Bhawana Somaaya

A few months ago I met a friend for coffee and she suggested that we gather like minded people and start a book club. It was not difficult, we spoke to our friends and within no time we had put together a group of enthusiasts. We would decide a book that all of us would read and agreed to meet for discussion the following month over a weekend. We take turns in playing the hostess and in reviewing the book. The evening begins with snacks and small talks after which we get down to serious business. Every body gets a chance to speak their mind on the plot and the characters. Some of us sometimes hate the book and some of us sometimes hate the characters still we adhere to our commitment and seriously read and make notes.

We started with The Last Lecture, a lot of us found it too heavy and dragging in parts, then Zoya Factor-I felt it was too flighty and disapproved of the excess use of Hinglish even though it is an accepted form of language today. I had problems with the message of the book because however inadvertently it supports superstition. It was an ordeal to complete the book and I seriously suggested that members consider reading separate books and share the experiences at the meeting.

Everybody disagreed and confirmed Disgrace for the next meeting and I was assigned the task of the review. I first watched the film, then read the book and finally researched details of the author background. Presenting all three:

Disgrace the film
Like most books turned into films this one too pales in comparison but still manages to capture the stillness and the sadness of the prevailing circumstances. To be fair the husband-wife team of director Steve Jacobs and screenwriter Anna-Maria Monticelli are faithful to the narrative. John Malcovich portrays David as a character who is not merely the sacrificial white lamb of black revenge. Haines as Lucy incarnates the spirit of white reconciliation in the new South Africa.

If the writer scores with his intricate descriptions in the book, the cinematographer more than makes up with his picturesque frames of the city and the countryside. The book is more layered and comprehensive, the film leaves a lot unsaid but is still an impelling watch of a South Africa in transition and the shift of power.

Book Review
Disgrace is Nobel Laureate Coetzee’s first book to deal explicitly with post-apartheid South Africa.

What makes the book interesting is the contrast between the urban life of an older-generation white male in Cape Town and the rural life where suffering, death and brutality are daily occurrences. The book epitomizes South Africa today and comments on gender and racial discrimination.

It tells the story of an English professor David Lurie, who seduces a confused interracial student. On the surface it seems like a story about his relationships with women, but in fact Disgrace is a story about what these relationships reveal about the man.

The opening sentence of the book describes Lurie as 52, divorced and somebody who has solved the problem of sex rather well. Lurie obtains satisfaction from weekly visits to the same prostitute, a woman he knows as Soraya, but it’s an arrangement that soon falls apart. Just another whore will not do for him, so he seduces a reluctant student, Melanie Isaacs. It is an awkward relationship as Melanie appears unsure of what she wants. She is unequipped to deal with the professor’s advances and not entirely adverse to the flattering attention but she is a reluctant participant, as was Soraya.

Lurie fails to judge the parameters of the permissible in a relationship probably because all he only knows to ask rather demand sex, even though what he really craves from the relationships is compassion. He is a man of extreme logic and confidence and when charged with sexual harassment chooses not to defend himself. He pleads guilty but expresses no remorse. Lurie forces them to impose the harshest punishment on him and, leaves the university in utter disgrace.

Lurie visits his daughter Lucy, who has a plot of land in the countryside and lives by selling flowers at a local market and boarding dogs. Like Lurie she has not been successful in relationships. Her lover Helen has moved out, leaving her all alone. She has a turbulent relationship with her father but the two come closer when three hoodlums attack their home and rape Lucy. The violation is not about sex but subjection and subjugation. She chooses not to admit to the police that she was raped for she has little faith in the system as she explains to Lurie, “What happened to me is a purely private matter. In another time, in another place it might be held to be a public matter. But in this place, at this time, it is not. It is my business, mine alone.”
Disgrace is a book about South Africa, the race, history and politics. Lurie and his daughter are white, their attackers black. The situation becomes complex because Lucy has a black hand, Petrus, who asserts his independence. Power shifts throughout the novel, steadily from Lucy to Petrus when we discover that the oppressor is a relative of his, a disturbed boy who later moves in as Lucy’s neighbour.

The book reflects little patience or respect for authorities or procedures. The police inform they have located Lurie’s stolen truck, so Lurie drives to the Vehicle Theft Unit and is shown a car that’s obviously not his. To add injury to insult, the culprits caught with the stolen vehicle are released on bail. When Lurie returns to Cape Town, he discovers his home ransacked but he doesn’t bother calling the police for he knows it is futile.

All the characters live in a world uncomfortably in transition. Aging Lurie, who can now expect no better than to bed the woman who puts animals to sleep feels sorry for himself when he says, “Let me not forget this day…After the sweet young flesh of Melanie Isaacs, this is what I have come to. This is what I will have to get used to, this and even less’

Lucy’s situation becomes more precarious, but she won’t accept Lurie’s offers of escape. He’s willing to send her to Holland, but she’s not ready to abandon her small piece of land and what life she has here, despite the compromises she will have to make. She has not gotten over the rape, but is determined to become a good mother and a good person.

David Lurie who has been a failure in love all his life chooses to for once support a woman in his life, his daughter. It is evident that he is changing too. On the last page of the book, David helps a dog into nothingness. The blankness ascribed by the colonial regimes to the land and cultures of Africa is now inverted, absorbed by an individual who is an ancestor of those regimes. It is a profoundly moving ending, and its emotional power is all the more impressive for being attached to a protagonist who has, until that point, seldom evoked empathy from the reader.

The father and daughter are strong-willed but misguided, unwilling to do the obvious or simple. When Lurie in search of peace, submits his dog to the boarder and confirms “Yes, I am giving him up” we are allowed a catharsis—a catharsis of the protagonist and his disgrace, a catharsis that signals a difficult future, but an end to suffering and oppression. We are left with no illusion that the rest of David’s life will be comfortable or easy, but we are given a way to envision a dignity within it.

Coetzee’s writing is powerful and compelling though not always a productive read. The voices (there is a lot of dialogue) and descriptions sharp and true. The book moves forward somewhat uncertainly, but this mirrors the hero’s current mind frame. The author does not impose an easy resolution, and the uncertainty is a part of the attraction. Disgrace is a troubling work, of troubled people in troubled times that are ill-equipped and unwilling to face the new realities of post-apartheid South Africa.

The Booker Prize
Coetzee won the 1999 Booker Prize for this novel, a chronicle of one man’s passion and abuse. The book offers no solutions for post-apartheid South African white men who build security fences or for solitary women who are brutalized. It is the story of David Lurie who falls from grace time and again. It is a story of self-redemption and optimism that if David who represents the upper educated class of old South Africa—can find meaning in life again, then perhaps, the disgrace of apartheid can evolve into something better as well.

About the author
JMCoetzee was born in Cape Town, South Africa on 9 February 1940 to Afrikener parents. His father was an occasional lawyer, government employee and a sheep farmer, and his mother a schoolteacher. The family spoke English at home, but Coetzee spoke Afrikaans with other relatives. The family was descended from early Dutch settlers dating to the 17th century.
Coetzee spent most of his early life in Cape Town as recounted in his fictionalized memoir, Boyhood (1997). The family moved to Worcester when Coetzee was eight after his father lost his government job due to disagreements over the state’s apartheid policy. He attended St. Joseph’s College, a Catholic school in the Cape Town and later studied mathematics and English at the University of Cape Town, receiving his Bachelor of Arts with Honours in English in 1960 and his Bachelor of Arts with Honours in Mathematics in 1961.

He is known as reclusive and avoids publicity to an extent that he did not collect either of his two Booker Prizes in person. Author Rian Malan has remarked Coetzee is a man of monkish discipline and dedication. He does not drink, smoke or eat meat and cycles long distance daily to keep fit. He spends an hour at his writing-desk every morning, seven days a week. A colleague who has worked with him for more than a decade claims to have seen him laugh just once. An acquaintance has attended several dinner parties where Coetzee has not uttered a single word all through the evening.

He migrated to Australia unable to accept the lawlessness in his land of birth and is now a bonafide citizen of it.

Bhawana Somaaya
www.bhawanasomaaya.com