Disgrace

Author: J.M. Coetzee

Coetzee won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003 and this book one the Booker Prize in 1999. A quick research on Amazon revealed plenty of 4 and 5-star reviews. The book was only a couple of hundred pages with well spaced lines and I needed no more incentive to check it out.

When I started reading the book, I quickly realized why Coetzee is so well regarded in the Literary world. His prose is sparse but to the point. He can quickly move from describing a scene to something more metaphysical without skipping a beat. In Disgrace, the protagonist, David Lurie is a 50+ year old University professor in a South Africa. He is twice divorced and does not have any friends or companions.  He satisfies his sexual urges with a regular visit to a local prostitute. When that ends, he seduces one of his students. Both of these events are described in a rather clinical, without much pathos which makes you feel like a bystander watching someone self-destruct. And that is precisely what happens in the rest of the book. In describing this, Coetzee gets the reader to ponder on much weightier issues like post-apartheid race relations in South Africa and definitely gets you to look at it from an unconventional point of view.