Disgrace

I had previously read J. M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello which I found to be dry and dull- basically a treatise on animal rights and the writing process, both of which are interesting topics, but not when handled in the 'novelesque' form used in that book. Disgrace was much better.

Coetzee, a South African and Nobel prize winner, writes here about David Lurie, a divorced professor whose affair with a student goes spectacularly wrong and who finds himself unemployed and at very loose ends. He decides on an extended stay with his daughter Lucy who lives alone on a relatively remote farm plot which she shares with Petrus, a black man with his own ambitions. Lurie has just begun to re-establish a relationship with Lucy and to understand her choice of lifestyles when the two are brutally attacked by a trio of young men. The heart of the novel lies in the various responses to this event by the main characters.

I really liked this novel because Coetzee is masterful at making the emotional barriers and distance between the father and daughter palpable. It is also an engaging meditation on the complexities of racial interaction in South Africa, post apartheid. The style is descriptive but economical, and Coetzee isn't afraid to feature a protagonist who is, on many levels, unlikable. Compelling.