Disgrace

Reading novels is one of my greatest pleasures in life. Thus, I am somewhat thrown by a book like Disgrace, by J.M. Coetzee, which won the 1999 Booker Prize for fiction. The central character in the book, David, is immensely unlikable. His daughter, Lucy, portrayed through David’s eyes, is distant, aloof, unknowable. Yet their story, for all of its brutality and ambiguity, I suppose reflects at least some aspects of post-apartheid South Africa, where Coetzee was born and raised, and where the story takes place.

David is middle aged (eek! he’s 52) college professor who gives into sexual desire even when it means debasing people around him. He admits to “taking advantage” of a student, but refuses to “repent,” and is dismissed in disgrace. That leads him to a long visit with his daughter, who lives on a farm by herself in the countryside where she takes care of dogs. A Black African man, Petrus, is her “co-proprietor,” who later becomes her protector when she herself is disgraced after a violent assault (and David is doubly disgraced as he fails to protect her). Only Petrus can protect Lucy from the people she has chosen to live with, and her decision to accept his protection as the only way she can continue to live in the Eastern Cape is both perplexing and painful.

Despite the dark and ugly story he tells, Coetzee writes beautifully and truthfully. When Coetzee won the Nobel prize in literature in 2003, the press release accompanying the announcement captured his point of view as reflected in Disgrace: “…he is a scrupulous doubter, ruthless in his criticism of the cruel rationalism and cosmetic morality of western civilisation. His intellectual honesty erodes all basis of consolation and distances itself from the tawdry drama of remorse and confession.”