LE RAGIONI DELL'ALTRO, A MAD HEART


John Malkovic è il professore David Lurie, e Jessica Haines è sua figlia Lucy nel film di Steve Jacobs del 2008.

Qual è la vera vergogna, chi la commette, chi dovrebbe provarla?
Devono vergognarsi anche le vittime?
La ragione non sta mai da una parte sola.

La storia di David Lurie, professore di Poesia Romantica in una qualche università di Cape Town, con la sua studentessa è uno stupro? Il prof si è avvantaggiato della sua posizione e del suo carisma, ma ha davvero commesso violenza?



Una violenza pari a quella dei tre ragazzi di colore?
Eppure, anche loro sembrano avere giustificazioni: la segregazione razziale non si cancella con la spugna, la povertà esiste, la rabbia la violenza la voglia di vendetta prosperano in condizioni repressive e razziste, la miseria non è un punto di vista, uno dei tre ragazzi è perfino mentalmente disturbato: basta questo a spiegare, ad assolverli?



Il professore appare fastidiosamente altezzoso e arrogante, però sa restare accanto alla figlia che sembra aver fatto una scelta molto irragionevole e dalle conseguenze tutt’altro che semplici: quest’uomo è davvero così superbo e borioso come i suoi colleghi lo dipingono e percepiscono?
David Lurie è incapace di difendere la figlia, è debole e vigliacco come anche la figlia Lucy sembra pensare, oppure la violenza che subisce, il tentativo di dargli fuoco, spiega il suo non intervento?

I tre stupratori uccidono anche i cani in gabbia. I neri vedevano nei cani il simbolo del potere bianco, della repressione che dovevano subire.
Basta a motivare l’odiosa gratuita carneficina?

Possiamo spiegare questo magnifico romanzo di Coetzee come una parabola del Sudafrica post-apartheid?



Coetzee non è uno scrittore per chi ama i punti fermi più dei punti interrogativi, per chi preferisce le risposte alle domande: senza pregiudizio, scrivendo tre parole e cancellandone quattro, scopre le responsabilità di ciascun personaggio, rovescia ogni violenza e ogni vergogna.
Per capire le ragioni dell'altro bisogna dimenticare, mettere da parte almeno per un poco le proprie - solo così potremo concederci di arrivare al giudizio.

Ma a quel punto, ci renderemo conto dell'inutilità del giudizio.
Ci renderemo conto di essere abbandonati al nostro destino.

هل يستطيع الانسان أن يعتاد حياته ويتعايش مع الشعور بالعار أو الخزي؟
1999 رواية للكاتب الجنوب أفريقي جون ماكسويل كوتزي نُشرت عام
في مجتمع ما بعد التمييز العنصري في جنوب أفريقيا يأخذنا الكاتب لأشكال مختلفة من الخزي
الاستغلال والاغتصاب والاستسلام وتراكمات الظلم والقهر والجهل
الشخصية الرئيسية في الرواية هو الأستاذ الجامعي الأبيض الذي يُقدم على فعل شائن يعلم جيدا انه خطأ
ومع شعوره بالخزي يُبرر عدم ندمه واعتذاره بأن الرغبة والاشتهاء طبيعة انسانية
وعندما تتعرض ابنته للإغتصاب تشعر أيضا بالخزي كضحية للاغتصاب لكنها ترفض الرحيل
وكأنها تعتبر ما حدث لها فعل لابد ان تتحمله تكفيرا عن عار التمييز العنصري
تفاصيل الرواية ممتعة.. كوتزي يكتب بقوة وسلاسة عن القيم والخيارات الانسانية
عن مسئولية الأخطاء والقرارات, واختلاف الفكر بين الأجيال في التعامل مع متغيرات الحياة

I think this is a very well-written novel. Coetzee is very well-regarded so this isn't news. However, when I finished the book, I felt like there was something missing. After thinking about it and discussing it with someone else who read it as well, I think it comes down to the portrayal of the main female character, David's daughter. I don't think he authentically developed this character in a way that would explain her (shocking) decisions in the novel. You could argue that this is the point- it's the worldview of a man who is increasingly alienated from others, unable to connect in any meaningful way, particularly with females. But I'm not sure that that tactic really adds up to a great novel. A lot of the writing focuses on the daughter, so saying that she is a one-dimensional projection of the main character doesn't make sense given how much space she takes up in the landscape of the novel. Also, that is not a narrative I find particularly compelling- a self-centered, alienated man who continues to be disconnected from any understanding of others. Why a woman would choose to make a life with a community that condones a terrible act of violence committed against her is a more compelling question, that the main character, and by extension the author, seems unable or unwilling to explore. The failure of the author to examine this choice in any meaningful way may not amount to a "sexist" novel as others have said, but to me it amounts to a flawed one that doesn't reach its potential.

This was an amazing book about a main character with an ambiguous moral compass. It was infuriating, it was interesting, it was just such a ride. Major trigger warning for rape and pedophilia, since pretty much the entire book revolves around that. But I just loved this. It made me think so much and we had amazing discussions in class. Highly recommend!

I read Disgrace by Nobel Laureate J M Coetzee with a few friends in the group reading for pleasure. A winner of the Man Booker Prize, Disgrace also fulfills the Nobel Laureate square on my classics bingo card. All of Coetzee's novels have received multiple awards or prizes, and Disgrace is the first of his novels that I have read. Although short in length, this introduction reveals to me the brilliance of Coetzee's writing.

David Lurie is a fifty two year old professor of communications at Cape Town Technical University. Having been divorced twice and struggling to get inspired by his courses, Lurie engages in one affair after another with either prostitutes or women passing through town. Lurie's last affair left a bad taste in his mouth, and for the first time he decided to sleep with a student. Although this is hardly unheard of, Lurie is caught and forced to resign his position. In the throes of both a scandal and midlife crisis, he moves in with his grown daughter Lucy.

A child of the city, Lucy has decided to live in a rural farming community on the eastern cape. A young, determined woman of the younger generation, Lucy allows her father into her homestead but from the onset it is obvious that she would rather be left alone. The generation gap is evident as she calls her father by his first name and does not bestow any respect on him. Determined to do a better job as a parent as a middle aged man, Lurie feels the inherent need to parent Lucy at this trying time for both of them.

Coetzee's writing delves into what an affair and a rape is like for both the man and the woman, across lines of race and class. Set in post apartheid South Africa, it is evident that blacks are still struggling in their relations with whites and feel the need to turn the tables on them. Likewise, the younger generation that Lucy is a part of also does not see a need for white male protection. In striving to erase these lines, Coetzee writes in third person and refers to all characters, even in passing, by their first names. He treats all his persona with the same respect regardless of age, gender, or class, even the animals at the clinic where Lucy and later David work. As a result, as a reader, I am able to feel empathy for all of the characters, even the stubborn ones like Lucy and the disgraced David.

For an introduction to Coetzee, Disgrace is a poignant novel. After reading only women authors during women's history month, it was refreshing to read a novel written by a male author that shows empathy toward strong women characters. The writing is powerful and deserving of its praise. I am now inspired to read more of Coetzee in the future to see firsthand the work that merited him the Nobel Prize. Solid 4.5 stars.

Che libro strano, la parte iniziale mi aveva irritato: superficiale, storia scontata e già vista, poi quando il setting narrativo si sposta dalla città in campagna, quando la Vergogna, come una lettera scarlatta si cuce sulla camicia del protagonista, il libro ha cominciato ad acquistare merito e interesse, e ho finito per leggerlo con grande velocità e avidità.

David Lurie il protagonista è un uomo come tanti che si incontrano:

Un uomo. Né cattivo né buono. Né freddo né appassionato, nemmeno nei momenti di massimo ardore. Lontano dagli standard di Teresa, e persino da quelli di Byron (il poeta). Gli manca il fuoco interiore. Sarà dunque questo il verdetto che verrà pronunciato contro di lui, il verdetto dell'universo e del suo occhio onnisciente?

E’ Professore di letteratura nel dipartimento dell’università di Città del Capo, viene accusato di molestie sessuali perché seduce a letto una sua studentessa.
Eticamente è sconveniente, non è cosa buona e giusta, perché Lurie rappresenta l’istituzione universitaria, gli è stata affidata una cattedra per insegnare e non per usare il suo ascendente intellettuale e di potere al fine di concupire studentesse, sono d’accordo, anche se la studentessa in questione non è più una bambina ma una donna quasi fatta e consenziente ai rapporti, e non c’è traccia di violenza.

Lurie viene allontanato dall’università, non cerca di difendersi, non abiura, addirittura peggiora la sua posizione quando pacatamente argomenta così ad una giornalista che rappresenta una associazione di diritti femministi

- E' dispiaciuto? - domanda la ragazza. Il registratore si riavvicina. - E' pentito di quello che ha fatto?
No, - dice David. - E' stata un'esperienza che mi ha arricchito.

E, non solo, aggiunge, sebbene tra se e sé, che la bellezza di una donna non appartiene solo a lei ma appartiene al mondo e con il mondo hai il dovere di spartirla (ohohoh!!)
Da lì in poi David Lurie comincerà a scontare la sua vergogna,.
Non sarà mai chiaro se si sentirà veramente colpevole oppure no, l’avere ammesso un fatto è già pentirsi ?
No, è solo constatare di avere commesso qualcosa.
Essere pentito di un’azione, promettere (promettersi) di non ripeterla è un passo più profondo e complesso nel lavoro interiore nella propria coscienza, cosa diversa, e Coetzee lascia volutamente il dubbio sospeso, aprendo ad interpretazioni o giudizi, secondo il sentire che è proprio di ognuno.

Sono caduto in disgrazia, e non sarà facile risollevarmi. Non rifiuto la punizione. Non mi ribello. Anzi, la vivo giorno dopo giorno, cercando di accettare la vergogna come la condizione della mia esistenza. Pensa che a Dio sia sufficiente, se vivrò per sempre nella vergogna?

Vivere nella vergogna è una punizione sufficiente?

Il comportamento di David Lurie resta ambiguo, si chiude al mondo restandone indifferente in uno stato privo di rimorsi, oppure la decisione di scontare la sua vergogna rifugiandosi in campagna presso la fatiscente azienda agricola della figlia, improvvisandosi psicopompo di cani randagi e malati che affollano la clinica veterinaria dove presta opera è il suo modo di pagare in parte il fio?

Vero è che nell’assolvere un compito che non gli viene richiesto, come avvolgere con tenerezza e cura uno ad uno i cani morti dentro sacchi di plastica anzichè gettarli tutti insieme in maniera anonima nella discarica, mostra un lato sensibile della sua anima in evoluzione o maturazione che mi ha molto toccato: forse nel cercare di restituire una dignità agli animali, esseri viventi che appartengono ad un ordine del creato diverso da quello umano non necessariamente inferiore ma diverso, può rappresentare un modo personale per smacchiare la propria vergogna se non di fronte alla comunità che ne resta indifferente e ignara, almeno al cospetto di un Dio per chi vi crede, o della propria coscienza.

Ho tralasciato di commentare il contesto in cui la storia si svolge: il Sudafrica, un aspetto del romanzo non meno importante, che inserisce una storia personale individuale e che avrebbe potuto accadere ovunque, in una enclave dominata dalle aspre contrasti di un post-apatheid che si trova a risolvere le proprie contraddizioni con una violenza atavica e radicata , un’altra forma di vergogna più universale, un aspetto che rappresenta un valore aggiunto alla lettura del libro di Coetzee.

Some novelists can work comic relief into the most heart-wrenching dramas. See Kazuo Ishiguro, Edmund White, James McBride to mention a few. The light moments help provide greater contrast when things turn black. William Shakespeare knew that well. But Coetzee is absolutely dead humorless. That said, this is a story that should resonate well in our #metoo era. Our narrator, a twice divorced middle-aged man, a Cape Town professor, bangs one of his students who then files a complaint with the college. I knew a professor like this; but a blind eye was turned to such matters then. It’s hard now to believe such a time ever existed, but it did. One wonders what the upshot will be long term? Will we live in this constant din of accusation, or will the hounds eventually be dissuaded by rule of law? Please read Sigrid Nunez’s fabulous novel The Friend for more on how our culture has been warped by #metoo. She cites this particular Coetzee novel a number of times.

“After a certain age one is simply no longer appealing, and that’s that. One just has to buckle down and live out the rest of one’s life. Serve one’s time” (p. 67) says the 52-year-old narrator. When called on the carpet by colleagues he refuses to make any written expression of remorse, and he refuses “counseling,” which he likens to Maoist re-education. He leaves Cape Town and drives into the countryside to visit his daughter on her farm. Soon they are brutalized by black men. The daughter is raped. So how does what the professor did differ from what his assailants did? The question hangs in the air. The apartheid legacy is plumbed. The daughter, who refuses to leave her farm, says “What if that [rape] is the price one has to pay for staying on? Perhaps that is how they look at it ; perhaps that is how I should look at it too. They see me as owing something. They see themselves as a debt collectors, tax collectors. Why should I be allowed to live here without paying? Perhaps that is what they tell themselves.” (p. 158)

There’s so much here I haven’t addressed. Like the narrator’s work in a local animal shelter, or his apology to the parents of the student he’s seduced, or his conversations with his deeply bitter ex-wife, Lucy’s mother, or the return to Lucy’s farm of one of her rapists. . . . The characters are flawed: angry, beneficent, cruel, complaisant. These attributes are like serrations on a knife that give the story purchase in one’s mind. I will re-read this one. I don’t think I could forget it if I tried.

This review discusses the whole plot, so SPOILERS all the way.

*

The Bible is full of tremendous soundbites that don’t stand up to much scrutiny.

Judge not, lest ye be judged.

Well, there goes one entire branch of government. In Disgrace everybody gets very harshly judged. The main guy in whose loathsome mind we are trapped for the whole journey is a supercilious condescending white professor. You will already know we are in post-Apartheid South Africa so race is central to everything that happens. This guy David Lurie has a sense of entitlement the size of Table Mountain, especially when it comes to women. He’s 52 and up to now he’s been a self-satisfied sexual barracuda, women fall for him right and left. And he judges them, each and every one.

He reminded me of an English Literature professor version of Jack Donaghy from 30 Rock who one day barks an order to his assistant about an older female member of staff

Fire her. And don’t ever make me talk to a woman that old again.

Prof Lurie loves to swoop down on one of his 30-years-younger students and impress them into sex by waving his big hard professorship in front of them.

He letches after the 20 year old charms of Melanie Isaacs. The reader is not sure if this girl is black or white, it’s left ambiguous. (In the movie she was played by a light skinned black actress.) He coerces her into sex a few times. Looking back, he realises that she wasn’t really into him, how sad. But no, he didn’t force himself, he thinks :

Not rape, not quite that, but undesired nevertheless, undesired to the core.

This is queasy stuff. If it was undesired to the core, then, er, wasn’t it rape? This whole novel is about queasy stuff, written in a cool swift style.

Melanie complains to the university authorities about his sexual harassment of her. They request him to appear before a panel of judges. Professor Lurie hates to be judged. He should do the judging, not them. They ask him oh so respectfully about the nature of his relationship with Miss Isaacs. Well, he thinks, even if it was a bit rapey, that’s my nature. I was overtaken by Eros. Beautiful women don’t own their beauty. It’s for everyone, especially 52 year old white guys. Yes, he really thinks that. He thinks you can’t legislate people into being untrue to their natures. You might just as well command a frog to become a wombat or a lion to stop biting those young soft gazelles. He is an essentialist.

So he refuses to apologise and he is fired out of the university. He goes off to stay with his lesbian daughter Lucy who lives way out in the countryside on a tiny farm looking after dogs and growing flowers, all jolly and bucolic until the big disaster happens.

Three black guys saunter by the farm one day and break in and beat up the professor & set him on fire (sounds worse than it was) and gang rape Lucy (just as bad as it sounds). She then decides not to tell the cops about the rape. Later, the youngest of the home invaders appears as a house guest in her black next door neighbour’s house. And she still doesn’t want to say anything. And she’s pregnant.

Her passivity and decision to stay at her farm alone and in danger, a total capitulation to the perpetrators, a disgraceful thing, you might say, is incomprehensible to many readers and seems only to make sense if it’s read symbolically.

Because the symbolic meaning of all this hot mess is reasonably clear. The white people are now living under a different dispensation, and they better get used to their new subservient role. David complains bitterly, and daughter Lucy meekly accepts this transfer of power in a spirit of reparation. (We notice that both of them in different ways chose not to defend themselves.)

That seems to be the jist of the thing, and if so, it’s brutal, and it’s not surprising that the ANC denounced this novel as racist in April 2000. (When JM Coetzee won the Nobel Prize three years later they retreated somewhat and embraced him as a great South African.)

I confess I couldn’t stop reading this but I found I did not love it like so many people have. I mean the whole thing is like staring at a nasty traffic accident.

3.5 stars.

Notes:

The ANC judgement is here :

https://www.politicsweb.co.za/documen...-


For a really remarkable comment on the fate of Lucy take a look at message 21 under Jason’s fine review here

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

This story gets directly to the point. Coetzee is quick to take us from point A to point B with as little embellishment as possible. The short and compulsively readable "Disgrace" revolves around a professor who has fallen from his status at a South African university, then the tables are turned and he finds himself falling even further down the chute, becoming the victim of sudden violence. Misogyny is thence explored, as is morbidity. It's (America's) "The Human Stain" meets (Britain's) "Saturday." (The former is a classic but the latter a piece of s***--- & this one is quite good). It has a character perhaps as modern as Ian McEwan's (more humane, more of a randy old gentleman) but the antihero this time around does learn his lesson: Don't mess with the countryfolk, city boy!

The symbolism is dark; the pace exciting. A modernday clash (in a particularly distant region) of societies, genders and races. Very few books succeed in packing such a wallop in as few pages (220) as this one.

5