Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee

Hmm… this book has a lot going for it. It’s short, fast-paced, relaxed (yes, both), fun, and profound. David, a university professor in Cape Town, South Africa(?) and two-time divorcée, begins an affair with one of his female students and it isn’t long before the school finds out and starts hashing out how to deal with the situation. This process is actually pretty hilarious as the deans want David to give a genuine apology but he can’t bring himself to do it. Obviously disturbed by this, the administration decides to discontinue his term at the college so he moves in with his daughter, who shelters homeless dogs, in a rural area. They are soon the victims of a robbery and something more serious. The plot thickens…I just realized that it’s pretty hard to talk about this book without giving too much away, but it as at this point that we see how people act in fear and how senseless it can make us. Despite his disgrace at the first of the novel (and it happens again later on) and his so what perspective on it, David becomes more of the voice of reason. Yet we also get interesting ways of looking at situations in other characters.

I think this book also says a lot about the political landscape of Africa, that of which I know nearly nil about. One of my friends, though, was studying abroad in Botswana and one night he and his friends were walking down the street when a car advertently started coming right for them. My friend didn’t get run over but somehow (I’m not exactly sure) he gashed up his head and was bleeding pretty profusely. His friends had a cell phone but couldn’t speak the native language so they looked at a bystander and motioned for him to use their phone to call the hospital. So they handed him the phone and he ran off with it, stealing it while my friend lay bleeding in the street. This reveals just how cutthroat modern day Africa can still be. And I suspect this is a big motif of this book, though I can’t speak in depth about it.

I will say that Coetzee (phonetically: coo-tsee-uh) has an utterly smooth voice. Beautiful sentences without being showy or complicated at all. The plot is direct and I really like how he doesn’t muck around. For instance, there was both the meeting of the student and the undressing of the student within 20 pages. He also puts in these rhetorical questions in his writing that are absolutely spot-on to the situation. I wish I could extract one for you as an example but I don’t have my copy of the book handy so you’re just gonna have to read it. Love it, though—coming across these rhetorical questions was one of my favorite things about reading this novel. I recommend it. It’s a quick read and, even though serious, it’s quite fun. If my word isn’t enough, this book was the recipient of the 1999 Booker Prize and Coetzee won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003. You might find it hard to see where everything is going in the beginning and maybe even through the middle, but see it to the end. It feels so complete with the last paragraph and the more I think about this book, the more I like it. And I really like thinking that he didn’t put any effort at all into this title. But maybe he did. I dunno. It’s a good one either way.

Just found out that there is a 2008 film adaptation of this starring John Malkovich and holy freaking crap, that's awesome. It also won the International Film Critics' Award.