Overview:
One of the most widely read novels by a South African-born writer or ‘about' South Africa, Nobel Laureate J.M. Coetzee's (second) Booker Prize-winning novel, Disgrace (1999), is a firm favourite with reading groups and a fixture on many university-level courses on postcolonial or international literatures in English. Sometimes regarded as offering a bleak picture of post-apartheid South Africa, Disgrace has also been read as an ultimately hopeful novel about renunciation and redemption.
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. (Nov.) FYI: Viking accelerated the pub date after the Booker Prize was announced on October 25.
"Lively, succinct, and readable, Andrew van der Vlies's handbook of key themes, contexts, and intertexts is the best reader's guide to J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace on the market. Attentive to the politics of literary form and to the controversies of the novel's reception, Van der Vlies's companion will stimulate discussions in the classroom and beyond for some time to come." - Mark Sanders (New York University), author of Ambiguities of Witnessing: Law and Literature in the Time of a Truth Commission
"When it was first published in 1999 Disgrace opened up a uniquely challenging space in our times, the meaning of which we are still trying to grasp. Andrew van der Vlies's wonderful book is an essential guide for all new and not-so-new readers eager to find their own way through this vitally important, absorbingly labyrinthine fiction and the unfolding story of its effects."
- Peter D. McDonald, (Oxford University), author of The Literature Police: Apartheid Censorship and its Cultural Consequences (2009)
'His detailed account of central themes, alongside a narrative of Disgrace's historical context and reception, will bolster the thinking of any casual reader.'
(Times Literary Supplement )
"Lively, succinct, and readable, Andrew van der Vlies’s handbook of key themes, contexts, and intertexts is the best reader’s guide to J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace on the market. Attentive to the politics of literary form and to the controversies of the novel’s reception, Van der Vlies’s companion will stimulate discussions in the classroom and beyond for some time to come." - Mark Sanders (New York University), author of Ambiguities of Witnessing: Law and Literature in the Time of a Truth Commission
'His detailed account of central themes, alongside a narrative of Disgrace’s historical context and reception, will bolster the thinking of any casual reader.’
ENJOYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!
And Blessed Are The Ones Who Care For Their Fellow Men!
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