CONTENT

I.

About J. M. Coetzee.page 3

II.

A few book reviews..page 4

III.

Short summary of the storypage 5

IV.

David Lurie, the main character of the novel.page 6

About J. M. Coetzee

J. M. Coetzee (John Maxwell Coetzee) , 1940-, is a South African novelist. Educated at the Univ. of Cape Town (M.A. 1963) and the Univ. of Texas (Ph.D. 1969), he taught in the United States and returned home (1983) to become a professor of English literature at Cape Town. He immigrated to Australia in 2002, becoming a citizen there in 2006, and working as a research fellow at the Univ. of Adelaide. Several of Coetzee's novels are noted for their eloquent protest against political and social conditions in South Africa, particularly the suffering caused by imperialism, apartheid , and post apartheid violence. His books are also known for their technical virtuosity. Often melancholy and detached in tone and spare in style, his fiction treats themes of human violence and loss, weakness and defeat, and isolation and survival. His critically acclaimed novels include In the Heart of the Country (1977), Waiting for the Barbarians (1982), the two Booker (later Man Booker) Prize-winning novels, The Life and Times of Michael K (1983) and Disgrace(1999), The Master of Petersburg (1994), Elizabeth Costello (2003), Slow Man (2005), and Diary of a Bad Year (2007). The last three novels, written after his move to Australia, have had Australian settings and have shown a more pronounced philosophical orientation. Among Coetzee's other writings are the memoirs Boyhood (1997) and Youth (2002) and several essay collections, among them Inner Workings (2007), studies of 20 20th-century writers. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003.

I.

A few book reviews

New York Times Book Review The effect of the novel's plot is deeply disturbing, in part because of what happens to David and Lucy, but equally because of the disintegrating context of their experiences. New York Post J.M. Coetzee's new novel Disgrace, which last week won the South African writer his second Booker Prize is an absolute page-turner. It is also profound, rich and remarkable ... is destined to be a classic. The New Yorker Disgrace is not a hard or obscure book--it is, among other things, compulsively readable--but what it may well be is an authentically spiritual document, a lament for the soul of a disgraced century.

II.

Short summary of the story

This book tells the story of Prof David Lurie who teaches Romantic poetry at the University of Cape Town. At the start of the novel he is visiting a prostitute for a weekly session. However he starts an affair with one of his students who is 30 years his junior. He is intoxicated with her. She however turns sour and her boyfriend threatens David. She then makes an official complaint about David. There is a Committee of Inquiry at which David admits his guilt but refuses to apologise. He is publicly condemned and loses his job. He then goes to stay with his lesbian daughter Lucy
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on her small holding in the eastern Cape. He hopes to write an opera about Byron. For a while everything is peaceful and David volunteers at an animal welfare refuge. However one day they are visited by three men who rape Lucy and set fire to David and rob them of their car and valuables. This horrific attack changes their relationship. Lucy withdraws and David fails to understand why she doesn't bring rape charges against the men. David takes over the running of the small holding with the help of Petrus, Lucy's hired hand. It turns out that one of the attacker's is a brother of one of Petrus' wives. Petrus says the boy is innocent though. When Lucy discovers she is pregnant from the rape Petrus offers to marry her in exchange for the small holding and his protection. David can't comprehend how Lucy can consider marrying Petrus and he offers to pay for her to go to Holland to escape the situation. David also visits the parents of the student he had the affair with and apologises for his behaviour. The novel ends with David putting down his favourite dog at the animal refuge.

III.

David Lurie, the main character of the novel

Not just in trouble. [I am] in what I suppose one would call disgrace

David Lurie is a 52 years old mediocre teacher. He is twice divorced. He teaches communication skills that he finds nonsensical. He thinks that the origin of the language is in music and the origin of the songs come from the need to feel the human soul with sounds. He has published three books: one is opera, the other one is the vision as the Eros and the third one is about Wordsworth and history. David views himself as a womanizer, living all his life with women. When mother, aunts, sisters fell away they were replaced in due course by mistresses, wives, a daughter. He
considers himself good looking. This is why it`s not hard for him to seduce women even at this middle age.

For a year he has been seeing in secret a prostitute, Soraya. These meetings are like an oasis of luxe et voluptand also thinks that he has solved the problem of sex rather well. One day he sees her shopping with her two sons. He starts to think about her as living a double life, a respectable wife during the day and only working for the Discrete Escorts Agency some hours a week. For a short moment their eyes meet and he regrets it at once. He might feel that he has violated her privacy. Next time they meet, he can feel how she is getting cooler towards him to the point where she finally ends their arrangement. We could accuse David for buying her sexual pleasures, but he thinks differently: He thinks she is a loose woman who helps him solving the problem of sex. His next victim is one of his students, Melanie Isaacs. There is one female student almost every term that awakes these feelings and he knows they know. He pursues her and they have dinner at his house. But she is very uncertain, maybe because she sees in him first of all his teacher, a teacher who can pass or fail her and she is at his mercy. Melanies distance does not bother him which clearly shows he wants passive women. David tells her that the woman`s beauty is not her`s entirely. She has the duty to share it with the others. David and Melanie go on having sex at three separate times, the first time in Davids house. David finds the act so pleasurable that from its climax he tumbles into blank oblivion but Melanie does not seem to enjoy the lovemaking, being passive, afterward leaving him, having a slight frown on her face . The next time they have sex, they are in Melanies apartment.
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He reflects over her passiveness, and concludes, Not rape, not quite that, but undesired nevertheless, undesired to the core. David says he has never been passionate but Melanie has made him a servant of Eros. For a man with a Romanticists view, his actions may not be considered a crime, but an act of passion. A passion not allowed in society at large and, definitely not allowed between teacher and student. He believes Melanie is his final object of desire, his last act of lash, his Romantic desperation. He becomes aware of his acts but he cannot resist the temptation. He says to himself: I should leave her alone, or She`s just a child! Only a child!. He admits to having violated the policy on student-lecturer relationships, a policy written to protect the students from being taken advantage of by their superior lecturers. However, David refuses to confess to any immoral activities, only focusing on the legal concerns, admitting nothing but his impulses. I admit I am guilty he says in front of his colleagues. Pressured by family and friends, Melanie reports the indiscretion and David, who refuses to apologize for his behavior, saying that he was merely answering the call of Eros, he will resign. To get away from Cape Town he flees to his daughter Lucys smallholding in Salem, in the Eastern Cape Province. As time goes by, David gets settled in the rural way of living. He has come here to find a cure, to work on his book and to forget about what happened . But he cannot do that because of the attack, his daughter`s being raped. David Lurie becomes a character that is situated in extreme situations, he must endure both psychological abasement and physical torment. He feels that he has failed to protect his loved ones and this sense of impotence makes him feel a veritable disgrace. The rape may be Lucys secret but his disgrace since he was not there to help her. He blames himself, and it is possible that others do so as well. The attack makes David think and eventually change his way of seeing life and his perspectives: his daughter and her courage, the rights of the South Africans, the souls of the damaged dogs he helps put down at the local Animal Welfare Leageue and even the character of Lord Byron`s mistress. From being a man of stature, he now considers himself like a fly-casing in a spiderweb, brittle to the touch, lighter than rice-chaff, ready to float awayHis pleasure in living has been snuffed out.

There are similarities between his own seduction of Melanie and the rape of Lucy, he himself becomes part of what he condemns. He becomes David having trouble in reading female signs, maybe because he for the most part reduces women to their looks. Womens behaviour amazes him, women are now unreachable, unpredictable and impossible to understand. David realises he is growing old. He is tired to the bone and perceives this as a first taste of old age (107). Lucy starts talking to him as one talks to an intellectually inferior or an old person, confirming what David calls a curtain between their generations. This notion of growing old is connected to a loss off faith. David no longer considers himself handsome, but having bowed shoulders and skinny shanks and when he is reached by the news of Lucys pregnancy he, again, mainly focus on the effect it has on his person, wondering, [w]hat pretty girl can he expect to be wooed into bed with a grandfather. He adjusts to this change and surrenders, nothing has to last forever and rests in the fact that he is just an old man who sits among the dogs singing to himself. What is very surprising from him is the fact that he decides to go and see Melanie`s parents in order to get their forgiveness, taking in account that in front of the council at school he didn`t want to defend himself. Another important issue that is worth mentioning is the fact that David struggles with the language many times. He demands for justice but gets no response from the police and his attempts to confront one of the attackers ( the one that Petrus protects) produces only silence and lies. By the end of the novel, David reclaims dignity and he gives up everything : his daughter, his ideas about justice and language, his dream of the opera on Byron. He eventually learns from life on and around Lucy`s farm. He finally understands that his little girl is no longer little and that he is able to make her own decisions. I think that the most thing that strikes him is the fact that she has a strong personality and such strong ideas and perspectives of life. In my opinion she is the one who gives his father a lesson of life. In conclusion I would like to say that when one of my colleague has presented the book in class I didn`t like it and I said to myself that I am going to choose another book to do my essay. I thought it was too harsh, too violent and I`ve decided that it would be a challenge to write about something that I do not agree.

So, I didn`t like the way in which David Lurie treats women in this novel and I don`t like the way in which those three men treat Lucy. In a way Lucy`s rape may be seen as a revenge on his father`s bad behavior to women. And for him it is very painful because he is aware of the fact that her daughter should not pay for his mistakes. David Lurie is a character that in the beginning of the novel has negative features but who, during the novel is starting to become positive. He`s trying to leave behind his old way of leaving, but he doesn`t manage it entirely if we keep in mind the fact that he has an affair with Bev Shaw. But despite all these we can say that he is a complex and an interesting character.

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