, whether it is Professor Lurie, his daughter, Petrus the "caretaker", even the pet shelter owner. They are beautifully crafted, leading us, with Lurie, into the disgrace of the title. Ultimately, it was difficult for me to see how Lurie could continue on having suffered so much. But... he also performed his own brand of creating suffering in others. Are we meant to understand this as a life balance? As kismet?

I am able to glean some deeper meanings from the novel, but am particularly looking forward to book club this month because I am certain that my compatriots will have alternate and deeper insights. And I'm sure I don't want to have missed them. ( )

Set in modern South Africa, this is a tense picture of post-colonial, post-apartheid society where the previously white owned land is slowly being subsumed by newly powerful farmers. The lone woman on the land, slowly ground down by the neighbouring farmer, leaves a tense, unresolved situation where it feels inevitable that she will have to, in the end, give in. Her father, the main character, never quite understands this and cannot accept that his daughter must be humiliated in this way. Eventually, he sees that he cannot save her, himself, or his new canine friend. ( )

It should be made abundantly clear that Coetzee is not falsely advertising Disgrace. David Lurie's disgrace comes overtly in the form of a scandalous affair with a student that leads to his loss of position at the university in Cape Town.

But this is not a simple story about a teacher/student affair. Coetzee's brilliance in Lurie's character is that we're only given the perspective of a man who has the emotional depth of a puddle. We see this scandal roll out and we know that there is more to the story, but we have to piece together the true nature of it from the occasional flashes our main character gets?

When our main character moves in with his daughter, we're given her life through his filter. So while this might have been a more interesting perspective on post-apartheid South African race relations, it becomes a self-absorbed commentary on how his daughter reflects on him, on how her relationships reflect on him, and how she won't remain attractive if she stays in the country. Is this the disgrace Coetzee refers to? The inability to remain nonjudgmental about your children and their choices?

The attack on David and his daughter is brutal, but we are only given David's perspective. Again, this is the beauty of Coetzee's novel. It is harsh and in watching David try to piece together the events of the afternoon, Coetzee's novel truly shines. This is where one has to remember that we've been given a tale called Disgrace, because we will be pulled emotionally into a number of directions that longs for a tale about anything else. But Coetzee's writing shows us that disgrace can come in many forms, can be self-inflicted, can be a product of environment, can be a product of perspective and can simply be a product of circumstance.

Much has been said of not liking the characters in the novel in other reviews. In reality, every character is seen through David Laurie's vision, and David Lurie is a deeply flawed man. We are seeing every character through this flawed vision. That I wanted to catch the few shards of truth in this vision is a testament to Coetzee as an author. ( )

Above average read. Enjoyed the literary material. The opera was saved by becoming comic. The main character is not a particularly good man, but I identify with him on several levels (albeit not having been as successful in number of lovers). But his age--loosing his job. Felt like he found some redemption with the dogs. ( )

This book is intense and raises a lot of questions. ( )

Disgrace is sparse, sharp, and dark. It contained no colorful natives, no majestic wildlife, and no exotic scents or flavors. It quickly, almost surgically, boxed the main character, communications professor David Lurie, into a prison of his making. Chance circumstances leave Lurie looking for sexual companionship and a series of bad choices lead to his disgrace. Readily admitting his guilt, but unwilling to admit to any remorse, Lurie compounds his disgrace and is exiled to his estranged daughter's country home. In a self-imposed solitary confinement, cut off from the rural community by his homophobia, sexism and racism and other bigotries, he is forsaken even by the romantic poet Byron and can only empathize with Byron's left-behind lover Teresa as she fades into middle age.

I specifically chose this book because it deals with the aftershocks of apartheid. Due to Coetzee's minimalist approach, the reader learns little about the various characters' previous experiences. No specific reasons are given for David Lurie's suspicions about Petrus, his daughter's black "dog man." No details are shared about the circumstances that left Lurie's daughter Lucy running a dog kennel and a farmer's market garden by herself in rural South Africa. Nonetheless, what Coetzee does choose to include paints a complex picture of human interactions -- between men and women, parents and children, victims and perpetrators of crimes and blacks and whites. Coetzee's characters are maddeningly inarticulate, but in many ways their inability and unwillingness to explain their motivations speaks for them. I was left in many places feeling that I would never understand Coetzee's characters' actions because I haven't lived their lives.

One of the most interesting aspects to me was the role that animals played in the story. As part of his disgrace, Lurie assigns himself to help at a local animal shelter which attempts to give unwanted dogs a dignified death. He even goes so far as to transport the dogs to the local hospital for incineration and oversee the process himself. Despite being a thoroughly despicable character, Lurie's tenderness with the dogs left me sobbing and gasping for breath. This was especially troubling because the terrible things that happened to other characters in the story didn't move me to nearly the same degree.

Although this was a dark, depressing book it is masterfully written and I have thought more about it after the fact than any book I have in several years. ( )

Terrific book, but not a happy read. The writing is clean, spare and lucid, which drives home the stark nature of the environment and events. The characters are not particularly sympathetic, but that also helps to establish a high level of realism. ( )

I struggled through this book at the end. It is a definite let-down after the Life and Times of Micheal K. Reading it made me feel uncomfortable, and I was disaapointed to realise that the writing style (flat, factual, understated) which seeded images of the dusty plains of SA in my head, was not something Coetzee naturally had but rather an academically developed style, rather like the brush strokes of a french contemporary artist who first draws the picture clearly and then blurs it to add their personal touch. I don't know why this dissapoints me, maybe because I feel cheated.

Had to read it; hated it, hated the people in it & hated the professor who assigned it. The only thing that sticks in my mind about this book is how much I disliked it. ( )

Story of a professor who has a disgraceful affair with a student and whose daughter experiences disgrace as a rape victim. Plot intertwined with the complexities and complications of post-apartheid South Africa. ( )