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Rating:  -
I fully expect for this review to get trashed given the popularity of this book but here it goes anyway. This was at best a mediocre book. Unlike many of the negative reviewers I did not dislike it because it was depressing. The author tries very hard to write a depressing book but I felt little for the characters to be disturbed or to be depressed by their misfortune. That is a big failure for the author. The protagonist is not meant to be a likable character but that is not the problem either. Coetzee simply fails to develop his character or for that matter any of the other characters in the book. They are not believable. Their actions are unconventional, which by itself is not a problem, but the author's lack of explaining and convincing readers leaves readers puzzled.
I noticed that many of the 1-star reviewers rated the book poorly because of the sad emotions it brought on them. Unfortunately for me I cannot even admit to those same emotions. At least they felt something! Yes, it was a depressing book but it lacked depth and hence I did not become too involved in the story. If your goal is to learn a bit more about South Africa I would also recommend looking else where. Skip this one!
Rating:  -
Coetzee's Disgrace is a complicated read and experience for the seasoned novel reader. The protaganist, David Lurie, is an unsympathetic, unlikeable main character. He is a womanizer, immoral, and emotionally immature. We meet him initially as he is engaged in his weekly tryst with a prostitute; we see him through a misguided -- and almost unrealistic -- seduction of one his students, which ultimately leads to his unapologetic downfall within his university community; and then, finally, we watch him physically degenerate through an attack while visiting his daughter's farm. All of his life-altering changes play against the backdrop of a South Africa experiencing its own transition. South Africa's political alteration, though painful, will ultimately lead to a freer and more enlightened society; so, too, will Lurie's recent experiences and growth lead to a more enlightened individual. We can only assume so, given his embracing of a woman who is described as physically unattractive, but emotionally and intellectually beautiful, a far cry from the exotic prostitute and attractive 20-year-old he had been with. Coetzee's language is beautifully sparse, and painful, similar to Ian McEwan's most moving prose.
Rating:  -
Disgrace is not about a rape. It is not about an University professor having affairs with students. The fact that he is 50sh, the fact that he has a daughter running a kennel in the countryside are not relevant.
The book is about the condition of living as a white in South Africa today. The rape is not an ordinary rape, it is a bloody premeditated vengeance on an innocent victim who must leave for ever. The living in the country is not an expression of freedom any more. It is nightmare that rapists, African rapists will come again and again and again, until David Lurie's daughter will have to leave.
She wants badly to stay. She even considers that raping is a price she now must pay, for privilege of staying on her property, in country she always lived.This exasperates her father, David Lurie. The hospital of the dogs is mostly doing euthanasia for dogs, while they lick the hands of their executioners, deluded that they will be cured. Professor Lurie, expelled from a decent teaching job, works as hireling in a veterinary clinic, not saving the dogs' lives. Is this the life he wants?
There is no doubt in my mind that this book explains clearly why the only Nobel prize writer had to leave South Africa. He went to Australia, where, Coetzee was received as a hero, after being denied a US residency by a real dimly-lit-minded bureaucrat from INS.
Rating: -
All it's cracked up to be. A tough but fair indictment of men. I'd never read anything like this, subtle and direct, not over the top, which culminated in a twist that broadens and sharpens the message of the book. (Don't want to spoil it). Apartheid and Africa are the backdrops but this is a book about men and women and the life we're in. Read this.
Rating:  -
I just finished J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace last night, and woke up this morning thinking that it was loathsome in almost every regard. The very bad behavior of the protagonist is punished, without exception, by the terrible and gratuitous suffering of women, homosexuals, and animals.
Just in case you don't get the point, his redemption, his apotheosis, is seen through his trying to write an opera -- the composition process beautifully well described but founded on the awful, shamelessly sadistic suffering of its female protagonist. Coetzee permits himself literally to scapegoat his repellent hero's suffering on to an abandoned 19th century woman. Asked how to keep the attention of jaded Paris audiences of the Belle Epoque, Victorien "Tosca" Sardou replied, Torture the women. Spielberg's wet t-shirt scenes in Schindler's List spring to mind.
The book is touted as a brave face-to-face encounter with post-apartheid south Africa, which consists, apparently, of miscegenation of every kind, punished by panels composed of mixed race or South Asian women's libber harpies in charge of human rights, or untrammelled by worthless police. The protagonist starts by screwing a prostitute with dark-haired children, presumably Indian, and moves on to a 20-year-old student named Isaacs. His punishment -- literally, his disgrace -- is that his Lesbian daughter should be raped by three black Africans, and not only not bring charges, but not get an abortion, and not leave her hopeless flower business farm in the countryside. Worse, he is forced to screw a deeply unattractive woman who euthanizes the few animals not brutally slaughtered or brutally permitted to reproduce by rapacious, multiplying, mentally deficient, congenitally immoral, and improvident blacks. In case you don't get the point that women are in charge now, on the last page he brings the one dog he has been able to care for to the killer woman for euthanizing. Because he can't keep it up on his own any more.
The misogynism cascading from subsidiary passages entailing dialogue spoken by his ex-wife, or the demands of the educated women of the academic panel which investigates his affair with Isaacs (only the men on the panel are semi-humane) is awful to feel.
And so on.
Um, no.
If I want real black and white race relations, I'll just stick to George Pelecanos. Or The Wire.
The spareness of the prose disguises it, as I've suggested, until you've slept on it. It's a time bomb of nastiness.
Ugh.
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