Disgrace door John Maxwell Coetzee

Disgrace

J.M. Coetzee
First published by Secker & Warburg 1999

The story takes place in South Africa, in the present. It describes the surroundings of a white divorced professor in Cape Town, and his daughters farm on the countryside of South Africa.

The genre is fiction. I couldn’t come up with any other genre, maybe a new genre should be invented, Describing, because it describes the life the characters live and the environment they live in so well.

The main character in the book is David Lurie, a middle-aged Romantic poetry teacher. In the first part of the book he is not really happy, but he feels like he’s got it all figured out. He has no real friends, but he has good contact whit his colleagues. Every Thursday he visits a prostitute, but when he tries to get into her personal life, she doesn’t want to see him again. That’s the part of the book were Lurie’s live changes. He gets into an affair with one of his students. When their affair comes out, it becomes a scandal. Lurie admits his guild before a university committee, but won’t apologise. He resigns, and drives off to the Eastern Cape, where his lesbian daughter, Lucy, lives on an isolated farm. She grows fruit and vegetables which she sells in the market of a nearby town, and looks after other people's dogs in the kennels she runs. Lucie is a very strong woman, who knows what she wants. Lurie eventually gets used to the country life, especially when he starts assisting Bev Shaw, a friend of Lucy's, at her Animal Welfare Clinic. Petrus, Lucy's neighbour, does odd jobs for her. He is soon to be a landowner, under the new laws of the new South Africa. Petrus leaves the land without warning, and during his absence three young black men suddenly arrive. Lurie is, locked in the lavatory while the men rape Lucy. They steal his car, and attempt to set him alight. Lurie is really concerned with his daughter, and wants to help her. After the attack Lucie and Lurie don’t get along any more. Lurie wants her to press charges against her attackers, but she won’t. It’s almost as if she wants to make up for the injustice that is done to the blacks by her ancestors. Lurie leaves the farm and goes back to Cape Town, but he can’t adjust any more. He returns to Lucie, rents a house nearby and starts helping out at the clinic again. Lucie turns out to be pregnant and Lurie decides to stay nearby Lucie till the baby is born.
The title of the book is disgrace. I think its very obvious why: Lurie falls into disgrace. but also Lucie lets herself fall into disgrace by not wanting to fight for her rights. Altogether it’s a book about disgrace.
It took me a while to finish this book. Not because it was to difficult, but I just didn’t felt the need to read on with this book. Afterwards I think that knowing Coetzee was a Nobel price winner, and a lot of my friends recommending this book to me maybe my expectations were a bit different. Nevertheless, I really enjoyed reading Disgrace. I think it gives a great description of the human relationships in South Africa after the Apartheid. Coetzee’s style is beautiful, I love his simple yet stylish way of writing. I think the biggest problem I had with this book was that I couldn’t identify myself with any character. I can see why people love this book, but I’m not one of them.