Disgrace

Name: Disgrace
Author: J.M. Coetzee

J.M. Coetzee · 1999

David Lurie is a disgraced professor who has no language for the new world he finds himself in. Coetzee's prose is stripped to bone. The novel refuses answers about post-apartheid South Africa; it argues that there is no redemption, only something lived through. Won the Booker in 1999. Coetzee took the Nobel four years later.

The case against

on the farm chapters
“country life is not therapy but ordeal, not a pastoral but a war of attrition.”
Adam Mars-Jones · The Guardian, 1999
on the characters
“The characters are so flatly presented that we cannot fully enter into their mental worlds”
Carol Iannone · Commentary, 2000
on David Lurie
“I found it difficult – especially as a female reader – to warm to him.”
Evie Robinson · Pi Media, 2020
on the Byron chapters
“we could have done without the Byron bits.”
a Substack review