His daughter refuses to press charges, even though one of her assailants is a former “dog man” on the property. The farm is attacked by a gang of black men, Lucy is raped, and Lurie beaten up. But the conflicts of South Africa will never go away. Country life in the eastern Cape, and Lucy’s company, seem to offer the prospect of sanity. It’s here that Disgrace, moving up a gear, begins seriously to engage with the aftermath of apartheid.Īt first, there is hope. “Pass sentence,” he says, “and let us get on with our lives.” He retires to the country to live with his daughter Lucy, and address the meaning of this self-inflicted injunction. He will not give his bien pensant academic tormentors the satisfaction they crave. In his mind, Lurie has committed no offence he prefers to get fired and suffer disgrace than endure a politically correct process of rehabilitation. David Lurie, on whom Coetzee visits a contemporary catalogue of humiliations, is a fairly average, twice-married, fiftysomething lecturer at a Capetown university who, accused of sexual misconduct with one of his students, chooses not to defend himself but rather to suffer his fate with a noble, slightly grumpy, stoicism. In an apt connection to the beginnings of the 100 best novels series nearly two years ago, Disgrace has been compared by some critics to the work of Daniel Defoe ( No 2 in this series).
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