Rating: - Atrocious
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.