This short novel, written in spare, economical prose, tells the story of a not particularly likable middle-aged Capetown college instructor who falls into "disgrace" because of an affair with a student and is soon reduced to living with his daughter in the bush and working as a euthanizer at the local animal shelter. A violent incident occurs, and "disgrace" takes on another meaning.

The novel is both merciless and compassionate (not an easy combination to achieve), and is also incisive in its portrayal of the changing world of South Africa.

A worthy ManBooker prize winner. Professor Lurie loses everything as a University English professor in Capetown. The adage there is no fool like an old fool comes to mind. He is given a chance to come back to the university by admitting his wrong behavior but does not. Instead he visits then lived with his daughter on a remote farm where they are assaulted by a gang of men.

In the aftermath a struggle ensues where no one is a winner. Lucy his daughter is just as stubborn as her father. The change from 40 years of apartheid to the new South Africa is one of confusion, violence and one without hope. Using the dogs as a metaphor of trying to be compassionate but in the end that is also a failure with no one to care for them.

Disgrace is an excellent title to describe the fall of humanity and the treatment of animals by their owners. Heartbreaking.

Yıllar geçse de akılda kalacak bir roman Utanç.

Morality vs Mortality

This is not a standard review of Disgrace. I have chosen to tackle a perspective that I think is very apparent in the novel, but is mostly overlooked by many of its readers. Sure, the common way of looking at it is already enough to judge its genius, but I think this is another feasible one. As they say “Words are form, man gives the meaning.” There have been few moments of genuine awe in my reading experiences and I can without any trace of doubt say that reading my first Coetzee is one of them. Disgrace, with all its disguised simplicity is a novel that is the epitome of a literary masterpiece. My encounter with it is one that I shall truly savor remembering. At the start of the novel, I was filled with this sense of foreboding that Coetzee was toying with me. I sensed something within that had me intrigued; it was a sort of softening around the edges, a stray resonance that I glimpsed. Starting off with a man’s sexual adventures while misplacing any attempt to be anything but blunt, he had me impressed at the first few lines. But, Coetzee’s cunning lies with how he is able to tell one thing while telling something else. He drives two points at the same time and somehow makes it work. In the exterior, Coetzee tells a story about morality; a story about lust, rape, family-ties and parental love. While if you explore the interior concepts he is peddling, you see something entirely different. Embedded in the all these ploys of morals and familial difficulties is the clear message of mortality, learning to accept the inevitability of man’s demise. At first I thought that it was just me, that I was interpreting things too much. But as the book progressed, the more I became convinced that things were not truly as they seemed. That this book is telling me something else than what I was reading. It made me remember this quote from Stephen King that goes: “The hardest things to say are the ones most important.” It amazed me that a creativity of this magnitude existed and I realized that there are a lot of amazing possibilities in literature, that I had barely cracked the surface. Coetzee points that man should learn to accept his nature of decay. Nothing is permanent. “No, that is not the moral. What was ignoble about the Kenilworth spectacle was that the poor dog had begun to hate its own nature. It no longer needed to be beaten. I t was ready to punish itself. At that point it would have been better to shoot it…” Man’s viewpoint nowadays is that death is a disease. If it is a disease, then there would be a cure. A lot of people are afraid of it; they try to prevent it by living a healthy lifestyle, by eating good food, by drinking vitamins and minerals, being active, etc. Others hold on to religion, they cling to the promise of immortality as a means to defeat death. That being said, that is why religions are successful entities, because of their promise of salvation. It is a way to avoid death, a way to live forever. But no one wants death as it is. No one wants to die because they want to experience death. Coetzee is saying that we should learn to accept death per se. It is a part of our nature. We are born, we die. On the more obvious sense, this passage talks about the nature of lust in men. That denying ourselves of it is self-abdication. “No animal will accept the justice of being punished for following its instincts.” I digress. I will not dwell much on the matters that are easier to identify. Instead, I will focus my attention on supporting my claim that this is about mortality as much as it is morality. “With the aid of the banjo he begins to notate the music to Teresa, now mournful, now angry, will sing to her dead lover, and that pale-voiced Byron will sing back to her from the land of the shades… Six months ago he had thought his own ghostly place in Byron in Italy would be somewhere between Teresa’s and Byron’s: between a yearning to prolong the summer of the passionate body and a reluctant recall from the long sleep of oblivion. But he was wrong. It is not the erotic that is calling to him after all, nor the elegiac, but the comic. “. This particular snippet unveils Teresa’s call to the Byron of her youth, to the long gone man of her dreams as an ode from a woman past her prime, unable to let go of her past, unable to accept the passage of time, unable to come to terms with her mortality. And as Coetzee has so skillfully worded, it is not erotic, nor elegiac, but comical. Why? Someone longing for things gone, someone trying to deny her nature, I guess, is pretty laughable. You don’t feel sorry for a woman resorting to cosmetics and plastic surgery to turn back the clock. I feel that these acts of self-denial can only be described as comic. Again, this all returns to accepting our nature. Even revisiting that part in the story where Lucy gets raped shows a certain angle of mortality. We become powerless as we grow older, not only in the physical aspect, but also from a hopeful one. Lucy is a representation of our youth, and we are unable to do anything as we drift farther and farther from it. Up till the end, the subject is traceable. The young dog carries our hopes and dreams, some unrealized exemplified by one crippled leg. And when David carries him to its deathbed and pronounces “Yes, I am giving him up.” This is the final act of acceptance, the acceptance of his nature, the inevitable, and the confirmation of a truth. “Its period of grace is almost over, soon it will have to submit to the needle.” This is when I was finally persuaded of the double-edged truths that are buried here. Period of grace? Does he use it to particularly refer to those advanced in years? Or does he refer to life? But one thing I’m sure of, disgrace is the negation of that grace, the negation of a life, a prefix of three letters turning a virtue into something vile. Disgrace is death. But it isn’t all bad; there is hope in the story. The redemptive act of Lucy’s childbirth shows that good things come even as our youth unfolds into yonder. That aging has fruits that can be rewarding. That life regresses in years but progresses in achievements. I guess what we can pick from it is live life to the fullest, so that when your time comes, you can accept death without any misgivings. Carpe diem, live in the moment, be in the now. Acknowledge your life so that you can acknowledge death. “…desire is a burden we could do without.” I believe that Coetzee’s ultimate point in the end is that mortality is not the disease we see it to be, but the cure. That life, love, lust, everything is a matter of wanting. Desire is man’s biggest sickness and he cannot be rid of it. Only through aging is desire possibly watered down. Death is the only cure. Mortality is the panacea of sin. This is Lurie’s conversation with a prostitute: “Where are you taking me? I’m taking you back to where I found you.” Out of nothing we found greed, into nothingness will we take it. My friend, when the time comes, I hope you learn to accept. Let go.

Man, living in South Africa really sounds like it sucks.

---

Nabokov insisted that "one cannot read a book: one can only reread it," and while I suspect he was right I almost never read books more than once. There are just too many unread books out there for me to stop and go back in most cases, unless I'm made to do so for a class, which this time I was, just two years after first reading Disgrace.

There are a couple obvious reasons why it's good to reread books, and one has much more to do with the reader than with the book. Put simply, you're just not the same person the second time as you were the first time you read a book; disappointingly, this usually makes me like the book less, now that I'm older and cynical and a more ruthless judge. But I responded much more strongly and positively to Disgrace the second time, probably because of something that happened to me a couple weeks ago.

I live in a neighborhood of Miami with a huge population of feral cats. I'm not much of a cat person, but I like these guys. They twist all over the jungly block I walk down on my way to the train, and sometimes I sit in my backyard and one of them will stand across the grass and we'll sort of just look at each other, and it's nice. There's one -- or maybe twenty -- that's black with some white, that I often saw in my backyard and spent time with in this way: it just kind of hanging out on its end, me over on mine.

So a couple weeks ago I noticed that this cat -- or one of it -- was lying dead on the grassy palm-treed median right in front of my house. I noticed its black and white body while I was crossing on my way to do laundry. It must have been hit by one of the crazed Miami drivers whizzing by on my fairly busy street.

Being strenuously unsentimental, my only response was to try figuring out if there was some city agency charged with going out to collect animal corpses. The closest I ever got was a number for animal control that, whenever I called, played a message stating that there were too many calls and then disconnected the line.

I really didn't know what to do in this situation. I'm not into pets and have never owned a cat, and while there have been a few I've grown to like, I'm just not a cat person; much more into dogs. I've also been historically opposed -- for reasons I might get into below -- to sentimentality about domesticated animals. Plus I'm a real city mouse, used to having this kind of thing swept up by some kind of taxpayer-funded agency... Mayor Bloomberg would not have dead cats littering his city's streets, but Miami is no New York. It is pretty Third World down here, in some ways.

It seemed obvious that the cat's corpse couldn't be allowed to stay there. I could see it across the street, starkly black and white against the green grass, every time that I stepped out of my house. But it was also clear that unless I did something, the dead cat wasn't going anywhere. But I couldn't think of anything to do except for throw it out in the trash, and this seemed profoundly disgusting to me -- having it rot in my trashcan in the heat for a few days, then being dumped into the garbage truck -- and anyway, I didn't own a shovel.

The first thing I did was ask my father (who lives in a rural area) what to do. He asked if I could not just "ignore it and let nature take its course?", noting that if he were around he would deal with it, but that for me it was a question of what was more disgusting at this point: chucking it in the trash, or watching it rot and be eaten by scavengers.

This was not a satisfying answer, and so as my Facebook friends already know, at this point I put the question to The Community. What should I do? I was stumped. Did my virtual friends have suggestions? The first responders were a gallant, practical, and mostly male bunch who advocated either leaving it to return to the earth in due time, or swiftly transporting it to the nearest garbage receptacle wrapped in some kind of plastic or other, post haste.

But then two Facebook friends -- both slightly older, pretty tough punk chicks, both cat owners, who live in different parts of the country and don't know each other at all -- told me that what I had to do, the only right thing, was to bury it.

This option hadn't even occurred to me before. I say this in all sincerity and with emphasis: It hadn't crossed my mind.

Obviously this was the only decent thing to do. More than decent: it was the thing that must be done, and this was incredibly important. It was late at night when I figured this out and I went to bed anxious that before I could get to Home Depot the next morning to buy a shovel, the cat corpse would disappear without being properly laid to rest.

Fortunately, that was not the case. I woke up in time to get to Home Depot when they opened, bought a six-dollar shovel and was out on the median with my blue recycling bin and an old cut-up white Ben Sherman shirt. The cat was already rotting in the heat, crawling with bugs, its eyeballs popping out of its furry little head. It stank. I mean it really did smell extraordinarily bad. It was also surprisingly heavy and difficult to maneuver into the recycling bin with my shovel, but I did, then tossed the shirt over it and carried it back around the side of my house to the backyard, holding my breath against the stink and full of purpose.

I dug a fairly deep hole and then tipped the cat's body into it, its black and white paws sticking out playfully in all directions from underneath the white shirt as I heaped dirt back on top of it.

As soon as I'd filled in the hole I was flooded with a feeling of peace and relief. I did not, as a Facebook friend suggested I should, say Kattish. I place a rock over the grave, awkwardly mumbled, "Rest in peace, cat," then wandered back inside my house. I sprayed the shovel and the blue recycle bin with cleaning fluid, where the decomposing cat had left a smelly smear and a bit of fur. I felt an enormous sense of well being, that a problem I'd been anxious about had been resolved in so obviously the correct and most appropriate way.

When I walked to the train later on, I felt happy when I saw the other feral cats roaming around. I had attended honorably to their fallen comrade; I was a friend of homeless cats everywhere, a true ally. I was decent. I was okay.

Except that I wasn't. What really disturbed me then, and still does, was that it hadn't even crossed my mind to bury the dead cat until other people suggested that that's what I should do. It was so obviously the right thing, the only thing, to do once I'd done it, but I didn't know I should do it until two other people told me to.

I know why this didn't occur to me, kind of. It's because I try really hard not to be sentimental about animals. When I was in the second grade, I stopped eating meat. I don't remember why exactly, but I suspect it was inspired by bumper stickers on the hippie van of the next-door neighbor's boyfriend... and also just by a childlike conviction that animals were cute and that eating them was gross and wrong. And so I didn't eat meat then, starting at a very young age, and as a teenager -- following a drug experience at Washington DC's extremely depressing aquarium -- discovered a real passion for animal rights with a very strong philosophy behind it. I was appalled by the idea of animals as pets; I became vegan, and stopped eating and wearing animal products altogether. But I wasn't a judgmental, obnoxious vegan, I don't think. I respected hunters, people who killed what they ate. The people I looked down on were self-identified "animal lovers": those who cherished dogs and cats with a real self-righteous fire, but who ate hamburgers and pork. I scorned people who were disgusted by raw carcasses, by farm animals' deaths, but who ate them, and then dotingly spoiled their dogs. I didn't see the difference, and their distinctions offended me.

My veganism was very adolescent, but I don't mean that in a derogatory way. I wanted to be morally consistent. I didn't want to participate in eating something I wouldn't take responsibility for having killed. I was a kid, a teenager, first confronting how truly and irreparably fucked up the world was, and I immediately understood that it was too big for me to do anything about that and saw how I was implicated in all of it, and the animal thing seemed like the one area I could take myself out of. Everything with the people was all so so so bad, and this was the only place where I felt I could say, "No. Not this. I won't be part of it." And it made me feel, not okay, but something. Like in this terrible world I was doing one tiny thing that made sense, that was right, that was rooted at least in an effort at ethics and dignity.

Which is, I think, what Disgrace is about. Not in a simplistic or didactic way (unlike, say, Elizabeth Costello, which I haven't read in awhile but don't remember fondly at all), but in an extremely complex and nuanced sense this book is about the question of how to be a good person in this horrendously awful world, and what our relationship to animals has to do with that. Disgrace's post-apartheid South Africa is, in certain ways, not so different from my adolescent welcome to the actual world. We are all, like Coetzee's David Lurie, so flawed. We are terrible, and our world is such a violent and complicated mess that we cannot be good people in any recognizably meaningful sense. It's impossible. And so this is why we turn to the animals: to measure ourselves. To practice humanity, by being humane. But in this book, it's not practical at all, which resonates: David Lurie doesn't save the dogs, any more than I saved the dead cat. His actions have no practical result for the animals, yet what he does is not symbolic, it's not a metaphor for something else. It is just what he does, because that's what there is to do. I can't really say what I mean beyond that, but I think Coetzee says it for me in this book.

I'm still really ashamed that I didn't think to bury that cat. I understand why I didn't, and it has to do with why I stopped being vegan and with everything that's happened since then. I stopped thinking so much about animals because I grew disgusted with that, and turned my attention to the sufferings of and injustices to people. But, as Disgrace dramatizes, people are far more complicated than dogs or cats or sheep or cows. We just are. It's silly to dispute it. And that's what made veganism so appealing to me, as a young person, was that it was so clean cut, black and white, right and wrong. Dealing with people isn't like that, not ever, not really. It's all grey, all the time, and violently, despairingly so.

I tried to get really tough and steel myself against the world when I saw what it was, because that seemed to make the most sense. It seemed hypocritical to care more about animals than about people, but caring about people in a consistent way was so complex and taxing, and whatever I did seemed to drown me in hypocrisy and confusion. As I grew older, I felt I'd been too idealistic. I wanted to be more cynical, or at least tougher, because that's what this world seemed to demand. And that's why it didn't occur to me to bury the cat, even when I knew full well the other options -- toss it in the trash or leave it there -- were both wrong. The world was so bad and complicated that I'd given up trying to be a good person.

That's what this book's about, I think. Trying to be a good person. At least, I thought that the second time that I read it.

So many themes taking place in this short novel that starts out with a twice divorced, 52 yr old college professor in South Africa losing his career after a seduction and affair with a young student of his...his state of “disgrace”

He ends up going to the rural part of the region, to spend time with his grown daughter. While there, the daughters house is burglarized and acts of violence occur “disgraced” again.

I’m kind of at a loss for words to review this.. read others reviews..
This is quite a haunting and disturbing read!


Themes include ..sexuality, racial tension, rape, desire, shame, remorse, empathy, justice, fathers and daughters, animal treatment... just so many ..

When I closed on the last page of this book, I just sat in stunned silence and stared into space. I felt a little sick and lost, over affected by the sad truths it disclosed. I did not cry, but there were tears behind my eyes pricking through much of this read, and they were not tears for these characters as much as for humanity at large.

David Lurie is not a likeable person. He is short-sighted and self-centered and amazingly insensitive. So, how is it that I ended this book wishing him well? Wishing he would find the future better than the present? That Bev Shaw’s assertion that “One gets used to things getting harder; one ceases to be surprised that what used to be as hard as hard can be grows harder yet.” will not be the truth for him always? There is a glimmer of hope growing at the end of this story that flickers like a candle flame. It might easily be blown out, but perhaps it will find a way to burn on into the future; perhaps it will save Lucy and David alike.

I have been being surprised a lot by the books I have been reading lately. I seem to have some preconceived idea about what they will entail and then find they are not that at all. This definitely falls into that category for me. I thought this was going to be about race relations in South Africa, and it is, but it is about so much more than that. It is about humanity and what unavoidable ugly choices we make, that we are not always forced into, and how we relate to others and their choices which we find completely impossible to understand. Lucy tells David that he sees her as a minor play in the story of his life, but that she believes she is at the center of her own story. And that might be the most true statement Coetzee makes. We are all the center of our own stories and everyone else is a minor player. We cannot help that. Can anyone really imagine life goes on without them? Can you think about the day after you are dead and all the people you know still getting up for breakfast and going to work...but you are not there, you do not exist? It is the hardest thing to imagine in all the world.

Huge kudos to J. M. Coetzee for tackling the big questions and weaving them into a marvelous story that grips you from beginning to end. I heartily recommend this book. I have no doubt I will be thinking about it for a long, long time.

Putting this at 2 stars until I decide how low I actually want to rate it.

This was terrible. Do not let the stamp that says "Nobel Prize for Literature" or "Booker Prize" fool you. This is just another story written by a white man pretending that he knows the struggles of subjugated individuals. I have studied literature for years and read a good number of books just like this. Coetzee isn't as unaware of his ignorance as other authors might be and I think the awareness of ignorance is the angle that he's trying with this book. But he fails.
He continually tries to reclaim this failure with little snippets of actual good content and critical moments here and there but it doesn't erase the harm done by the rest of this book. This novel is taking up the position that an actual minority or subjugated individual could have. It is books like this which take up space in the areas in which individuals with actual hardships and experience should be operating. I'm sick of this.

I don't think if someone described the plot of this book to me I would think that this is a book that I would enjoy yet here we are. I'm not sure how to even explain what about this book appeals to me. I think it's that the writing felt really wonderful and every word felt meaningful and right. I can't stand overly verbose prose and nothing about this felt this way. I think I also just really enjoy flawed characters, and David, the main character, clearly has his flaws. I just enjoyed the humanizing way we see David grapple with his faults and limits, and his disposition towards romanticism and passion are things I can also empathize with. It's just one of those times where I've read a book and everything I've read felt like it added it to the book and just the writing and characters were so human and easy to embody when reading. I really really enjoyed this one.

Ovo su puritanska vremena. Privatan život je javna briga.

Kako napisati roman koji treba da liči na nešto? Posmatraš pojave oko sebe i djeluješ tako da nisi dio istih. Potom ih preneseš na papir, pokušavajući da izbaciš ljutnju prema takvim pojavama, iznoseći ih na čistac. Tako je slično uradio i Kuci. U fokusu je Kejptaun koji je ujedno i jedan od najvećih gradova Južnoafričke Republike. Kada profesor književnosti Dejvid Luri bude razotkriven da je imao odnos sa jednom od svojih studentica, apetiti onih željnih tuđe pakosti će potpuno da buknu. Kuci je dosta dobro na malom prostoru produbljivao lik Lurija. On nije želio da njegova sramota bude i ostane beznačajna. Oblikovao ga je tako da se može sagledati iz više uglova, i što bi rekli sve to čitaocima pružao na tacni. Takođe, on je apelovao i na one slojeve društva koji teže ne samo da priznaš i osjećaš krivicu, već i da budeš potpuno ponizan pred njima. Čisto iz njihove potrebe za nasladom i moći nad tobom. Kroz roman se vidi da su sva područja javnog mnjenja pod okriljem sramote. Profesor Luri će samo biti jedan od isturenih preko koga će se lomiti grbača. Pljačke i nasilja, slijepe državne uprave, katastrofalan odnos prema životinjama, rasni momenti, jesu neke od tačaka Kejptauna. Emotivni dio romana varira iz poglavlja u poglavlje. Sramota je jedan kratak ali slojevit roman, uokviren stilom koji pokriva sve ono što je njemu prijemčivo, a da opet nema manjka ili nedorečenosti.

I would rather slide down a hill of rusty razorblades into a pond of rubbing alcohol in winter than read one more page of this misogynistic, overcompensating, piece of "literature". The main character is someone we are supposed to shake our heads at and then cheer him on as he attempts to redeem his "bad boy" ways. The problem is he's a pretentious, bile-inducing old perv whom God himself would turn away.

I live, I have lived, I lived.

I think I’m alright.
My heart is unbroken, my soul appears to be intact, my pulse seems to be normal and my eyes are dry.
Then why do I feel so spent? Why do I sense my heart is being squeezed in an invisible fist? Why do my eyes burn?
And as for my soul…my soul...my soul?
I was led; I followed. I arrived, I was bewitched, I wandered off and left my soul, my all, among the mountains and valleys of South Africa.

What dwelling shall receive me? in what vale
Shall be my harbour? underneath what grove
Shall I take up my home? and what clear stream
Shall with its murmur lull me into rest?
The earth is all before me. With a heart
Joyous, nor scared at its own liberty,
I look about; and should the chosen guide
Be nothing better than a wandering cloud,
I cannot miss my way. I breathe again!

-William Wordsworth (from The Prelude)

The story begins one evening.
He is walking through the college gardens and so is a young woman, a student of his. Their paths cross, words pass between them, and at that moment something happens which he cannot describe.

Suffice it to say that Eros entered.

After that day, he is not the same. He is not a fifty-two year old man any longer, but a servant of Eros.

It was a god who acted through me.

That is how it begins.
But nothing is secret that will not come to light. And so does the professor’s indiscretion.

Out of the poets I learned to love,
But life, I found is another story.

He is not a bad man but not good either. He is not cold but not hot either. He is principled and on principle refuses to defend himself.
What he lacks is hypocrisy.

Will that be the verdict on him, the verdict of the universe and its all-seeing eye?

Hence, David Lurie, disciple of William Wordsworth and a professor at the Cape Technical University is sentenced to life in disgrace.

First the sentence then the trial.

Quitting his job is easy; his students aren’t keen on learning about dead poets and archaic poetry anyway.

If he is being led, then what god is doing the leading?

So, with nothing left to lose, he decides to stay with his daughter who lives on a farm in Eastern Cape. But can he cope with the rustic life and its perils and threats?

Perhaps it does us good to have a fall every now and then. As long as we don’t break.

Can he put the past behind and begin a new life and a new existence?
And what about the shocks, vicissitudes and the unpredictables?
Can he learn to take them more lightly?
Can he learn to live again?