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Adult Books - Fiction - General Fiction
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Disgrace.
Coetzee, J. M. (author).
Feb. 2000. 220p. Viking, hardcover, $23.95 (0-670-88731-5).
REVIEW.
First published November 15, 1999 (Booklist).
In Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) and other great novels, the eminent South African writer Coetzee set his dark stories in a chaotic near-future world on the edge of allegory. The place in this book is postapartheid South Africa; the power struggle is now; anarchy has come. This deeply pessimistic view is how many conservatives today see the changes in South Africa. David Lurie, 52-year-old divorced literary scholar, is disgraced for sexually harassing one of his college students. Refusing to submit to “counseling,” he loses his job (he was never much of a teacher, anyway) and moves in with his beloved daughter Lucy on her small farm in the eastern Cape. She’s a sturdy peasant, part of the new world (“dogs and a gun; bread in the oven and a crop in the earth”) and he’s glad for her--until one night the farm is ransacked, the animals killed, and Lucy gang-raped. The predators will come back, but she refuses to leave (“They see me as owing something”). In the end, she will bear the child from that rape, become the third wife of her former sharecropper, and live on his land. With the social chaos is Lurie’s sense of personal failure. Is he also a monster? What about his own sexual aggression? Where is power now? There’s an ongoing metaphor about the poet Byron’s life and work that becomes tedious and self-indulgent--just too much about an idle old man “at the end of roving.” Like Lurie, Coetzee clearly sees himself as apolitical, a weary figure “from the margins of history,” but the insistence on violence as the only possibility makes the novel disappointing. What’s strongest in the story, as good as anything Coetzee has ever written, are the scenes in the country place, especially the father-daughter relationship (both tender and apart). This novel has just won the prestigious Booker Prize in England, making Coetzee the first writer ever to win the prize twice. (Reviewed November 15, 1999)— Hazel Rochman
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Features That Discuss This Work:
1. Notable Books : 2001
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