Disgrace
J.M. Coetzee(1999)
Extract
He is in a desert. He is a man who, unless he be careful, unless he pull himself together, is going to go to pieces.
A twice-divorced professor of Romantic poetry in Cape Town seduces a student half his age and refuses, when called to account, to perform the contrition his university demands. J.M. Coetzee's 1999 novel follows David Lurie from that refusal into the Eastern Cape, where his daughter lives on a smallholding and where a brutal attack reorganizes every certainty he possesses. The prose is austere, almost cold, yet its precision is a form of compassion, illuminating a post-apartheid South Africa in which old hierarchies are collapsing and no one knows what justice looks like. Lurie ends among dying dogs, performing kindnesses he once would have found beneath him. Disgrace asks what remains when privilege and self-regard are stripped away.
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Camus writes another man who cannot feel what the world insists he should, and the consequences are just as total.
Dostoevsky gives his transgressor a conscience; Coetzee gives his protagonist something harder to name.
Conrad explored the same colonial territory, but Coetzee writes from inside it and refuses the luxury of allegory.