Disgrace

In South Africa after apartheid, a middle-aged professor of Romantic poetry sees his career crumble as the world turns more to technology than to literature. After a series of ever more degrading misadventures, including a charge of sexual harassment, he ends up on his daughter's farm. There, after further disgraces--his daughter is raped and he is attacked and disfigured--he is able to reconcile himself to his stunted life by caring for animals and, finally, feeling a kind of kinship with them. DISGRACE won the Booker Prize and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999.

"[A] novel that not only works its spell but makes it impossible for us to lay it down once we've finished reading it--that makes demands upon us not by virtue of a self-conscious 'message' but by virtue of a narrative momentum that is itself expressive of moral urgency. Coetzee is the most cerebral and, with the exception of Breyten Breytenbach, the least given to sentimentality of the talented novelist to have come out of South Africa. He writes with a dark, compacted intelligence...." - Cynthia J. Frank (New Yorker, 11/15/99)

"[A] sober, searing and even cynical little book....DISGRACE is Coetzee's first book to deal explicitly with post-apartheid South Africa, and the picture it paints is a cheerless one that will comfort no one, no matter what race, nationality or viewpoint....There is something fundamentally cryptic and unsummarizable about DISGRACE, but I read it as an almost metaphysical journey from this Romantic variety of love to the harsher, leaner strain David eventually learns from life on and around Lucy's farm. - K.J.A. Westin (Salon, 11/5/99)

"Even though it presents an almost unrelieved series of grim moments, DISGRACE isn't claustrophobic or depressing....Its grammar allows for the sublime exhilaration of accident and surprise, and so the fate of its characters...seems not determined but improvised. Improvised in the way that our own lives are....[An] extraordinary novel..." - Michael K. Meek (New York Times Book Review, 11/28/99)

"His latest novel, DISGRACE..., is perhaps Coetzee's least allegorical and most realistic novel to date, but there remains in it a strong undercurrent of didacticism. The book has an odd kink in its narrative structure that is baffling at first--what does the first quarter of the story have to do with what follows?--and that is explicable finally only thematically....This is incendiary and, even to a liberal reader, infuriating stuff, and it's meant to be. The problem is that, from this point on, the book reads less like a novel and more like a very elegant, very complicated moral dilemma conc - Michael A. Steel (Washington Post Book World, 1/16/00)

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