خزي- ج. م. كوتزي

توقعت عملاً مماثلا لروايته الأخرى: في انتظار البرابرة، من حيث عمق الفكرة وثقل الطرح. بدلاً من ذلك، وجدت نصاً ثري الأفكار ممتع الأحداث.

العار

تتنوع تجارب الإصابة بالعار، منها ما نقترفه بأيدينا، ومنها ما نجبر عليه، منها ما تلذذنا به ومنها ما تجرعنا مرارته. إذن فمنبع الخزي يختلف، ليس هذا فقط، بل يتابين تعاملنا معه، البعض يتقبل فعلته المخزية ويتصالح معها، يتعبرها جزءاً منه، والبعض الآخر يحاول كنسها تحت السجاد. كذلك من حولنا تتنوع طرق معالجتهم للموقف ابتداءً من الاحتواء وانتهاءً بمن يشبعنا لوماً وتقريعاً. تتفحص هذه الرواية كل تلك الثيمات بحنكة أدبية منقطعة النظير، تارةً عن طريق الحوارات، وعن طريق الأحداث تارة أخرى.

الآباء والأبناء البيض والسود الإنسان والحيوان

إلى جانب مناقشة العار ومنابعه وتداعياته، تطرح الرواية أفكاراً ثانوية عن علاقة الآباء بأبنائهم الذين بلغوا مرحلة عمرية تسمح لهم بالاستقلالية والحرية. إلى أي حد يجب على الآباء تقديم النصح؟ هل يمسكون عن فرض ما يرونه صواباً حتى لو لم يكن لديهم أدنى ذرة شك؟ هل يفترض بهم الاستمرار بتقديم التضحيات والشعور بالمسؤولية حتى لو لم يكن لهم يد فيما حصل أو كان الأبناء يضعون حاجزاً بينهم وبين حنان والديهم؟

من أواصر الأسرة ينطلق النص ليتمعن في روابط المجتمع في جنوب أفريقيا حيث الماضي يلقي بظلاله على الحاضر فيجعل طرفاً يسوغ الانتقام حتى ولو على حساب من لا جريرة له، ويجعل طرفاً آخر يشعر بالذنب حتى ولو وُلد بعد وقوع الظلم بعقود. لا يكتفي كوتزي بهذا النوع من العلاقات بل يمتد تأمله إلى العلاقة بين الإنسان والبهائم من وجهة نظر إنسانية تعترف بأن الأفكار المطروحة لا يمكن تقبلها بيسر ولكن ليس من المستحيل استيعابها.

مصداقية عالية كثافة منخفضة

الأحداث والأفعال وردود الأفعال في الرواية مقنعة جداً في الغالب. صحيح أنني لم أتوقع ما بدر من بعض الشخصيات في مواقف معينة، إلا أن ذلك زاد من إثارة الرواية. قد تطرح اسئلة على نفسك في أكثر من موضع: ترى ماذا كنت لأفعل في هذه الحالة؟ هل ثمة ما يمكن عمله للتخفيف من فداحة الفعل أو كارثية الحدث؟ هل تستحق هذه الشخصية اللوم أم التعاطف؟

وعلى الرغم من تزاحم المواضيع ودقة رسم الشخصيات، وعلى الرغم من هذه المراجعة الطويلة، إلا أن النص جاء موجز التفاصيل مقتصداً في الكلمات. لا توجد ثرثرة فائضة ولا تأملات خارجة عن النص. ليس هناك أفضل من رواية قليلة الصفحات يمكن قراءتها في سويعات ثم التفكير فيها ومناقشتها لساعات وساعات.

رواية تقدم أحداثاً ومواضيعاً ثقيلة على النفس بجودة أدبية عالية ونص شديد الإتقان والإيجاز.

أربعة نجوم ونصف.

Arzunun, aşkın, yaşlanmanın hissettirdiği basıncın, ergenliğin, erkek olmanın, kadın olmanın, ebeveyn olmanın, hiçbiri olmamanın, genelgeçer ikiyüzlülüğün, cehaletin, şiddetin, nefretin, tecavüzün, akademik piyasanın, ırkçılığın, taşranın, hayvanlarla kurduğumuz ilişkinin, inancın, inançsızlığın sinir uçlarına böyle duru, alçak perdeden bir sesle dokunmak büyük beceri meselesi gerçekten. Üslubun hiç de harikalar yaratmayan mat ışığı pek çok okurun sinirine dokunuyor. Anlıyorum. Ama tanıdık bir tarz bu; hayatın tarzı işte: Beklentilere pek kulak asmayan, öylece var olduğu gibi. Kendimize sunduğumuz hediye zamanların arasında pusuya yatmış irili ufaklı binlerce hayal kırıklığının gölgesinde anlamsızca yavaş, ayarsızca hızlı...

Disgrace'i gözden kaçırılmış hazineler arasından çıkarayım diye bana alarmlar gönderen dostum Deniz Balcı'ya çok teşekkürler.

David Lurie, 52, professor, seduces a student. ‘Not rape,’ we are told, ‘not quite that, but undesired nevertheless.’ The girl's name, Melanie, means black. The power dynamic between them, the disparity of authority, is foregrounded.

Later, Lurie's daughter is raped by intruders, and violently. She is white; her assailants – three of them – are black. We are in South Africa.

~~~~

David is forced out of his position at the university for his ‘undesired’ liaison. An investigating committee asks him to issue a statement of contrition and regret, but he refuses to do so on principle. He insists on accepting his due punishment. He insists on what he calls his ‘freedom to remain silent’.

Later, David's daughter refuses to report her rape. She refuses to take medical precautions. She refuses to seek vengeance against one of the men when she sees him in the neighbourhood. She, too, insists on remaining silent. She, too, bases this on a moral principle.

~~~~

Apartheid was in force in South Africa from 1948 to 1991. This book, published in 1999, is set after apartheid has ended.

There are many animals in this book. The way people talk about animals sounds a lot like the way that white South Africans once talked openly about black South Africans. ‘By all means let us be kind to them,’ Lurie comments. ‘But let us not lose perspective. We are of a different order of creation from the animals. Not higher, necessarily, but different.’

~~~~

What is the moral of these correspondences (which I write down here only to order my thoughts, not to elucidate the book's point)? The answer is the novel, and it can't helpfully be further distilled. What makes Disgrace so impressive is precisely that it is no simple allegory, but rather a series of dynamics that echo and echo against each other in painful and confusing ways.

Lurie's employers talk primly about the undesirability of ‘mixing power relations with sexual relations’. But Coetzee suggests that the two might be – if not quite synonymous, at least tightly bound together. He writes about sex in an extraordinary way: unsentimentally, even anti-sentimentally, to the point of misanthropy. Libido is described in terms of

complex proteins swirling in the blood, distending the sexual organs, making the palms sweat and voice thicken and the soul hurl its longings to the skies. That is what [Lurie's regular prostitute] and the others were for: to suck the complex proteins out of his blood like snake-venom, leaving him clear-headed and dry.

Lurie's daughter, who is gay, addresses the link between sex and violence directly, in a monologue that is the more shocking for her tone of calm, dispassionate analysis:

‘Maybe, for men, hating the woman makes sex more exciting. You are a man, you ought to know. When you have sex with someone strange – when you trap her, hold her down, get her under you, put all your weight on her – isn't it a bit like killing? Pushing the knife in; exiting afterwards, leaving the body behind covered in blood – doesn't it feel like murder, like getting away with murder?’

Jesus. Coetzee's words hit like whiplash. And they are very carefully chosen, despite an expressed conviction in the novel that ‘English is an unfit medium for the truth of South Africa’.

Only the monosyllables can still be relied on, and not even all of them.

This is a very grown-up book (it reminded me a lot of Max Frisch's Homo Faber). But it isn't a hopeless one – it expresses confusion, anger, and sometimes despair, but also a certain sense of searching that at least imagines a different future. Perhaps, as one of the characters thinks, it is necessary, in order to build something up, for everything to be first brought down to nothing. For that, you need disgrace. And Coetzee offers that to everyone in the book – and everyone reading it.

I would like very much to be able to coherently refute this novel. After finishing it I felt as though I had maybe been taken in because while reading it I accepted its premise(s), but afterwards I wondered if what had seemed true really held up to the glare of daylight.

There was a review by James Wood that I liked a lot, and here is a quote from it: “But people like novels that, however intelligently, tell them what to think, that table ideas and issues - novels that are discussable. Above all, and most depressingly, people like allegory, and Coetzee's books always incline toward this mode. Coetzee is very subtle and refined, so that much of the time he does not really seem to be telling us what to think; better still, his novels self-consciously display an involvement in their own modes of presentation, so that Coetzee will often seem to be telling us what to think about being told what to think (which is still a species of telling people what to think, of course). Disgrace, which is a kind of South African version of Turgenev's Fathers and Sons - an issue novel about the generation wars - is a novel with which it is almost impossible to find fault. Precisely because he is a very good writer and not a great writer, Coetzee emits prize-pheromones.” The full review is here: http://www.powells.com/review/2001_05...

It does seem, in a way, to be too good without being good enough. It goes straight, if anything too precisely, to the jugular on some very particular issues: men and women, family, colonialism, rationality and its limits, irrationality and its dangers. Then (and I feel a little bit nervous about how there doesn’t seem to be more mention of this) at moments it really does offer something very much like a cheap form of redemption, doesn’t it? The protagonist goes on his knees before the family of the woman he has (in my opinion) mistreated. Literally goes on his knees. And what good does that do anyone? He rescues dogs and then gives them up to the inevitable slaughter. Come on, now. If you have been so seemingly brutally offering up such a dark version of the truth, what could you mean by these sorts of images? They seem either mocking or appeasing, and neither seems right.

Now here is a review I found even more disturbing than the book itself: http://www.salon.com/books/review/199.... Here is a part that really stuck in my gullet: “Readers may well be repelled by David's arrogance, and his conduct with Melanie has fallen only a little short of rape. But judging him is not a simple matter. He is a student of Romanticism whose unrealized ambition is to write a chamber opera about Byron's life in Italy. No matter how little of our sympathy David may command, he has a point: If he genuinely believed his passion for Melanie was the real thing, the flame he had been waiting his whole life to feel, then how could he not pursue her avidly?” Oh, come on. Come on! Perhaps this is beside the point, but now that the question has been raised, can’t we agree that he pursued her not avidly enough? He didn’t even take the time to seduce her properly, and so the point becomes, in my book, not that he was a student of Romanticism but that he wasn’t a very good student of Romanticism.

Then this sticks maybe worse, from the same review: “If David actually reclaims some dignity by the end of "Disgrace," it is only because he gives up everything, gives up more than a dog ever could -- his daughter, his ideas about justice and language, his dream of the opera on Byron and even the dying animals he has learned to love without reservation, without thought for himself.” Looking for this kind of resolution! It’s where we get a little too book-of-the-month, if not a little too 700-club. (For starters: is it really virtuous that he has given up his daughter?) And I am stuck trying to refute this book review, because in all honesty I couldn’t say that the book itself presented anything quite reducible to these platitudes. But it came too close, too close. And if you’re going to do a thing like that, it only seems right to go all the way or not at all. All the same, I would recommend it because it is at least interesting enough to disagree with.

He tenido la oportunidad de leer dos obras de J. M. Coetzee: “Esperando a los bárbaros” y la presente novela. En ambas, tras leer el final me quedé con la sensación de un puñetazo en la boca del estómago. Coetzee es capaz, como pocos, de evocar tristeza y esperanza con la misma intensidad. Es más, nos enseña que ambos sentimientos pueden ir de la mano, ya que el nacimiento de la esperanza siempre se produce tras un desgarro interior y, como todos sabemos, estas transformaciones tan integrales nos suelen sumir en la tristeza al despedirnos de un modo de vida.

Esta manifestación subjetiva no es el único punto de convergencia. Salvando las profundas diferencias entre el magistrado y el profesor Lurie, en ambos asistimos al descenso a los infiernos de dos personajes masculinos que, mediante la evolución de sus interacciones con personajes femeninos, hallan el camino a la redención personal. David Lurie no es para nada un personaje con el que sea fácil empatizar, pero nos terminamos viendo reflejados en sus frustrados intentos de mantener la dignidad en la desgracia, permitiendo nuestra catarsis a medida que intenta encontrar su lugar en unas circunstancias cada vez más adversas.

La evolución de David Lurie sigue el camino opuesto al de su hija, Lucy. Mientras que la segunda, tras la pérdida de la inocencia durante unos sucesos estremecedores, se niega a victimizarse con el fin de seguir siendo competitiva en un mundo donde los hombres hacen y deshacen a su antojo, el profesor Lurie experimenta tal transición de perspectiva de verdugo a víctima que no puede evitar escandalizarse de que Lucy no se victimice con él. Esta dialéctica, que genera no pocos episodios de fuerte tensión emocional, es el hilo conductor de la novela, aderezado de personajes secundarios tan interesantes como el de Bev Shaw.

Más difícil resulta hablar de Petrus. ¿Es el antagonista? ¿Otra víctima? ¿Un pobre estúpido que acepta su destino y no pretende imponerse a él? Personalmente, no creo que Petrus sea malvado, más bien un hombre consciente de que es un engranaje más de una maquinaria engrasada por pactos no escritos, costumbres e instintos que le benefician como hombre. Su ambigüedad moral lo convierte en el personaje más siniestro de "Desgracia", aunque no llegue a obrar de mala fe en ningún momento.

Coetzee es el maestro de las zonas grises del alma humana. Espero con impaciencia nuestro próximo encuentro.

J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace is a harrowing-and-haunting novel about the human (im)possibility to live honourably; to be allowed the very experience of honour and dignity. As opposed to being, rather, buried alive in humiliation; disgraced, utterly and ruthlessly; deprived, therefore, of humanness. It tirelessly circuits around questions of morality, pondering what it might mean for a human being to be in the throes of passions or subjected to extraneous power – a human being become a lonesome figure; an outsider, at the mercy of the grand narrative of history.

David Lurie, Communications professor at Cape Town Technical University, and his removed-from-society, self-sufficient daughter, Lucy, could not be seemingly more different from one another; separate in their ways of life and vision of the world. It could be said that they represent the double movement of this novel, between city and country, the old and the new. David – if the incipit is any indication to go by – is taken by his preoccupation with finding a solution for his sexual needs. At 52, he thought he had found it: his wholesome routine encounters with his prostitute-lover, Soraya. But her unaccounted for disappearance suggests otherwise, and the unbearable blankness resulting from this absence unsettles him profoundly. It feels almost fatal – in both meanings of the term: fateful and ruinous – that he should thus find himself having to re-orient his deep desires, electing 20-year-old Melanie, his student, as the pined for object of his desire. Needless to say that the situation degenerates all too rapidly. And upon being dismissed, he decides to visit his daughter Lucy, who lives just outside of Salem and shares her land with Petrus, emblem of the new rising power in post-apartheid South Africa. What suddenly and shockingly happens to David and Lucy – this one day, one day like any other – changes everything. And the life Lucy had assiduously built for herself – and her dogs – comes crashing down, with no real possibility for restoration…

Nabokov’s Lolita was surely at the back of Coetzee’s mind, in the writing of Disgrace. David Lurie stands for ‘the rights of desire’, driven as he is – much like Humbert – by the ‘logic of passion’; a ‘moral dinosaur’ in the eyes of the committee gathered at his dismissal hearing. Defined, also, as ‘a great self-deceiver’, with dire implications for the unfolding of his own life-narrative. His post-religiousness and ‘terrible irony’, coupled with his tendency to act on impulse rather than principle, transform him into an unpleasant and unloveable monster ‘condemned to solitude’. At the same time, the pseudo-lawful proceedings of the hearing itself operate in line with an extended commentary on moral righteousness. It turns out that more than a confession – where he is only able to deliver ‘a secular plea’ – is expected of him. Indeed, the committee refuses to actually hear what he has to say. The representatives are merely interested in determining whether he is truly repentant, in the Christian sense of the term that is also constitutive of a more general, puritanical system of belief. The hearing thus transforms into a quixotic scene, with David standing his ground. Judged to be a Casanova unwilling to even feign repentance, he is marginalised accordingly.

The one solid claim that David Lurie seems to be making throughout the novel, further confirmed through the later confrontation with Melanie’s father, is that there is something all-too-human about desire; about finding oneself, almost irresistibly, ‘in the grip of something’. His attempts to rationalise – ‘What is far, what is too far, in a matter like this?’ – or legitimise his actions by proclaiming himself to be Eros’s servant – ‘What vanity! Yet not a lie, not entirely.’ – all seem to fall short, not quite exposing, or fully articulating, the extent to which being caught by the ‘anxious flurry of promiscuity’ is also and ultimately a ‘burden’; a site of conflict.

‘No more than a child! What am I doing? Yet his heart lurches with desire.’

Alongside the references to Emma Bovary – the emblem of unbridled passion – much of the novel’s metacommentary operates through a poetic vein, in the light of the protagonist’s scholarly study of Romantic poets, Wordsworth and Byron in particular. Taking the lead from one of Wordsworth’s poems, David comments – during one of his lectures – that one ought not to ‘condemn this being with the mad heart’ but to ‘understand and sympathise’, within certain limits. Limits that are compulsively questioned throughout the novel, to the point where David confesses that he is hard put to consider these Romantic poets of his as decent guides in matters of life. There is also the fact that he is working on a long-term project that sees Byron and his mistress Teresa as protagonists of an opera. The shifting of moods, and the radical modifications he applies to his opera, as well as the struggle to make something of the ‘fragments’ that come to him from time to time, are an added layer to this underlying preoccupation with the concept of being; with understanding the nature of one’s passions and desires, and working through them. Ultimately he realises that his need for sex is of a less passionate order. When he has sex with a young woman passing by – after a relatively long period of abstention – he comments: ‘So that is all it takes! How could I ever have forgotten it? Not a bad man but not good either’, though evidently ‘lacking in fire’. As it seems, his temperament is more attuned to unsentimental sex – ‘a moderate bliss, a moderated bliss’.

And yet what haunts him (and his immersion in Lucy’s world defines his deep-rooted apprehensions all the more starkly) is the thought – absurd in that it strips humanity of its dignity – of being brought to hate one’s own nature, whatever that might mean. In a highly revealing parallelism between humans and dogs, David relates the story of a dog being relentlessly reprimanded by its master, and rhetorically questions whether it is not in itself ‘ignoble’ and disgraceful that the dog should develop a self-hating instinct, and is ‘ready to punish itself’ for simply being what it is in its nature to be. It is no coincidence that dogs dominate the backdrop of this novel, and that the fate of humanity and dogs becomes intertwined on a very deep level. Indeed, David ends up assisting Bev with extinguishing the lives of the too-many dogs that show up at the small shelter on a daily basis – either because unwanted by their owners, heavily injured, or disabled in one way or another. On his part, he insists on giving them an honourable death. But the overpowering violence of the land turns the incinerator – the object that annihilates the dogs, forever – into the governing god of this new world in-the-making. Inescapable, for man and dog, alike.

The levels of extraneously-imposed hatred, leading up to rape, confound this framework even further. What is so tremendously shocking about what happens to Lucy on her own land is that she experiences the full force of being a non-entity, divested of her right to life and dignity. In an early meta-passage, David lingers on the meanings of ‘usurp’:‘usurp upon means to intrude or encroach upon. Usurp, to take over entirely’. This is – in a nutshell – the nature of the power shifts at work in the novel, the rift between black and white. ‘A history of wrong’ that cannot be made right, it seems. Rather, hatred seems to be appropriated by the previously subjugated people, and the ‘wrongs of the past’ thus perpetuated, with the respective roles merely reversed. This is made clear especially when Petrus, who has been progressively taking over Lucy’s land and possessions, refuses to send away one of the young men who violated Lucy, on the grounds that he is ‘one of them’. David realises: ‘So that is it. No more lies. My people. As naked an answer as he could wish.’ Lucy – humiliated, subjugated, disgraced, and exiled from her own land – is adamant about staying put, however. She appears to take upon herself the sheer weight of historical wrongs, and insists on wanting to be a good citizen on the one hand, and on holding on to her individual right to lead the life she wants to lead, on the other. Lucy wonders, in fact:

n‘What if…what if that is the price one has to pay for staying on? Perhaps that is how I should look at it too. They see me as owing something.’n

The questions, it seems, keep piling up, becoming more complex and convoluted. To what extent is what David did to Melanie different – or substantially so – from what the three countrymen did to Lucy? Is it that the narrative perspective itself – in privileging David’s viewpoint – comes to reflect the tensions and the impenetrable divide between them and the others? In this novel, Coetzee delineates an unforgiving land that knows only the language of violence, coarseness, domination, vengeance. A dry aridness with something of the unfathomable about it.

n  ‘More and more he is convinced that English is an unfit medium for the truth of South Africa. Stretches of English code whole sentences long have thickened, lost their articulations, their articulateness, their articulatedness.’n

This changing reality is indistinct, uncertain, as yet unknown and unknowable. And Coetzee’s meticulous attention to language and the meaning of words, as well as his sober, plain and fairly laconic prose, conjointly strive to present and articulate some understanding of this chilling landscape; to keep despair at bay.

***

4.5 solid stars.

It is no wonder that Coetzee won his first Booker Prize in 1999 precisely with this incalculably complex and powerful novel. And that it was followed by the Nobel Prize in 2003.

Disgrace is a remarkably perturbing novel. It dismantles many an illusion, reveals the nothingness beneath – and leaves us, where, exactly? Nowhere, I would say. Or perhaps, bereft: disgraced in our adriftness, or dignified in our inarticulate understanding of disgrace as a ‘state of being’ synonymous with the ‘desert’ of life, figuratively and non-figuratively. Humanity, like dogs, destined to all-encompassing desolation, flung out in the ‘wilderness’, caught in the ‘vast circulatory system’, or the incinerator, with no means of escape.





Edward Hopper

Nel 2003 ho vissuto alcuni mesi a Città del Capo in Sudafrica. Di quel periodo ho ricordi molto contrastanti. A 17 anni vivere in un altro continente è vista come un'esperienza elettrizzante, ma ancora oggi faccio fatica a collocare i miei mesi sudafricani. Provenendo da una piccola città di provincia quando sono partita avevo già una certa autonomia: andavo a scuola a piedi fin dalle elementari, il sabato pomeriggio uscivo con gli amici, facevo la spesa... Arrivata a Città del Capo ho scoperto che tutte queste piccole libertà che davo per scontate non lo erano affatto: i mezzi pubblici erano pericolosi, meglio la macchina; i luoghi all'aperto erano pericolosi, meglio i centri commerciali; la scuola pubblica era pericolosa, meglio la scuola privata; una casa autonoma era troppo pericolosa, meglio vivere in un quartiere protetto in cui vigilavano le guardie giurate.
La famiglia che mi ospitava aveva paura e guardava con invidia all'Europa, i miei compagni si stupivano spesso del mio stile di vita in Italia. Probabilmente la mia esperienza è stata molto influenzata dalla percezione di chi mi ha accolto, ma sicuramente c'era una sensazione di insicurezza diffusa. A distanza di 15 anni vorrei tornare a Città del Capo per vedere quanto il paese sia cambiato, per scoprire quanto l'Apartheid sia stato lasciato alle spalle.

Questa premessa per dire che Vergogna non era un libro come tutti gli altri per me.
All'inizio la storia parte in maniera un po' banale: il professore ha una relazione con una studentessa. Il professore si giustifica, trova motivazioni, ma rimane vittima degli eventi. La situazione lo spinge ad avvicinarsi alla figlia che ha scelto di vivere in una fattoria nel veld sudafricano, da sola.
Il protagonista stenta a capire le scelte della figlia, anche se lei davanti alle difficoltà mostra una capacità fuori dal comune di razionalizzare, scegliendo di mantenere il proprio posto.
Ho letto questo libro con un senso di crescente tristezza, che di punto in bianco si è trasformata in pura angoscia.

L'autore racconta una storia esemplare per farci vivere la Storia di un paese dilaniato dal conflitto interno, talmente giovane da non essere ancora in grado di trovare il proprio equilibrio. 200 pagine di densità estrema, splendido e destabilizzante.

Transcendent and Transformative

"On trial for his way of life. For unnatural acts: for broadcasting old seed, tired seed, seed that does not quicken, contra naturam. If the old men hog the young women, what will be the future of the species? ... Half of literature is about it: young women struggling to escape from under the weight of old men, for the sake of the species."

I am wonderstruck by this 220-page novel, the 1999 Booker Prize winner. It's my first read of Coetzee. In sharp, precise prose, this transcendent novel traverses through about 8-9 months in the life of a twice-divorced, 52-year-old communications / poetry professor at a Cape Town university, who is dismissed from his post by admitted allegations of sexual relations with a 20-year-old female student (and covering for her missing a test and classes). The story is about so much more than the firing/resigning though, as the professor flees to his grown daughter's home and plot of land in east South Africa. It resonates on issues of the stages and value of life, the relationships between genders and generations, the animosity between races in South Africa in the 1990s, an interracial rape borne of hatred, the connection between humans and dogs, and, especially, the relation of a father to his daughter, as well as, of course, disgrace.

I rarely find a novel transformative, as I did with Disgrace. I highly recommend this novel to anyone who hasn't read it.

"In a sudden and soundless eruption, as if he has fallen into a waking dream, a stream of images pours down, images of women he has known on two continents, some from so far away in time that he barely recognizes them. Like leaves blown on the wind pell-mell, they pass before him. ... He holds his breath, willing the vision to continue.

What has happened to them, all those women, all those lives? Are there moments when they too, or some of them, are plunged without warning into the ocean of memory?...

...by each of them he was enriched ... even the least of them, even the failures. Like a flower blooming in his breast, his heart floods with thankfulness."

There are bleak books. There are books that destroy you a little bit. There are books about the soul of nations and the tide of History; and then, there’s Disgrace.

What can I say about this book that hasn’t been said before and much more eloquently? Perhaps, one tiny thing: amidst all the horror and the violence, there was never a moment where I wondered, “what’s the point?” This is a tremendously violent book, but it’s never gratuitous. Violence is applied throughout, yet sparsely, with a certain reserve. The book respects itself and the very serious themes it deals with. It doesn’t attempt to cheapen violence; it doesn’t soften it nor aggrandizes it.

And with so many great works of fiction, it asks, asks, asks but it never answers. It puts the reader before very uncomfortable ideas and scenes; it’s a book about racism, about misogyny, about change and fear. It offers no solutions, no respite, no absolution. Sometimes, things just get worse and worse, and we have to deal with it somehow.

Undoubtedly, many essays have been written (and many more will) about what this book says about post-Apartheid South Africa, the dissolution of an unfair society and the painful birth of a new one. There is something Hegelian about this book; these characters are trapped in History, unable to break free. David suggests his daughter go to the Netherlands; the idea seems absurd, almost as absurd as my going to Mars or another Galaxy. No matter how much you try, you can’t escape the force of your circumstances, of the structures around you. There's no running away from the tangled web of History, even if one believes -erroneously as has been amply demonstrated - that it is trotting towards Progress.

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I recently read the young adult book, INEXCUSABLE, which is the story of a teenage rapist who gradually comes to realize that he is the villain in everyone else's story but his own. While reading it, I kept thinking of this book, DISGRACE. Set in post-apartheid South Africa, it is about a man named David Lurie who abuses his position to sleep with and then rape one of his students but refuses to admit any wrong-doing in the act. Later, he goes to live with his daughter, who is raped herself as part of a coup to blackmail her into giving up her land rights.



DISGRACE is a book that I read when I was a teenager and I remember being shocked by the violence and the brutality. It touches on a lot of really heavy topics, such as sexism, rape culture, racial tension, gender politics, and all of these other harsh truths. It was unlike anything I'd really read before, and I remember being fascinated and sickened at what it was like being inside the mind of a rapist who doesn't really believe he's committed rape and who seems to think that his opinion, and no one else's, is the only one that should carry any real authority because he is so thoroughly entrenched in his own privilege.



I do not really think that David redeems himself by the end of the book. Even when his daughter-- in a picture of dramatic irony-- suffers basically the same fate that he imposed on another girl, it's still all about him. He wants to get revenge for her on his terms because deep down, he believes that he is the one who has been wronged. He is outraged that his daughter has fallen victim to African land politics, that she is being treated as chattel, but when he thinks of Lucy, it is always as his daughter, his his his, and her relationship is always defined in terms that relate to him, and what he thinks she should do with her life, whether it's her choice of spouse or how she should go about reacting to tragedy.



I'm not really sure I would recommend this book to others. It is grim. In terms of examining privilege through the use of an unreliable narrator, I would say that INEXCUSABLE is the slightly better book. DISGRACE is beautifully written but the bleak misogyny in the book makes it a bitter pill to swallow. Especially since David doesn't ever really redeem himself.



3 stars

This book is like a smooth thin stiletto that's already pierced your gut before you realize what's going on. The prose is economical and precise, the humor black, the outlook bleak, and yet there's an undeniable passion and rage at its still core: a bewilderment at the world and what we've become, what we've done to places like South Africa and the creatures in it, and the many flaws of the human characters whose consequences spill everywhere. There are no tidy resolutions here, and yet it's quite a journey.

Una novela dura, incomoda y por momentos angustiante que toca diferentes temas y se lee de un tirón.

David Laurie es profesor universitario, cincuenton, separado; una vez a la semana se encuentra con Soraya, una prostituta con la que se siente cómodo y así logra calmar sus pulsiones sexuales, pero David viola su vida privada y Soraya se aleja. Así las cosas, el equilibrio de su vida parece romperse y comienza a perseguir a una alumna hasta acostarse com ella, luego la denuncia de acoso, la perdida del trabajo y lo que sigue ya es todo barranca abajo.

Algo que a mi me resultó muy atractivo es que no hay un solo tema que atraviese la novela de punta a punta, sino que el lector se va encontrando con varias capas que con mucha naturalidad va montando el autor a lo largo de la historia. En apenas poco mas de 250 páginas la novela toca de manera incisiva temas de lo más variados, como por ejemplo, los alcances del machismo y su justificación sobre la base de “simplemente” saciar el deseo sexual, o las tensiones que se dan en la relación padre-hija cuando este no puede comprender y aceptar las decisiones que ella toma, o los conflictos raciales que quedaron vivos en la Sudáfrica post apartheid.
Pero lo que mas destaco es la construcción psicológica de los personajes principales; con algunas pinceladas Coetzee logra darles una profundidad enorme que permite conocerlos incluso mas allá de lo escrito.

Una novela muy recomendable que tiene un muy buen ritmo y pareciera incluso quedarse un poco corta en extensión.