Disgrace

I will come right out and say it. I struggled with this novel. Not in the actual reading of it, for it’s quick and stark, understandable and lacking that absurd authorial elitism that other novels carry like a badge of honor. No, I struggled with J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace because the story made me uncomfortable. This doesn’t happen often, but within the first twenty pages of this novel, I was already squirming with my dislike for the protagonist.

The novel centers around David Lurie, a professor in South Africa, who lives in a world of ideas, completely self centered within his own consciousness. So absorbed within his own sphere is he that the reader doesn’t even find out his name until a good fifteen pages in, after he’s already slept with a prostitute and commented on his need, but not appreciation of women. He then proceeds to have an affair with one of his students. Normal, unimaginative plot twist right? Except that there relationship, short as it may have been, existed in a haze of grey. It is never stated outright that this girl really desires him in any way, and the word rape is just waiting to be said. It is not explicit, there is no violence, but in reading it I just wanted to scream at Lurie to stop that very instant, because the girl so clearly wasn’t into it. Anyone who has remotely been in such a situation, where the headiness of an older, powerful man overtakes the senses would (I imagine) be right there along with me, yelling and remaining stupefied that Lurie doesn’t pick up on the social cues fairly hitting him in the face.

Coetzee cleverly makes the grey area even more obvious by juxtaposing Lurie’s affair with his daughter Lucy’s rape. The two acts of violation are so completely different from one another that as a reader I still found myself more uncomfortable with the earlier affair than the outright rape. Which is horrible! And not quite knowing what to do with that, I will let it alone and leave it to other readers to figure out what happened and how they feel about it.

Despite my discomfort with the protagonist and the questionable violations, the novel did make me feel something. There is a heavy emphasis on Lurie’s work with dogs being put down that absolutely crushed me. Put a dog in a book, kill it, and I promise you, I will sob forever. The dogs worked as distinct characters, tying together Lucy and Lurie’s story and eventually allowing for a symbolic release at the end of the novel. Besides this utter despair at a dog dying, the novel also made me angry, uncomfortable, and frustrated and completely question why on earth this book had won a Booker, a Nobel and been a finalist for the National Book Award. My answer to this last question is that Coetzee’s writing is frank and honest, and further more it made me feel deeply. So perhaps this is not a book I would read again. I’m on the fence about even saying I liked it, but it has affected me, and in the end, that is the point of literature.