An in depth, slice of life look at a man on the cusp of old age, Disgrace is fascinating. Once started, I couldn't stop. David loses his professorial job, because of an affair with one of his young students. She is above the age of consent, but this hardly excuses anything, as even the protagonist describes one encounter as next to rape. The professor has been surrounded by women all his life, but has never treated them as full human beings. He begins to learn about them in his disgrace.

He runs away from the city and takes refuge with his grown daughter. She lives by herself on a remote farm in South Africa.This is post apartheid, but there was never a full reconciliation. Young, angry men roam the country intending to change that. They want vengeance in blood and sacrifice. Lucy, his daughter, has to pay the price for the sins of her forefathers. David is as ineffectual here as ever, becoming irritable with his daughter after the savage attack she endured from 3 men. I really started to despise him at this point.

Thankfully, this is not the end of their relationship, but I too felt some of David's despair and confusion at his daughter's choices. They are her decisions to make though and he does finally realize this and wants a good resolution with his only child. Many other themes are here too, how we treat and mistreat animals, and what that says about us. I found a sentence here, which I wonder if Cormac McCarthy stole for his book entitled No Country for Old Men, which is what the sentence was with the addition of one other word.

BkC 18) Coetzee, J.M., DISGRACE: Wonderful writing, is there a story here?

I think I must have been in a foul humor when I wrote that. There is indeed a story here.

About disgrace, about the taking of grace from another being, about the horrors of which grace, in its religious meaning, is capable of holding back.

David Lurie, fifty-two, isn't a bad man. He isn't a good man, either. He is a human male possessed of a libido and enough facility of mind and tongue to service that libido's demands. This means he is also capable of performing, to the absolute minimum standard, the demands of teaching the youth of Cape Town, South Africa, a subject barely worthy of attention: "Communication." Not, you will note, English, or a language, but the abstraction of communication, whole and entire.

Bah. Modern "education" rots. So David, after he loses his erotic focus Soraya, leaves it and Cape Town behind to join his daughter Lucy in the countryside. She has a farm there, and it is the farm that leads to dis-grace, the shedding of grace, the negation of grace, for father and daughter alike. Horrors occur that I have no desire to relate to you, and that should keep those readers whose anxiety buttons are easily engaged far, far away from this book.

I don't think Coetzee likes people too terribly much.

The ending is the final act of dis-grace. I strongly strongly urge dog-lovers not to read the ending. Put it this way: I'd love the ending had it featured a cat. Now, does that scare y'all off? Good.

But the writing. Oh me, oh my.

A rik to own anything: a car, a pair of shoes, a packet of cigarettes. Not enough to go around, not enough cars, shoes, cigarettes. Too many people, too few things. What there is must go into circulation, so that everyone can have a chance to be happy for a day. That is the theory; hold to the theory and to the comforts of theory. Not human evil, just a vast circulatory system, to whose workings pity and terror are irrelevant. That is how one must see life in this country: in its schematic aspect. Otherwise one could go mad.

Thus the musings of a father after a horrific crisis. David Lurie is dis-graced. Grace is no longer part of David Lurie's mental furniture, and while he fights it for over 100pp, in the end, at the ending, David Lurie accepts his fate:

He is disgraced.

Nobelli yazar J.M. Coetzee'ten okuduğum ilk kitap, iyi ki de okumuşum. Beklediğim kadar iyi. Aslında bu kitap ile aramda enteresan bir bağ var. Kitabı ilk Ankara'da öğrenciyken buluşma noktamız Dost Kitabevi'nde gördüm, eski beyaz klasik kapağı ile. Ve her Dost'a girişimde denk geldiğim her an elime alıp şöyle bir bakmışlığım vardır. Bilmiyorum nedendir okumak bu güne kısmetmiş. Geç kalmış değilim belki fakat bu zamanlarda okuduğum için pişman değilim.

Kitaba gelecek olursam, arka kapakta da dediği gibi aslında kitap hiç de "yumuşak" değil. Öyle olma çabası da yok. Hatta hayvanların uyutulması ile ilgili hassasiyeti olan hayvan severler için oldukça sert dahi olabilir nitelikte.

David Lurie iki defa evlenip boşanmış, "sevişme ihtiyacını" haftalık buluşmalarla geçiren bir akademisyen. Öğrencilerinden biriyle yaşadığı ilişki sonrası olayın büyüyüp problemli bir hal alması ile başlayıp, olay sonrası üniversitedeki işinden ayrılıp kızı Lucy'nin yanına, Güney Afrika'ya gitmesi ve orada yaşanan talihsiz olay ile başa çıkmaya çalışması ile devam ediyor.

Kitapta bir çok "utanç" verici olay iç içe geçmiş olarak aktarılıyor. Özellikle Güney Afrika'ya her şeyden biraz olsun ara vermek ve kafa dinlemek için gidildiği esnada yaşananlar siyasal, felsefi ve bir o kadar da gerçek dille aktarılıyor.

Yazarın dilini oldukça beğendim. Kitap aynı zamanda Man Booker ödüllü. Okumak için geç kalmayın.

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

Professor David Lurie is forced to resign when his affair with a student comes to light. His resignation and the humiliations he gets to swallow as a parent burn chinks in his cynical armour and self-image. By volunteering in a veterinary clinic, his indifference to man and animal gradually gives way to empathy. Disgrace deals with the human inability to communicate effectively and with the uncertain relations between black and white in post-apartheid South Africa. Coetzee writes soberly and compactly. He aptly records the wry horror of raw physical and psychological violence.

Disgrace hits like a sledgehammer, but results in a catharsis that one doesn't forget lightly. A staggering book.



(Willie Bester, Transition, 1994)

n  Misschien is het goed voor ons om af en toe te vallen. Zo lang we maar niet breken.n

Professor David Lurie ziet zich gedwongen ontslag te nemen als zijn affaire met een studente aan het licht komt. Zijn ontslag en de vernederingen die hij als ouder te slikken krijgt, slaan barsten in zijn cynische pantser en zelfbeeld. Door zijn vrijwilligerswerk in een dierenkliniek maakt zijn onverschilligheid voor mens en dier geleidelijk plaats voor empathie. In ongenade handelt over het menselijke onvermogen tot werkelijke communicatie en over de onzekere verhoudingen tussen blank en zwart in het Zuid-Afrika van na de apartheid. Coetzee schrijft sober en compact. Hij registreert trefzeker de wrange gruwel van rauw fysiek en psychisch geweld.

In ongenade komt aan als een mokerslag, maar resulteert in een catharsis die je niet licht vergeet. Een onthutsend boek.

A savage, ruthless book.

At the onset of this 1999 Booker winner, I thought I was reading the story of 52 year old Capetown romantics poetry professor David Lurie, who has an affair with a student over thirty years his junior. I was in awe of the storytelling, of how Coetzee was able to show much by saying little, about the two sides of that affair.

Lurie, a man who identifies as a Byron-esque lover, who has been twice divorced and who enjoys the services of prostitutes, isn't exactly likeable. Especially when he has the opportunity to save his career by simply issuing an apology, but doesn't, on principle. His hubris is cold and unwavering.

I thought the book would revolve around his fall from grace after being forced to resign from his position. I guess it is, in a small part, but the book really begins after taking what seems like a wild left turn into the remote countryside of South Africa, where Lurie’s daughter Lucy lives. It’s a whole other world - a world that buzzes with danger.

This 1990’s post-Apartheid South Africa is a seething place, certainly unsafe for a white lesbian woman alone on a farm. A terrible attack occurs, fuelled by hatred.

So yes, it is a story about disgrace - but Coetzee casts his net far wider than an aging philanderer who abuses his position of power and loses face in the academic community. It is more about the disgrace of rape. The disgrace of misogyny. The disgraceful violence, resulting from Apartheid.

It also touches on the father/daughter relationship, generational gaps, and what one is prepared to lose for one's principles. It is about aging, loss of virility, and death. And I haven’t even discussed the animals - those poor, poor dogs. All in 220 pages (what IS it with the powerful, short novels I’ve been reading this month?!).

I am disturbed by the brutality of life in this part of the world. I’m even more disturbed by how Lucy reacts to it. She refuses to leave the farm after the attack. Transformed into a walking dead, she is at the mercy of her attackers, becoming a peasant in the fields she once mastered. I wasn't a fan of David Lurie, womanizer, objectifier, general dick-head. But I found myself pleading along with him, begging his daughter to choose something else for her life. Instead, she loses herself, laying down in submission, much like a dog undergoing euthanasia.

I’m shattered by the way that Lucy lays down like a dead dog, whether it is in general terms as a woman in subjugation to the violence of men, or whether it is a political illustration of how white South Africans of this time laid down to take their punishment, a retribution for the sins of their fathers. Coetzee is merciless in his depictions, pointing an accusing finger. It’s shocking, unacceptable. A complete DISGRACE.

Disgrace is my first book by Coetzee. I wonder why I hadn’t read him yet. For, I must admit that I found myself hooked to the work. So much so that this is easily the first book I have read with a compulsive eagerness. This is the sort of writing which, as Marlow says, is haunting and strangely beautiful. I completely agree.

David Lurie, the disgraced one. Really? Well, in a world where morality belong to people who are ostentatiously right, even if their rightness stands out boldly in their little acts of dishonesty, haughtiness, cunningness, lies and conceit, which do not really harm others directly, it is but established that people like Lurie are to be condemned. It is not that I am saying that what David did was right, it is just that I am asking who is to set the rules for what is right here and what is not, who should be condemned and who shouldn’t be? True, David engaged in liaisons, but one thing that I cannot overlook is that he, not even once, engaged in illicit relations without the consent of others involved. So, if David is disgraceful, aren’t the ones involved with him too? That does include Melanie, his student who brought up charges against him. I am not trying to make David seem innocent but then neither was she; remember that Melanie herself stayed back with him for the first time. A young women who is over eighteen years and has an ability to take her own decisions, should as well know what she is plunging into. If she finds it distasteful she can step back, like what she did afterwards. But she is shown to be timorous, one who is afraid even to look straight in the eyes. I wonder if she only accepted the proposition the first time because she, being a country girl, was afraid to offend her Professor, but then she didn’t hesitate to file charge against him even if it was under pressure from his boyfriend. What also perplexed me about her was that she announced herself unexpectedly late night once and cried over hysterically. We aren’t shown much of her character, not even her race. At best we are supplied with ambiguous details like her dark eyes and black hair. Even when Melanie’s boyfriend warns David to stay with his ‘own kind’, we don’t know if he is referring to race or age. If she is black, then the work takes an entirely different perspective.

It then come a complete circle, when David’s daughter Lucy is raped by black men. Lurie says to Lucy that ‘a history of wrong was speaking through Lucy’s rapists’. We are drawn to apartheid in South Africa. A history of personal abuse, but if Melanie was black then perhaps what David refers to is his own history as well. In that case, Melanie’s submission in the first place is something which might have come from a history of surrendering oneself to racial abuse.

David has been honest, through out. But his honesty doesn’t make him sympathetic. He is unaware of the hurt he has caused, cannot give in to feel sorry for what he has done until he is the suffering father. Then he realizes how important it is to accept and say the words, which cannot undone what has been done, but can at least bring some respite.

Lucy’s character was one which really roused me. I couldn’t understand her will to stay back in the place where she was raped. She said that it was like staying in someone’s place and paying taxes; Her rapists were debt collectors who were asking to violate her physical territory so that they might let her live on their territory which belonged to them geographically. Really? Did she mean to amend all the bad that were ever done to the African people by whites? She chose to stay back because she couldn’t live with a feeling of accepting defeat, but she could live with a feeling of being crushed or being nothing else than a debt that must be paid for the wrong done to the native people by her race? Well, it was really complex for me. I felt angry with Lucy because I do not believe that a person can alone stand for the unethical done by his/her race. But then I think this is why this is such a sensitive issue. It is also not possible to shirk off the lurking shadows of the unjust done against a race easily. It takes time and patience.

What also held my attention was the piece of Opera, David wanted to write. Being a scholar and comparing himself to his favorite poets, he wanted to write something musical about Byron and Teresa. Towards the end he says:

Well, he is too old to heed, too old to change. Lucy may be able to bend to the tempest; he cannot, not with honor. That is why he must listen to Teresa. Teresa may be the last one left who can save him. Teresa is past honor. She pushes out her breasts to the sun; she plays the banjo in front of the servants and does not care if they smirk. She has immortal longings, and sings her longings. She will not be dead.

What is it that David refers to here? Does Teresa represent Melanie or his desires? Or something which will help him achieve a state where his longings just go away? His decision to come back to the country and helping Bev Shaw with animals is one way he finds he can do that. By giving himself to bring grace to the animals in their death, he hopes he can undo the disgrace which hovers about him. Redemption at last.

A fierce, intelligent book so deep, dark and delightful I would need to write one of those exhaustive reviews I usually skim-read or scan for paragraph breaks to do it justice. But right now, I can’t. Let me keep it brief: an aging academic is brought tumbling down after the suspected or implied rape of a young student, then forced to deal with his own brutal assault and horrifying rape of his daughter. If you thought that was enough fun, it all takes place in South Africa, so there’s a whole race and class debate tossed into the mix too. The protagonist, although dashingly well-rendered, is something of a literary construct, but this is searing realism at its worst, so no complaints from me. Just don't read it on holiday.

It was obvious from the outset that Coetzee can write well. The prose was simple, yet powerful, and I admittedly found myself rather interested within a few pages of reading. The emotion can certainly be felt within the writing, and that is what kept me reading until the end.

Let's face it, David Laurie is a pathetic being. He spends his time manipulating his students which then results in him bedding them, but on his terms, of course. Believe me, I am certain that his character showed absolutely no remorse for any of his actions, not even at the end. I mean, David Laurie was a professor, a man with a few brain cells to have a party with, a man to trust, right?

Wrong.

Coetzee did a spectacular job of bringing his woeful character to life. No really, he made my skin crawl on more than one occasion. Is that a good aspect, I wonder? I've heard of too many of these kind of men/women that use their positions to abuse their students, and it quite honestly sickens me.

This was well written, but with a vile, and a somewhat unsettling subject matter.

A fascinating novel about the possibility of change and what it takes to become a better human being. The advantage of Disgrace (and his other novels) is that it addresses racism, gender roles, sexual harassment, and inherited guilt in more subtle ways than other recent novels do. Perhaps this is because Coetzee explored these themes before they gained mainstream interest. Or perhaps it's simply because Coetzee is one of the best writers.

“Was it serious? I don't know. It certainly had serious consequences.”

شتان الفارق بين ترجمة عبد المقصود عبد الكريم وترجمة أسامة منزلجي، كأن تقرأ رواية ثانية مع ترجمة منزلجي
تذوقت الرواية أخيرًا، بعد أن قرأتها من ستة سنوات وأنا أشعر بحنين يجعلني أن أقرأها مرة أخرى وحقًا عند قرائتي لها مرة أخرى اكتشفت أني لم أقرأها من قبل، كوتيزي كاتب وقلم لاذع في سخريته وذو مشرط حاد جدًا في تمزيقه النُسق الأخلاقية والمنظومة العائلية والاجتماعية وإفريقيا بعد الأبارتيّد، رواية صغيرة الحجم ولكنها دسمة جدًا ولا يمكن أن يقرأها أحدنا دون الإشتباك معها شعوريًا

coetzee yıllar yıllar öncesinden bana itici gelen bir yazardı. nobel'i, booker ödülleri de gözümde iticiliğini artırmaktan başka anlam ifade etmiyordu. bunun sebepleri bir tarafa, şimdi, okurluğumun o zamanlara göre daha ileri ya da daha başka bir döneminde, en azından bu romanının hakkını teslim etmem gerektiğini düşünüyorum. bu roman:

-kahramanlarının hikayesiyle güney afrika'nın hikayesini bütünleştirmedeki başarısı sebebiyle çok iyi bir roman.

-başta utanç olmak üzere, kadın-erkek, siyah-beyaz, gençlik-yaşlılık temalarını çok yönlü, çok boyutlu işleyebildiği ve bu temalar üzerinden bir değişim-dönüşüm izleğini baştan sona ustaca yürütebildiği için çok iyi bir roman.

-hem kahramanları hem de okurla mesafesini ayarlayarak hem itici hikayesini hem de karmaşık meselesini sunmaktaki ölçüsü ve inceliği sebebiyle çok iyi bir roman.

-düz, neredeyse kupkuru denecek bir dille, büyük sözler etmeden, "edebiyat yapmadan" derinleşmeyi başarabildiği için çok iyi bir roman.

-okura alan bırakabildiği, okuru neredeyse ite ite düşünmeye, sorgulamaya, hem hikayenin kişileri hem hikayenin meselesiyle tartışmaya yönlendirdiği için çok iyi bir roman.

coetzee okumaya devam edeceğim kesinlikle. bu vesileyle eskiden itici bulduğum başka yazarları tekrar gözden geçirmeye de elbette.