Disgrace

Absolutely appropriate cartoon perhaps via Yoe! Books, though found on FB

She does not resist. All she does is avert herself; avert her lips, avert her eyes. She lets him lay her out on the bed and undress her: she even helps him, raising her arms and then her hips. Little shivers of cold run through her; as soon as she is bare, she slips under the quilted counterpane like a mole burrowing, and turns her back on him.

Not rape, not quite that, but undesired nevertheless, undesired to the core. As though she had decided to go slack, die within herself for the duration, like a rabbit when the jaws of the fox close on its neck. So that everything done to her might be done, as it were, far away.
….
A mistake, a huge mistake. At this moment, he has no doubt, she, Melanie, is trying to cleanse herself of it, of him. He sees her running a bath, stepping into the water, eyes closed like a sleepwalker’s. He would like to slide into a bath of his own.

From the first pages of J. M. Coetzee’s deceptively simple novel, Disgrace, Professor Lurie distances himself, morally, from the reader. Lurie is a South African professor of communications and literature, in his early 50s. He has a weekly appointment with a prostitute who suits him well, she is passive and not passionate; but when he sees her in a restaurant with her two young children, the invisible barrier between them is broken, and he finds himself looking elsewhere for a solution to ‘the problem of sex’, as he puts it. He seduces one of his students, a girl of about 20, and while she is somewhat intrigued by him and his interest in her, she is in no way ready, emotionally, for such a relationship. After a few extremely awkward trysts, she starts to talk to her friends at school about what has happened, and Lurie ends up losing his job and his reputation. His view of the supremacy of a man’s desire over a woman’s power over her own body, her own beauty (he says, which belongs to the world, not to her) is what ultimately seals his fate, as if he would just admit that he did something wrong, and apologize to Melanie and her family, he would simply be censured. Because he will not do so, he is shunned. You would think that by telling you this much of the story, I would have given too much away, but really, the disgrace which Lurie brings upon himself is just the smallest part of the story.

Lurie leaves the city and goes to stay with his daughter, Lucy, on her farm in the country. She boards dogs and grows flowers and produce, which she sells at a weekly market. She is independent, living alone, with only a man named Petrus to help with the work. Petrus would have been Lucy’s employee in the Apartheid era, she would have had some control over him. In this post-Apartheid world, he is a co-proprietor of the farm, is working to build a house and bring his family there.

Lurie and Lucy have an uncomfortable relationship. She calls him by his first name, David, and they hold each other at arm’s length. But she is his daughter, and she loves him, and she wants to help him, so she tells him he is welcome to stay as long as he would like. He loves her, and worries that she will not be safe living out in this isolated country, a country of violence. He finds works with Petrus, and also with a quasi-vet in the area, Bev, with whom Lucy is a close friend.

The events that occur while he is there shake him to the core, and threaten to destroy Lucy. He is no way capable of dealing with the aftermath, but very much wants to.

I won’t go into any more detail here, lest you decide to read this book for yourself. Coetzee writes in a sparse manner, and the book is a quick 220 pages. And while you may tear right through it, the turbulence of emotions in Disgrace will linger with you, and have you thinking about it for days, perhaps weeks.  This is a devastating novel.  There is nothing simple about it.