Disgrace

The verdict's in: I didn't like J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace, as I began to suspect halfway or so through the book (I think I would say that it was "good," and I just didn't "like" it, if that makes any sense).  As Gordo notes in the comments here, tribalism is a major theme in the novel.   All in all this Salon review is pretty good.  Coetzee depicts a troubling world of racial tension, unchecked violence, irreconcilability of "city" and "country," and a failed struggle of human nature against animality.

Disgrace is hugely depressing.  The book is dark, to be sure, but I don't think that's my problem with it: Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness is if anything "darker" and more troubling than Disgrace; one might say the same about Ian McEwan's Amsterdam or Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. Why don't any of these other books depress like Coetzee's novel?  Well, it's just such an unhappy book, one which seemingly espouses acceptance--defeatism, really--as an ideal life principle.  You're allowed to be frightened and outraged reading Heart of Darkness; the narrator shares our hopes and fears; even Kurtz, in his own way, offers hope for improvement.   Amsterdam never quite feels real.   The Jungle (at least now with the book's reality firmly in the past) promises a degree of progress.   But in Disgrace, the text won't allow the reader to wish for things to be different. Main character David Lurie eventually learns a lesson, but it is not the lesson we would have him learn, and in any case it's hard to sympathize with a man who was assaulted as his daughter was raped when he himself fell into "disgrace" by effectively raping one of his students at university.  And while one might not expect a South African post-apartheid book to be bright and sunny (and unlike Conrad's work Coetzee's book is grey and gloomy rather than sweltering midnight), one might expect a Nobel Laureate's work to have a stronger political message than the nihilistic "life sucks, and your actions will only make things worse."

Comments

[matt]

Hello my friend. What a nicely designed site! I feel like I am in a wonderfully lovely library, where I could just roam about and sit for hours, enjoying the books, enjoying the atmosphere. Yes/yes.

[Joe]

hehe