Disgrace

Disgrace, novel written by South African author J.M. Coetzee and published in 1999. It was his second work to win the Booker Prize and came to be regarded as a masterpiece.

Disgrace is set in South Africa after the end of apartheid, a time in which social and political structures that had once seemed immutable have crumbled, and many among the once-dominant white population are forced to make difficult adjustments. The protagonist is David Lurie, a 52-year-old twice-divorced white professor of communications and Romantic literature at a fictional university in Cape Town, who is also a womanizer. After he coerces one of his students into sex, she leaves school and makes a complaint against him. At the resultant disciplinary hearing, he admits to his actions but cannot bring himself to meaningfully apologize and so is required to give up his job, plunging him into an unknown future.

Lurie takes refuge with his daughter, Lucy, on her small farm in the Eastern Cape. Lucy boards dogs and sells flowers at a farmer’s market, and Lurie meets and later begins working with both Lucy’s Black African neighbor and co-proprieter, Petrus, and her white friend Bev, who runs an animal shelter. One day, three Black African men break into Lucy’s house and lock Lurie into a bathroom. They shoot and kill all the dogs, rape Lucy, and set Lurie on fire.

Lurie is appalled by his daughter’s refusal to include the rape in her report to the police or to leave the farm. When they attend a party at Petrus’s home to celebrate Petrus’s purchase of land from Lucy, they see one of the attackers at the party, but Lucy refuses any confrontation. The attacker proves to be a relative of Petrus named Pollux. Eventually, Lurie returns to Cape Town but finds that his home there has been ransacked. When he later returns to Lucy’s farm, he learns that the rape has left her pregnant but she refuses an abortion, and she agrees to marriage with Petrus. Lurie returns to working at the animal shelter and continues to work on an opera that he knows he will never complete. He at last recognizes his daughter’s right to live her own life as she sees fit.

Disgrace (which was filmed in 2008) caused fierce debates in South Africa over its portrayal of the new social and political order. Yet the novel’s ethical stance is even more challenging than its painful depiction of some of the country’s problems. It is unclear that Lurie achieves redemption or whether the acknowledgment of loss of power is a sort of redemption.