Disgrace

Description

The provocative Booker Prize winning novel from Nobel laureate, J.M. Coetzee

“Compulsively readable… A novel that not only works its spell but makes it impossible for us to lay it aside once we’ve finished reading it.” —The New Yorker

At fifty-two, Professor David Lurie is divorced, filled with desire, but lacking in passion. When an affair with a student leaves him jobless, shunned by friends, and ridiculed by his ex-wife, he retreats to his daughter Lucy’s smallholding. David’s visit becomes an extended stay as he attempts to find meaning in his one remaining relationship. Instead, an incident of unimaginable terror and violence forces father and daughter to confront their strained relationship and the equallity complicated racial complexities of the new South Africa. 

2024 marks the 25th Anniversary of the publication of DisgraceWINNER OF THE BOOK PRIZE
THE NOBEL PRIZE WINNING NOVELIST

“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.”—The New Yorker

“A subtly brilliant commentary on the nature and balance of power in his homeland…. Disgrace is a mini-opera without music by a writer at the top of his form.”—Time

“Mr. Coetzee, in prose lean yet simmering with feeling, has indeed achieved a lasting work: a novel as haunting and powerful as Albert Camus’s The Stranger.”—The Wall Street Journal
“A tough, sad, stunning novel.”—Baltimore Sun

“A great novel by one of the finest authors writing in the English language today.” – The Times (London)

“What is remarkable about Coetzee’s vision as a novelist is that it remains intensely human, rooted in common experience and replete with failure, doubt and frustration.” ― Guardian

“Exhilarating… One of the best novelists alive.” ― Sunday Times (London)Born in Cape Town, South Africa, on February 9, 1940, John Michael Coetzee studied first at Cape Town and later at the University of Texas at Austin, where he earned a Ph.D. degree in literature. In 1972 he returned to South Africa and joined the faculty of the University of Cape Town. His works of fiction include Dusklands, Waiting for the Barbarians, which won South Africa’s highest literary honor, the Central News Agency Literary Award, and the Life and Times of Michael K., for which Coetzee was awarded his first Booker Prize in 1983. He has also published a memoir, Boyhood: Scenes From a Provincial Life, and several essays collections. He has won many other literary prizes including the Lannan Award for Fiction, the Jerusalem Prize and The Irish Times International Fiction Prize. In 1999 he again won Britain’s prestigious Booker Prize for Disgrace, becoming the first author to win the award twice in its 31-year history. In 2003, Coetzee was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

INTRODUCTION

Set in post-apartheid South Africa, J. M. Coetzee’s searing novel tells the story of David Lurie, a twice divorced, 52-year-old professor of communications and Romantic Poetry at Cape Technical University. Lurie believes he has created a comfortable, if somewhat passionless, life for himself. He lives within his financial and emotional means. Though his position at the university has been reduced, he teaches his classes dutifully; and while age has diminished his attractiveness, weekly visits to a prostitute satisfy his sexual needs. He considers himself happy. But when Lurie seduces one of his students, he sets in motion a chain of events that will shatter his complacency and leave him utterly disgraced.

Lurie pursues his relationship with the young Melanie—whom he describes as having hips “as slim as a twelve-year-old’s”—obsessively and narcissistically, ignoring, on one occasion, her wish not to have sex. When Melanie and her father lodge a complaint against him, Lurie is brought before an academic committee where he admits he is guilty of all the charges but refuses to express any repentance for his acts. In the furor of the scandal, jeered at by students, threatened by Melanie’s boyfriend, ridiculed by his ex-wife, Lurie is forced to resign and flees Cape Town for his daughter Lucy’s smallholding in the country. There he struggles to rekindle his relationship with Lucy and to understand the changing relations of blacks and whites in the new South Africa. But when three black strangers appear at their house asking to make a phone call, a harrowing afternoon of violence follows which leaves both of them badly shaken and further estranged from one another. After a brief return to Cape Town, where Lurie discovers his home has also been vandalized, he decides to stay on with his daughter, who is pregnant with the child of one of her attackers. Now thoroughly humiliated, Lurie devotes himself to volunteering at the animal clinic, where he helps put down diseased and unwanted dogs. It is here, Coetzee seems to suggest, that Lurie gains a redeeming sense of compassion absent from his life up to this point.

Written with the austere clarity that has made J. M. Coetzee the winner of two Booker Prizes, Disgrace explores the downfall of one man and dramatizes, with unforgettable, at times almost unbearable, vividness the plight of a country caught in the chaotic aftermath of centuries of racial oppression.

ABOUT J. M. COETZEE

Born in Cape Town, South Africa, on February 9, 1940, John Michael Coetzee studied first at Cape Town and later at the University of Texas at Austin, where he earned a Ph.D. degree in literature. In 1972 he returned to South Africa and joined the faculty of the University of Cape Town. His works of fiction include Dusklands, Waiting for the Barbarians, which won South Africa’s highest literary honor, the Central News Agency Literary Award, and the Life and Times of Michael K., for which Coetzee was awarded his first Booker Prize in 1983. He has also published a memoir, Boyhood: Scenes From a Provincial Life, and several essays collections. He has won many other literary prizes including the Lannan Award for Fiction, the Jerusalem Prize and The Irish Times International Fiction Prize. In 1999 he again won Britain’s prestigious Booker Prize for Disgrace, becoming the first author to win the award twice in its 31-year history.

PRAISE

“—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.”
—The New Yorker

“—A subtly brilliant commentary on the nature and balance of power in his homeland…Disgrace is a mini-opera without music by a writer at the top of his form.”
—Time

“—Mr. Coetzee, in prose lean yet simmering with feeling, has indeed achieved a lasting work: a novel as haunting and powerful as Albert Camus’s The Stranger.”
—The Wall Street Journal

“A tough, sad, stunning novel.”
—Baltimore Sun

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

The novel begins by telling us that “For a man his age, fifty-two, divorced, he has, to his mind, solved the problem of sex rather well.” What can you infer about David Lurie’s character from this sentence? In what ways is it significant, particularly in relation to the events that follow, that he views sex as a “problem” and that his “solution” depends upon a prostitute?
 

Lurie describes sexual intercourse with the prostitute Soraya as being like the copulation of snakes, “lengthy, absorbed, but rather abstract, rather dry, even at its hottest.” When he decides to seduce his student, Melanie, they are passing through the college gardens. After their affair has been discovered Melanie’s father says that he never thought he was sending his daughter into “a nest of vipers.” Lurie has also written a book about Faust and Mephistopheles and explicates for his class a poem by Byron about the fallen angel, Lucifer, whom Lurie describes as being “condemned to solitude.” What do you think Coetzee is trying to suggest through this confluence of details? How clearly does Lurie himself understand his behavior? How does his reading of the Byron poem prefigure his own fate?
 

When Lurie shows up unexpectedly at Melanie’s flat, “she is too surprised to resist the intruder who thrusts himself upon her.” Later, he tells himself that it was “not rape, not quite that, but undesired nevertheless, undesired to the core.” How do you view what happens in this scene? Is it rape?
 

How would you characterize Lurie’s attitude before the academic committee investigating the charges of harassment brought against him? Is the committee justified in asking for more than an admission of guilt? Why does Lurie refuse to assent to the fairly simple demands that would save his job? What consequences, practical and spiritual, follow from this refusal?
 

Lurie claims that in his relationship with Melanie, he was “a servant of Eros” and that his case rests on the rights of desire. On the God who makes even the small birds quiver.” Is this an acceptable explanation of his actions? Do you think it is sincere?
 

What parallels do you see between the attack on Lurie and his daughter Lucy and Lurie’s own treatment of Melanie and Melanie’s father? To what extent do you think Coetzee wants us to see Lucy’s rape as a punishment for Lurie’s undesired sexual encounter with Melanie? Is this an instance of the sins of the father being visited upon the child?
 

In the course of the attack, Lurie is burned and blinded, temporarily, in one eye. What symbolic value might attach to these events? In what other ways has Lurie been blind? What significance does fire have for him?
 

Why does Lucy refuse to report her rape? How is her decision related to the changed relations between blacks and whites in post-apartheid South Africa? Why does she accept Petrus’ protection even after he has been implicated in the attack?
 

How do you feel about Lucy’s neighbor Petrus? To what extent do you think he was involved in the attack? What are his motives? What are the motives of the attackers? In what ways does Petrus embody the transition South Africa is making between apartheid and democracy? In what sense will Lucy’s child also represent that transition?
 

During a heated argument about whether animals have souls and how they should be treated, Lurie tells his daughter: “As for the animals, by all means let us be kind to them. But let us not lose perspective. We are of a different order of creation from the animals. Not higher necessarily, just different. So if we are going to be kind, let it be out of simple generosity, not because we feel guilty or fear retribution.” In what ways does this speech echo the logic of racial oppression and apartheid?
 

Throughout Disgrace, Lurie contemplates writing an opera based on Byron’s last years in Italy. Why is he so drawn to Byron? How does Byron’s situation in Italy resemble Lurie’s own? What ironies do you see in the fact that Lurie composes the music for his opera on a banjo and that he considers including a part for a dog?
 

From virtually the first page to the last, David Lurie suffers one devastating humiliation after another. He loses his job and his reputation. He is forced to flee Cape Town to live with his daughter on her smallholding in the country. There he is beaten and burned and trapped helplessly in the bathroom while his daughter is raped. Finally, he ends up ferrying dead dogs to the incinerator. Is there a meaning or purpose in his suffering? Is he in some way better off at the end of the novel than he was at the beginning? How has he changed?
 

Disgrace is narrated in the present tense, largely through David Lurie’s consciousness, though not in the first person. What effect does this method of narration have on how the story unfolds? How would the novel differ if told in the past tense? At what points do you sense a divergence between Lurie’s view of himself and the narrator’s view of him?
 

In what ways can the events dramatized in Disgrace be seen as a result of South Africa’s long history of racial oppression? What does the novel imply about the larger themes of retribution and forgiveness and reversals of fortune? About the relation between the powerful and the powerless?
 

ONE

FOR. A MAN of his age, fifty-two, divorced, he has, to his mind,solved the problem of sex rather well. On Thursday afternoons hedrives to Green Point. Punctually at two p.m. he presses the buzzerat the entrance to Windsor Mansions, speaks his name, and enters.Waiting for him at the door of No. II3 is Soraya. He goes straightthrough to the bedroom, which is pleasant-smelling and softly lit,and undresses. Soraya emerges from the bathroom, drops her robe,slides into bed beside him. ‘Have you missed me?’ she asks. ‘I missyou all the time,’ he replies. He strokes her honey-brown body,unmarked by the sun; he stretches her out, kisses her breasts; theymake love.

Soraya is tall and slim, with long black hair and dark, liquid eyes.Technically he is old enough to be her father; but then,technically, one can be a father at twelve. He has been on herbooks for over a year; he finds her entirely satisfactory. In thedesert of the week Thursday has become an oasis of luxe et velupté.

In bed Soraya is not effusive. Her temperament is in fact ratherquiet, quiet and docile. In her general opinions she is surprisinglymoralistic. She is offended by tourists who bare their breasts(‘udders’, she calls them) on public beaches; she thinks vagabondsshould be rounded up and put to work sweeping the streets. How she reconciles her opinions with her line of business he does not ask.

Because he takes pleasure in her, because his pleasure isunfailing, an affection has grown up in him for her. To somedegree, he believes, this affection is reciprocated. Affection maynot be love, but it is at least its cousin. Given their unpromisingbeginnings, they have been lucky, the two of them: he to havefound her, she to have found him.

His sentiments are, he is aware, complacent, even uxorious.Nevertheless he does not cease to hold to them.

For a ninety-minute session he pays her R4oo, of which halfgoes to Discreet Escorts. It seems a pity that Discreet Escortsshould get so much. But they own No. II3 and other flats inWindsor Mansions; in a sense they own Soraya too, this part ofher, this function.

He has toyed with the idea of asking her to see him in her owntime. He would like to spend an evening with her, perhaps even awhole night. But not the morning after. He knows too muchabout himself to subject her to a morning after, when he will becold, surly, impatient to be alone.

That is his temperament. His temperament is not going to change,he is too old for that. His temperament is fixed, set. The skull, followed by the temperament: the two hardest parts of the body.

Follow your temperament. It is not a philosophy, he would notdignity it with that name. It is a rule, like the Rule of St Benedict.He is in good health, his mind is clear. By profession he is, orhas been, a scholar, and scholarship still engages, intermittently, thecore of him. He lives within his income, within his temperament,within his emotional means. Is he happy? By most measurements,yes, he believes he is. However, he has not forgotten the lastchorus of Oedipus: Call no man happy until he is dead.

In the field of sex his temperament, though intense, has neverbeen passionate. Were he to choose a totem, it would be the snake.Intercourse between Soraya and himself must be, he imagines, rather like the copulation of snakes: lengthy, absorbed, but ratherabstract, rather dry, even at its hottest.

Is Soraya’s totem the snake too? No doubt with other men shebecomes another woman: lu donna é mobile. Yet at the level oftemperament her affinity with him can surely not be feigned.Though by occupation she is a loose woman he trusts her,within limits. During their sessions he speaks to her with a certainfreedom, even on occasion unburdens himself She knows the factsof his life. She has heard the stories of his two marriages, knowsabout his daughter and his daughter’s ups and downs. She knowsmany of his opinions.

Of her life outside Windsor Mansions Soraya reveals nothing.Soraya is not her real name, that he is sure of. There are signs shehas borne a child, or children. It may be that she is not aprofessional at all. She may work for the agency only one or twoafternoons a week, and for the rest live a respectable life in thesuburbs, in Rylands or Athlone. That would be unusual for aMuslim, but all things are possible these days.

About his own job he says little, not wanting to-bore her. Heearns his living at the Cape Technical University, formerly CapeTown University College. Once a professor of modern languages,he has been, since Classics and Modern Languages were closeddown as part of the great rationalization, adjunct professor ofcommunications. Like all rationalized personnel, he is allowed tooffer one special-field course a year, irrespective of enrolment,because that is good for morale. This year he is offering a course inthe Romantic poets. For the rest he teaches Communications I0I,’Communication Skills’ and Communications 20I, ‘AdvancedCommunication Skills’.

Although he devotes hours of each day to his new discipline, hefinds its first premise, as enunciated in the Communications I0Ihandbook, preposterous: ‘Human society has created language in order that we may communicate our thoughts, feelings andintentions to each other.’ His own opinion, which he does not air,is that the origins of speech lie in song, and the origins of song inthe need to fill out with sound the overlarge and rather emptyhuman soul.

In the course of a career stretching back a quarter of a centuryhe has published three books, none of which has caused a stir oreven a ripple: the first on opera (Boito and the Faust Legend: TheGenesis of Mefistofele), the second on vision as eros (The Vision ofRichard of St. Victor), the third on Wordsworth and history(Wordsworth and the Burden of the Post}.

In the past few years he has been playing with the idea of a workon Byron. At first he had thought it would be another book,another critical opus. But all his sallies at writing it have boggeddown in tedium. The truth is, he is tired of criticism, tired of’ prosemeasured by the yard. What he wants to write is music: Byron inItaly, a meditation on love between the sexes in the form of achamber opera.

Through his mind, while he faces his Communications classes, fit phrases, tunes, fragments of song from the unwritten work. Hehas never been much of a teacher; in this transformed and, to hismind, emasculated institution of learning he is more out of place than ever. But then, so are other of his colleagues from the olddays, burdened with upbringings inappropriate to the tasks they areset to perform; clerks in a post-religious age.

Because he has no respect for the material he teaches, he makesno impression on his students. They look through him when hespeaks, forget his name. Their indifference galls him more than hewill admit. Nevertheless he fulfils to the letter his obligationstoward them, their parents, and the state. Month after month hesets, collects, reads, and annotates their assignments, correctinglapses in punctuation, spelling and usage, interrogating weak arguments, appending to each paper a brief, considered critique.

He continues to teach because it provides him with a livelihood;also because it teaches him humility, brings it home to him whohe is in the world. The irony does not escape him: that the onewho comes to teach learns the keenest of lessons, while those whocome to learn learn nothing. It is a feature of his profession onwhich he does not remark to Soraya. He doubts there is an ironyto match it in hers.

In the kitchen of the flat in Green Point there are a kettle, plasticcups, a jar of instant coffee, a bowl with sachets of sugar. Therefrigerator holds a supply of bottled water. In the bathroom thereis soap and a pile of towels, in the cupboard clean bed linen. Sorayakeeps her makeup in an overnight bag. A place of assignation,nothing more, functional, clean, well regulated.

The first time Soraya received him she wore vermilion lipstickand heavy eyeshadow. Not liking the stickiness of the makeup, heasked her to wipe it off. She obeyed, and has never worn it since.A ready learner, compliant, pliant.

He likes giving her presents. At New Year he gave her anenamelled bracelet, at Eid a little malachite heron that caught hiseye in a curio shop. He enjoys her pleasure, which is quiteunaffected.

It surprises him that ninety minutes a week of a woman’scompany are enough to make him happy, who used to think heneeded a wife, a home, a marriage. His needs turn out to be quitelight, after all, light and fleeting, like those of a butterfly. Noemotion, or none but the deepest, the most unguessed-at: aground bass of contentedness, like the hum of traffic that lulls thecity—dweller to sleep, or like the silence of the night to countryfolk.

He thinks of Emma Bovary, coming home sated, glazen-eyed,from an afternoon of reckless fucking. So this is bliss!, says Emma, marvelling at herself in the mirror. So this is the bliss the poets speakof? Well, if poor ghostly Emma were ever to find her way to CapeTown, he would bring her along one Thursday afternoon to showher what bliss can be: a moderate bliss, a moderated bliss.

Then one Saturday morning everything changes. He is in the cityon business; he is walking down St George’s Street when his eyesfall on a slim figure ahead of him in the crowd. It is Soraya,unmistakably, flanked by two children, two boys. They arecarrying parcels; they have been shopping.

He hesitates, then follows at a distance. They disappear intoCaptain Dorego’s Fish Inn. The boys have Soraya’s lustrous hairand dark eyes. They can only be her sons.

He walks on, turns back, passes Captain Dorego’s a second time.The three are seated at a table in the window. For an instant,through the glass, Soraya’s eyes meet his.

He has always been a man of the city, at home amid a flux ofbodies where eros stalks and glances flash like arrows. But thisglance between himself and Soraya he regrets at once.

At their rendezvous the next Thursday neither mentions theincident. Nonetheless, the memory hangs uneasily over them. Hehas no wish to upset what must be, for Soraya, a precarious doublelife. He is all for double lives, triple lives, lives lived incompartments. Indeed, he feels, if anything, greater tenderness forher. Your secret is safe with me, he would like to say.

But neither he nor she can put aside what has happened. Thetwo little boys become presences between them, playing quiet asshadows in a corner of the room where their mother and thestrange man couple. In Soraya’s arms he becomes, fleetingly, theirfather: foster-father, step-father, shadow-father. Leaving her bedafterwards, he feels their eyes flicker over him covertly, curiously.

His thoughts turn, despite himself to the other father, the real one. Does he have any inkling of what his wife is up to, or has heelected the bliss of ignorance?

He himself has no son. His childhood was spent in a family ofwomen. As mother, aunts, sisters fell away, they were replaced indue course by mistresses, wives, a daughter. The company ofwomen made of him a lover of women and, to an extent, awomanizer. With his height, his good bones, his olive skin, hisFlowing hair, he could always count on a degree of magnetism. Ifhe looked at a woman in a certain way, with a certain intent, shewould return his look, he could rely on that. That was how helived; for years, for decades, that was the backbone of his life.

Then one day it all ended. Without warning his powers fled.Glances that would once have responded to his slid over, past, throughhim. Overnight he became a ghost. If he wanted a woman he had tolearn to pursue her; often, in one way or another, to buy her.

He existed in an anxious hurry of promiscuity. He had affairswith the wives of colleagues; he picked up tourists in bars on the waterfront or at the Club Italia; he slept with whores.

His introduction to Soraya took place in a dim little sitting-room off the front office of Discreet Escorts, with Venetian blindsover the windows, pot plants in the corners, stale smoke hangingin the air. She was on their books under ‘Exotic’. The photographshowed her with a red passion-flower in her hair and the faintestof lines at the corners of her eyes. The entry said ‘Afternoons only’.That was what decided him: the promise of shuttered rooms, coolsheets, stolen hours.

From the beginning it was satisfactory, just what he wanted. Abull’s eye. In a year he has not needed to go back to the agency.Then the accident in St George’s Street, and the strangeness thathas followed. Though Soraya still keeps her appointments, he feelsa growing coolness as she transforms herself into just anotherwoman and him into just another client.

He has a shrewd idea of how prostitutes speak among them-selves about the men who frequent them, the older men inparticular. They tell stories, they laugh, but they shudder too, asone shudders at a cockroach in a washbasin in the middle of’ thenight. Soon, daintily, maliciously, he will be shuddered over. It isa fate he cannot escape.

On the fourth Thursday after the incident, as he is leaving theapartment, Soraya makes the announcement he has been steelinghimself against. ‘My mother is ill. I’m going to take a break to lookafter her. I won’t be here next week.’

‘Will I see you the week after?’

‘I’m not sure. It depends on how she gets on. You had betterphone first.’

‘I don’t have a number.’

‘

‘Phone the agency. They’ll know.’

He waits a few days, then telephones the agency. Soraya? Sorayahas left us, says the man. No, we cannot put you in touch with her,that would be against house rules. Would you like an introductionto another of our hostesses? Lots of exotics to choose from — Malaysian, Thai, Chinese, you name it.

He spends an evening with another Soraya — Soraya hasbecome, it seems, a popular nom de commerce — in a hotel room inLong Street. This one is no more than eighteen, unpractised, to hismind coarse. ‘So what do you do?’ she says as she slips off herclothes. ‘Export-import,’ he says. “You don’t say,’ she says.

There is a new secretary in his department. He takes her tolunch at a restaurant a discreet distance from the campus andlistens while, over shrimp salad, she complains about her sons’school. Drug-pedlars hang around the playing-fields, she says, andthe police do nothing. For the past three years she and herhusband have had their name on a list at the New Zealandconsulate, to emigrate. ‘You people had it easier. I mean, whatever the rights and wrongs of the situation, at least you knewwhere you were.’

‘You people? he says. ‘What people?’

‘I mean your generation. Now people just pick and choosewhich laws they want to obey. It’s anarchy. How can you bring upchildren when there’s anarchy all around?’

Her name is Dawn. The second time he takes her out they stop at his house and have sex. It is a failure. Bucking and clawing, sheworks herself into a froth of excitement that in the end only repelshim. He lends her a comb, drives her back to the campus.

After that he avoids her, taking care to skirt the office where sheworks. In return she gives him a hurt look, then snubs him.

He ought to give up, retire from the game. At what age, hewonders, did Origen castrate himself? Not the most graceful ofsolutions, but then ageing is not a graceful business. A clearing ofthe decks, at least, so that one can turn one’s mind to the properbusiness of the old: preparing to die.

Might one approach a doctor and ask for it? A simple enoughoperation, surely: they do it to animals every clay, and animalssurvive well enough, if one ignores a certain residue of sadness.Severing, tying off: with local anesthetic and a steady hand and amodicum of phlegm one might even do it oneself, out of atextbook. A man on a chair snipping away at himself: an ugly sight,but no more ugly, from a certain point of view, than the same manexercising himself on the body of a woman.

There is still Soraya. He ought to close that chapter. Instead, hepays a detective agency to track her down. Within days he has herreal name, her address, her telephone number. He telephones atnine in the morning, when the husband and children will be out.’Soraya? he says. ‘This is David. How are you? When can I seeyou again?

A long silence before she speaks. ‘I don’t know who you are she says. ‘You are harassing me in my own house. I demand you will never phone me here again, never.’

Demand. She means command. Her shrillness surprises him: therehas been no intimation of it before. But then, what should apredator expect when he intrudes into the vixen’s nest, into thehome of her cubs?

He puts down the telephone. A shadow of envy passes over himfor the husband he has never seen.

US

Additional information

Dimensions	0.5900 × 5.6000 × 7.6000 in
Imprint	Penguin Books
Format	General Trade
ISBN-13	09780140296402
ISBN-10	0140296409
Author	J. M. Coetzee
Audience	General / adult
BISAC	FIC045000, FIC051000
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