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South African authors - Fiction - |
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Disgrace |
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| Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee Random House (Vintage) 220 pages, 1999 ISBN 0 099 28952 0 Reviewed by our South African Editor, Merilyn Tomkins adams.west@saol.com - Adams Bookshop, Durban, SA Winner of the 1999 Booker Prize. This book is currently short-listed for the prestigious Book Data Award. After years of teaching romantic poetry at the Technical University of Cape Town, Professor David Lurie, middle-aged and twice divorced, has an impulsive affair with a student. The affair sours; he is denounced and summoned before a committee of enquiry. Willing to admit his guilt, but refusing to yield to the pressure to repent publicly, Professor Lurie resigns and retreats to his daughter Lucy's isolated smallholding. For a time, his daughter's influence and the natural rhythm of the farm and the rural community promise to harmonize his discordant life. However, the balance of power in the country is shifting. Professor Lurie and Lucy become victims of a savage and disturbing attack, which brings to light all the faults in their precarious relationship. The author has succeeded in capturing with appalling skill the white dilemma in South Africa. This is a subtle and multi-layered story, as much concerned with politics as it is with physical temptation. The author's prose is superb, chaste and lyrical. At the frontier of world literature, DISGRACE explores the farthest reaches of what it means to be human. A masterpiece - perhaps the best novel to carry off the Booker Prize in a decade. |
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