This is tricky. On the one hand, I thought Disgrace was great, but on the other, I’m not sure I understood it. Half way through the book and there I was, firmly convinced I was reading a novel about power and powerlessness, gender and race, but by the end I was thoroughly confused and not at all sure about what I’d just read.I suppose that's an endorsement. I feel that good books, like good paintings or good pieces of music, are supposed to be complex, they’re supposed be a bit opaque and demanding, to work on multiple levels, engaging us in different ways at different moments. At some point, however, I felt like Coetzee lost me, or rather I lost him.
His prose is excellent; sharp, clear and short sentences that convey complex themes and emotions simply. The story, about a college lecturer, David Lurie, who retreats to his daughter’s farm after resigning in disgrace following an affair with one of his students, is somehow both straight-forward and deeply strange. A terrible incident involving his daughter forces him to reflect, though never explicitly, upon his own actions, and throws into relief the gendered power relations which structured and facilitated his affair with his student. His glib rationalizations, following the affair, about the rights of Eros seem particularly distasteful when viewed retrospectively through the lens of his daughter’s ordeal, and we are asked to think about the differences and similarities between Lurie’s affair and what his daughter went through.
However, I couldn’t really get a handle on the changes that subsequently came over Lurie. I couldn’t quite reconcile it with his character. I just didn’t get it, basically. I didn’t understand the particular form of these changes, why he started to care more for the dogs at the animal shelter, for example. But, I'm sure the fault is mine. This is a book that I probably need to read again, carefully, to really pick up on all of its nuances and meanings.
