Desgracia funciona como un destornillador que va apretando las clavijas al profesor de universidad David Lurie. Coetzee lo maneja con precisión y firmeza haciéndole caer en desgracia. Los actos y la forma de pensar de David Lurie no me gustan absolutamente nada y como lector me agrada esa ración inicial de karma, pero entonces comienza una segunda parte mucho más rural y mis sensaciones cambian porque el autor no afloja. Al revés, Coetzee sigue apretando y llega un punto en el que todo lo que leo me parece injusto.

La novela está muy bien narrada, toca diversos temas como el amor, el placer, el dolor, la muerte, el mundo animal, las relaciones paterno filiales… y está ambientada en la Sudáfrica post apartheid.

Como buen optimista siempre tiendo a pensar que “lo mejor está por llegar”, pero en ocasiones el gran destornillador de la vida tiene otros planes y sigue apretando. Cuando a una desgracia le siguen otras aún más grandes solo nos queda intentar adaptarnos y sobrevivir.

Desgracia es una novela dura. Una historia donde aprendemos que hay sentimientos profundos que no se pueden expresar con palabras. Una historia hecha con palabras que habla sobre sentimientos profundos.

Me ha gustado, pero no sé si la recomendaría.

Listen. I decided I do not want to read stories written by men about men who are misogynistic pieces of shit and also rapists. I can and will happily go without the pretentious literary value these books want to teach me.

I literally just finished this book a few minutes ago, so I have not by any means worked though all of my reactions to it yet. It is written in a very spare, emotionally distanced style, even though it deals with very emotional topics. It is a page-turner, an absorbing, fast read that keeps you anxious to find out what happens next -- but that seems almost incidental, besides the point. I thoroughly disliked the main character, David Lurie -- he is unbelievably arrogant and chauvinistic -- but that seemed less and less important as the novel went on, and totally irrelevant by the end. In fact, I don't think there is a single likable character anywhere in this book, not even Bev Shaw (she is admirable, I think, but not likable). But these characters and their lives have so much to say to the reader that their likability just doesn't even enter into it.

This is an extremely complex book, with a lot going on -- I haven't even begun to unpack it all. At its core, it's about race, specifically about race relations in modern-day South Africa. But it also has a lot to do with gender politics and with animal rights (or, if not animal rights exactly, the treatment animals receive at the hands of human beings). Lucy, David's daughter, becomes the focal point for most of these issues, yet she, as a character, would eschew the whole notion of "issues". She doesn't deal in abstractions, only in the concrete necessities of daily life. She is -- all of these characters are -- hard to wrap your head around, hard to understand their motivations. Honestly, Lucy disturbed me even more than David disturbed me. David is an arrogant jackass who constantly romanticizes everything around him. Lucy, however, is a victim, a voluntary martyr. It is the role she has adopted for herself, the price she has decided she has to pay for being a white woman living in the South African countryside. She is powerless and oppressed -- not by other people, not by the society she lives in, but by herself. She may be trying to live a good life and be a good person, but I cannot imagine that anything good could possibly come out of the stance she chooses to take. She takes self-loathing to new and extreme levels, in my opinion.

So what is the disgrace that the title references? David's disgrace at the beginning of the book, being caught in an affair with a student? The disgrace Lucy feels from the rape? South Africa's disgraceful history of apartheid? The disgraceful behavior of the rapists and of Petrus, who is protecting them and may possibly have instigated the whole incident in the first place? Lucy's lack of self-respect? Her father's lack of empathy and connection with other human beings? Some other meaning I haven't considered yet? All of the above?

I don't know. But I know I will be thinking about this little novel for a long time to come. Haunting is, I think, the right word for it.

çok sinirlerim bozuldu :/ kitabı elimden bırakamadım resmen. david'in çöküşü bir yana lucy'nin kaybetmeyi göze aldıkları, petrus'un köylü pişkinliği... ezen ve ezilenin o garip yer değişimi çok sinirlerimi bozdu. coetzee tabii müthiş uzak bir dille aktarıyor her şeyi.
şimdiki zaman kullanımı, gazete haberi gibi nesnel dili, duygularının sadece iç konuşmalardaki sorularda hissedilmesi... çok ustaca kurmuş ama sanırım bu romandaki en önemli şey lucy'yi anlayabilmek.
david'in sömürgeci ve akademisyen erkek mantığıyla siyah bir kız öğrencinin hayatının içine etmesini, sonra bunun cezasını kendi istediği biçimde çekmesini görmek iyi geldi önce, oh olsun dedim ama sonra pollux'u kızını dikizlerken yakalayıp döverken de resmen pisliği öldürsün isteyip ondan taraf oldum.
lucy'nin sadece güvenliği adına köylülerdeki toprak anlaşması mantığını kabullenmesini ben hiç kabullenemedim :(
ay içim şişti resmen.
iyi edebiyat tüyleri diken diken yapıyor.

why did I do this to myself, she remarked

Update: the recent death of Toni Morrison reminded me that in this novel the author mocks both Morrison and Alice Walker. Who else have I heard do this? Something to think about.

------------------------------

This is a powerfully written novel. The cruelty to animals and the violence and crime have only continued to get worse since this book was published in 1999. There is no defending these actions.

I have traveled to South Africa and read its history. And I would argue that it is hard to understand this story without such context.

The author himself is an Afrikaner. It is his people who practiced racial oppression for years and codified Apartheid in 1948 that contributed directly to this monstrous situation. We fall into the same trap when we demonize the black man in the U.S. and prefer to forget the legacy of slavery, that my white race created, that still hangs heavy over black people today. This context and the ramifications from it cannot be forgotten.

A short overview of Apartheid....

https://answersafrica.com/what-is-sou...

---------------

The author was accused of racism because of this novel. I am inclined to agree. Some argue that David Lurie represents the author's character and beliefs. Also true. (See the NYT article below).

I felt that part of the unspoken thesis of Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs, and Steel" was to refute Kipling's concept of "the white man's burden." The underlying assumption of Kipling is that people of color (including India in those days) are by nature racially inferior. This is why Europeans could so easily conquer them, whether in South America, Africa, or Australia. The implication of this is, of course, staggering and has led to many crimes against humanity. Many still hold to this view, as Coetzee seems to, as well.

https://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/16/bo...

Заслужена Нобелова награда за Кутси, а това е тежък и неудобен роман, разкъсващ отвътре!

Африка продължава да ми бъде напълно непозната и неразбираема...

“Was it serious? I don't know. It certainly had serious consequences.”
― J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace



“When all else fails, philosophize.”
― J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace

Wow, folded into 220 pages is about everything you've ever wanted (or never wanted) to read about race, sex, power, family shame, suffering, humiliation, jus animalium, love and death. Really. I think Coetzee could fit more raw emotion and tender sorrow into one rangy clause than most writers could pack into a whole novel. There is part of me that thinks I need to read this book again to more fully understand it, and another more rational part of me that understands I wouldn't be able to handle it.

Die meisten Fünfsterner in meiner Sammlung gelesener Bücher zeichnen sich aus, dass sie schön geschrieben oder besonders spannend, dramaturgisch geschickt oder von den Protagonisten besonders besetzt sind. Bücher mit einer simplen Sprache, mit sexueller Gewalt, mit lebensuntüchtigen Hauptpersonen und dann vielleicht auch noch im Präsens geschrieben, haben es dagegen bei mir sehr schwer. Alle diese negativen Eigenschaften hat dieses Buch. Aber das Lesevergnügen war trotzdem ausgesprochen hoch. Das Buch ist kraftvoll und eindringlich, irgendwie verstörend gut.

Es ist eine Geschichte über verlorene Träume, persönliche Niederlagen, die Vergänglichkeit des Seins, die Trostlosigkeit der gesellschaftlichen Strukturen in Südafrika, Rassismus, Gewalt, Begierde und letztlich ein Buch über das Sterben und über das Leben in Ungnade. Ein gewaltiges Werk. Das erste Drittel spielt in Kapstadt, wo der Protagonist, ein Englischprofessor, sich in eine Studentin verliebt, eine Beziehung mit ihr beginnt und dabei das Ende seiner beruflichen Laufbahn einläutet. Er fällt in Ungnade bei der Uni-Leitung, quittiert seinen Job und zieht zu seiner Tochter in die Provinz. Diese unterhält eine Farm mit Hundepension. Das Leben der Tochter ist genauso in einer Sackgasse wie das des Vaters. Und als drei junge Schwarze die Farm überfallen und die Tochter vergewaltigen, beginnt anschließend die Entfremdung zwischen Vater und Tochter.

Im Grunde kann man spüren, wie diese Geschichte auf den Abgrund zusteuert. Und hier kommt der Schreibstil ins Spiel, denn der ansonsten von mir wenig geschätzte Präsensstil kommt hier voll zur Geltung. Durch die Gegenwartsform und der konsequent chronologisch fortgeschriebenen Erzählung bekommt die Geschichte eine Unaufhaltsamkeit und Unausweichlichkeit, die für sich spricht. Zudem verwendet Coetzee in den Beschreibungen auf das minimalistischste gekürzte Sätze, absolut schnörkellos, die im Gegensatz zu den Dialogen stehen. Man könnte meinen, dass der Autor nicht schreiben kann, aber die Sätze sind bewusst so gewählt. Zu Recht Man-Booker-Preisträger.

This book made me want to read Twilight. Yes, Twilight: perfectly perfect young people falling in love and never growing old. God, I hope that’s what’s in store for me there. I need an antidote to Disgrace.
   It affected me more than I thought it could, in ways I hadn’t imagined possible. At page ten I would have readily given it five stars; the writing is superb. Halfway through I’d have given it four. Excellent, but slightly annoying. At the moment I finished it, shouting “WHAT?? What the hell kind of ending is THAT???” and wondering if I was going into shock, I’d have demanded stars back for ruining my life. A little distance was needed before I could consider it rationally again.

   The word disgrace is what struck me with nearly every page. Coetzee’s writing is like that. Tight. There’s no escaping what he wants you to see. It’s not outrageously blatant, but it’s none too subtle either. It’s good. So good you might be tempted to revel in it. Do not. This is not for the faint-hearted. Run. Read something easy, something happy. Anything. If you stay Coetzee will turn that word, disgrace, in your mind a hundred different ways. I’m no stranger to the word. I have been a disgrace, been disgraced, disgraced myself and others. Seriously. I thought I was immune to it.
   The main character, David Lurie, is disgraced. Big deal. He disgraces a student. Yeah, I’m familiar with that. She’ll live. He is a disgrace. Yes, clearly. David Lurie is entering the disgrace of growing old. That’s where Coetzee has me.
   I can’t find it in me to despise Lurie. He’s a Lothario and possibly worse (“She does not own herself. Beauty does not own itself.”), but I don’t have to live with him. Then there’s the sharp intelligence with too little empathy or emotion to make it truly sing. The bare objectiveness. He claims to have lost ‘the lyrical’ within himself, but it’s doubtful he ever had it. He’s a pretender. I’m amused by the fact that he, a professor of language, begins the affair that causes his public fall from grace by quoting Shakespeare’s first sonnet. The words apply as much to himself as to anyone. But self-delusion is my own stock-in-trade. I can’t condemn him for that. I don’t love him either. I feel as dispassionate as Lurie himself. The disgrace of the dying though - the 'without grace' – that younger generations foist upon them. That they’re made to feel as intruders in life, burdensome. This is where Coetzee hooks me. And he reels me in. Reels me in until I find myself suffocating in a world I want no part of. A world of shame, dishonor, humiliation, degradation. Disgrace. That of a man, a father, a daughter, a woman, an unborn child. Now make those plural. Add the disgraces of South Africa, of humanity, of animals. Yes, animals. I suspected Coetzee would sneak in a little commentary on that. He has a reputation. I did not expect to be so affected by it. I, a confirmed carnivore, did not expect to lie awake at night considering vegetarianism. Coetzee brings that passionate quote at the beginning of this paragraph back to hit me square in the face near the end though and – once again – Disgrace.

   So five stars, but would I recommend it? I’m still not sure. Read it if you dare. Coetzee is brilliant.

“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 earring; 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 the 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.

Visiting 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, a small landholder who lives in the 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 that 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 South Africa. There is a 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.

Brace yourself to meet Professor David Lurie, banished son of the Romantic Poets, he roves and loves, spreading his unfertile seed unapologetically.
Byronic in his burning desire to possess female bodies, he doesn’t crave for their souls, it is the release of the flesh, the ecstasy of the unloved that he is after.
Fifty-two year old David seeks only his own pleasure and succumbs to his instincts as the true womanizer he is, or as he calls himself a lover of women, paying homage to Wordsworth in nurturing his true nature, embracing its mystery, arising as the dutiful Don Juan.
David feels satisfied combining this quiet life of debauchery with his comfortable post as a teacher at Cape Town University, but when his old age starts pressing on him, casting a shadow to his virile charms, he seeks for rejuvenation in lusting over one of his young students. Taking advantage of his position and blinded by his heated obsession, he recklessly pursues the young girl until she yields to his unrelenting demands.
When the affair is brought to light, David rejects all kind of moral compromise and, adopting a pose built on vanity and self-righteousness, he self-expels himself from the University.
"I am not prepared to be reformed. I want to go on being myself", he unflinchingly says to his daughter Lucy, whom he visits in her faraway farm until the scandal in Cape Town subsides.
A despicable character, indeed.
Or isn’t it?

This is the real beginning of David Lurie’s story. The starting point of a transcendental journey, which will change, not Lurie’s nature but the way he understands life, death and history.
For his lesbian daughter Lucy is everything he is not, a sturdy countrywoman who runs a farm and a kennel in a foreign land, an idealist with a not yet fired gun for protection, a forgiving soul who takes him in, without judging or questioning.
David will discover an unknown South Africa in Lucy’s rural spot, a place where his erudition and cynicism are worthless, a terrible place where a new order is being consolidated amidst brutish racial conflict, a territory whose implacable rules transcend what’s merely human. Lucy will pay a dear price for the sake of history, only to become David’s scapegoat, leaving no path for redemption.

Coetzee intertwines subjects such as the suffering and the dignity of animals with the mute and inescapable violence of his homeland, presenting challenging questions to the reader. What kind of mercy can animals expect from human beings who kill each other because of their race, their gender, or simply for random pleasure? How is it possible for people to achieve mutual respect if they can’t treat animals that feed them with the dignity they deserve?
The suffering of animals, the suffering of human beings: a sublime game of two-way mirrors.

Coetzee’s mirrors, capable of deforming his characters until the reader can see them for what they really are, reflect, from a myriad of kaleidoscopic angles, the central idea of the novel: the concept of Disgrace.
David Lurie, the cult seducer, disgraced in his old age and remorse.
His daughter Lucy, the white independent woman, disgraced in losing her status in a world where racial conflict has turned over the social order through injustice and cruelty. Humiliation and shame become Lucy’s new home in penance for the burden of history.
South Africa, a wealthy country and the future of Africa, disgraced with its harrowing violence and misery.

Coetzee’s final coupe de grâce relays in the way he weaves his dry, detached tone and unadorned narrative style with the lyrical closing chapters, in which David tries to recover his existential balance through the process of writing an opera based on the decaying affair of Lord Byron and his mistress Teresa. The voice of the dead poet mingles with David’s, and a phantasmagorical chant roams dolefully throughout South Africa, accompanying his descend to the abyss.
This crude novel won’t offer redeeming answers. But one can recover some dignity in resigned acceptance, as David does when his thoughts meddle with Yeats’s poem:

“He sighs. The young in one another's arms heedless, engrossed in the sensual music. No country, this, for old men.”

Old men, like Professor David Lurie, don’t have it in their core to adjust to change, to adapt to a new imposed reality. Their only aspiration is that of a decent death. In finding someone merciful enough to give a lethal shot while they are soothed and caressed, only to be put in a plastic bag and later be consumed by the fire of an industrial oven. What’s important is to make sure they don’t suffer any more than what’s strictly necessary, it doesn’t matter whether they are animals or human beings, when their souls are finally sucked away and gone in a gush of dark smoke.

"That is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees
- Those dying generations - at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.

O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.”
William Butler Yeats