Disgrace
A BBC Radio 4 Good Read
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- £4.99
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- £4.99
Publisher Description
**A BBC RADIO 4 GOOD READ**
'A great novel by one of the finest authors writing in the English language today' The Times
After years teaching Romantic poetry at the Technical University of Cape Town, David Lurie, middle-aged and twice divorced, has an impulsive affair with a student.
The affair sours; he is denounced and summoned before a committee of inquiry. Willing to admit his guilt, but refusing to yield to pressure to repent publicly, he resigns and retreats to his daughter Lucy's isolated smallholding.
For a time, his daughter's influence and the natural rhythms of the farm promise to harmonise his discordant life. But the balance of power in the country is shifting. He and Lucy become victims of a savage and disturbing attack which brings into relief all the faultlines in their relationship.
**A BBC BETWEEN THE COVERS BIG JUBILEE READ PICK**
**One of the BBC's 100 Novels That Shaped Our World**
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
As a writer, Coetzee is a literary cascade, with a steady output of fiction and criticism (literary and social) over the last two decades. This latest book, his first novel in five years, is a searing evocation of post-apartheid South Africa; it earned him an unprecedented second Booker Prize. An uninspired teacher and twice divorced, David Lurie is a 52-year-old poetry scholar-cum-"adjunct professor of communications" at Cape Technical University. Spooked by the flicker of twilight in his life trajectory, he sees himself as an aged Lothario soon to be "shuddered over" by the pretty girls he has so often wooed; he is disappointed in and unengaged by the academy he now serves by rote; and he cannot locate the notes for his opera, Byron in Italy, in which he has placed so much reluctant hope. He is, even at his best, a man of "moderated bliss." So when he seduces Melanie Isaacs, a lithe student from his poetry elective ("She does not resist. All she does is avert herself"), he believes her to represent the final object of his desire, his last act of lush, Romantic desperation. And then he is found out. This not uncommon outrage earns him a dismissal and censure from the university committee he refuses to cooperate with in hopes of saving his job. He immediately shoves off for Salem in the Eastern Cape where his daughter, Lucy, manages a dog kennel and works her smallholding, harvesting a modest crop. Here David hopes to cleanse himself with time-honored toil. But his new life in the country offers scarce refuge. Instead, he is flummoxed to discover an unfamiliar Lucy-principled, land-devoted, with a heroic resignation to the social and political developments of modern South Africa. He also memorably encounters Petrus, Lucy's ambitious colored neighbor and sometime assistant. Petrus embodies the shifting, tangled vicissitudes of a new national schematic, and forces David to relate to the broad segment of society previously shrouded by the mists of his self-absorption. But a violent attack on the estate irrevocably alters how the book's central figure perceives many things: his daughter and her bewildering (to him) courage, the rights of South Africa's grossly aggrieved majority, the souls of the damaged dogs he helps put down at the local Animal Welfare League and even the character of Lord Byron's mistress and the heroine of his operatic "chamber-play." But this is no tale of hard-earned, satisfying transformation. It is, rather, a paean to willfulness, an aria on the theme of secca, or the drying up of "the source of everything." In Coetzee's tale, not a single note is false; every sentence is perfectly calibrated and essential. Every passage questions the arbitrary division between the "major and minor" and the long-accepted injustices propped up by nothing so much as time. The book somehow manages to speak of little but interiority and still insinuate peripheries of things it doesn't touch. Somber and crystalline, it "has the right mix of timelessness and decay." It is about the harsh cleansing of humiliation and the regretfulness of knowing things: "I lack the lyrical. I manage love too well. Even when I burn I don't sing, if you understand me." To perceive is to understand in this beautifully spare, necessary novel. First serial to the New Yorker. FYI: Viking accelerated the pub date after the Booker Prize was announced on October 25.
Customer Reviews
From bad to worse
This was a compelling read, holding my interest to the end.
On the positive side, I found the main character Professor David Lurie an interesting figure, easy to understand in his musings and view of the world. He just mistakes his attraction to the young and beautiful Melanie Isaacs, his student, for love. The reader is more sceptical, as little comes back from Melanie in this affair of the two, she remains tight lipped, passive,vague-and ends up betraying him under duresse from her boyfriend and parents, who see this affair as an abusive act.
For Prof.Lurie, things go downhill fast and steeper than realistic: He gets dismissed from his University Position following his unapologetic presentation to an enquiring comittee, he then lives with his daughter in the countryside, trying to tolerate her very different lifestyle but becomes involved in a brutal attack on him and a rape of the daughter by three black men.
Against his advice the daughter Lucy remains on her farm and accepts patronage by her black neighbour, and upon return to his own flat in Cqpetown, Lurie finds this vandalised.
He tries to apologise to Melanie and her parents but gets dismissed again, his writing and composing project fails and he ends up as a adjunct to his daughter but not living with her, as she is expecting a baby from the rape.
I found this too to much of humiliation for one human being, even a white academic to be realistic and would have much preferred for the Desasters and failings to be a bit more subtle.
I was not very fond of Lucy and her companions, finding them arrogant in their reverted ideology, and wavering probably also in my sympathy for Lurie himself.
However I learned a lot through the book and being in the process of saying goodbye to professional life, I did find the Professors Journey very much worth following. In summary I can recommend the book with some reservations.
Beautiful book and reader
Whilst is a hard story to read and if you don't know much about Sth Africa it might be difficult to comprehend, this book is beautifully written and a deserved prize winner.
The audio version is on a par with the reading of it.
He reads in the most captivating manor, never afraid to portrait the different voices and emotions.
I can't recommend highly enough.