Disgrace

by J. M. Coetzee | Literature & Fiction |
ISBN: 0099289520 Global Overview for this book
Registered by BookGroupMan of Chester, Cheshire United Kingdom on 8/4/2003
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2 journalers for this copy...
Journal Entry 1 by BookGroupMan from Chester, Cheshire United Kingdom on Monday, August 4, 2003
This is the type of ‘literary’ book that gives the Booker prize a bad name. I found the main characters either unsympathetic, or not fully drawn stereotypes. The political themes (sexual & racial, and a bit of ageism/elitism?) were underplayed to the point of abstraction – all too subtle for me. The inconclusive ending, the sadness, moral corruption & stagnation of spirit left me feeling flat & disinterested. I recently read the excellent biog ‘Don’t Lets Go to the Dogs Tonight’ by Alexandra Fuller – I know it’s a different medium, but the style, humour & humanity, are a much more better way (for me) to understand the problems in Southern Africa, and to get a feeling for a very foreign landscape, culture & people.

Journal Entry 2 by BookGroupMan at on Tuesday, November 25, 2003
Released on Tuesday, November 25, 2003 at OBZ - Le Cafe Maison, Thorpe Road in Norwich, England United Kingdom.

Delivered to Norwich by my lil sis - I try not to go 'over the border' into Naarfolk too often!

Journal Entry 3 by gdex from Norwich, Norfolk United Kingdom on Monday, February 2, 2004
I found this in a box in a cafe in Norwich and may release it in a church.
I enjoyed this book, and on the last page wanted painfully for it to continue. I would have liked to have known more about how the main character, David Lurie, disgraced 52-year-old ex-professor, unable to control his impulses towards pretty young women, or any women, manages to navigate through the remainder of his life and perhaps complete his opera.
Lurie is a clever, pampered man, who has been treated well by academic life in South Africa but suddenly has to confront three things; his dismissal following an affair with a student less than half his age; a brutal attack on himself and his daughter at his daughter's farm; and the reversal of political power from white to black, the demand for reparations for the bloody past. In extremis, locked in a bathroom while three men are doing what he knows not to his only child, Lurie thinks: 'So here it is, the day of testing. Without warning, without fanfare, it is here, and he is in the middle of it...his child is in the hands of strangers. In a minute, in an hour, it will be too late; whatever is happening to her will be set in stone, will belong to the past. But now it is not too late. Now he must do something.'
Lurie is a brilliantly drawn character - while he is sincerely apologising to the parents of the student he has seduced, he is thinking about having three-in-a-bed sex with both her and her younger schoolgirl sister, and how that would be 'an experience fit for a king.' Lurie is both sincerely sorry and sincerely lustful. This is sketch of the complexity, paradox and perversity of the human heart. This scene is also after the aforementioned attack.
Written with a superb economy and characters that are interesting from the first page, this was the first Coetzee book I've read and I've just borrowed another.

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