This was actually a novel that was assigned for a class at Princeton--contemporary fiction, with the rather remarkable Professor Benjamin Widiss. I cannot fully express the impact that great professors have on students; even if he never knows it, I will be forever grateful to him for listening and for leading me on a fantastic discovery of some works that have since become forever ingrained in who I am as a person (Lolita, for instance). He was also incredibly helpful and kind when it came to advising my decision to switch from the English to Comp Lit department. (He, himself, is an English professor, so imagine how awesome he is to have recognized my desire to explore literature in a realm not his own!)
But, to get on with the review. I certainly recall reading bits of this for the class but, if we're being honest, I'm pretty sure I didn't get a chance to read the whole thing. (Hey, it happens. Especially in college. That's why I'm atoning by reading it now.)
So first and foremost, let's get the obvious out of the way. Coetzee won a Nobel Prize for this book--A FRIGGIN' NOBEL PRIZE!--in addition to the Booker Prize, which is also nothing to thumb your nose at. And yet, I'm not truly sure I agree that this novel is one of the best I've ever read.
On the surface, I think the plot is interesting. It tells the tale of David Lurie, a communications professor at a South African university who hates teaching communications and actually considers himself to be more of a literature scholar. He has an affair with one of his students, the shame of which leads to his ruin and his ultimate disgrace across multiple layers of his life--with his exwife, his daughter, the student, her family, his scholarly circle, etc, etc. Don't lets beat us over the head with the title, eh, Coetzee?
On the one hand, I think there are moments in the novel that present interesting, compelling criticism of human nature, especially with the backdrop of the apartheid in South Africa. I don't want to give away what I consider to be, probably, the acme of the novel, which involves, in a more specific way, David's daughter and her relationship with the African man who works on her property, but, essentially, I enjoyed the sort of awkward tension that builds from that moment, and the way in which Coetzee carefully deals with the broken people that result from the incident. I, in general, am a huge fan of broken characters--there is always something beautiful about them--so I'm totally on board here.
At the same time, while I can probably understand the political reasons for this novel's receipt of a Nobel--its address of questions like racism, rape, segregation, and the fundamental human emotion of loneliness--I also find that this novel is somewhat less profound and more straightforward than I would have liked, all things considered. It seemed to sort of trail along without very much change or development on the part of the narrator. Don't get me wrong, here. I liked the tone and the voice, but, overall, I felt that the hopelessness in the novel is hyper-present in the language, which was, for me anyway, a bit of a turnoff. I can certainly appreciate the sad / lonely / depressed kind of text that I would consider this to be, but I find myself losing interest and getting restless when this hopelessness is present for too long, without any sort of humor or release. Even Lolita, a prime tragedy, is littered with Humbert's jokes, allusions, etc, which all serve to break up the monotony of depression. In Disgrace, I didn't feel as much of that and it sort of made the whole thing very bleak and grey and drawn for me. Perhaps that was Coetzee's intent, but I didn't love the effect.
What I do totally have to respect, though, is that Lurie is one of those characters that you want to hate because he's not exactly a good guy, and yet since the story largely follows him, you sort of start rooting for him by the end. I typically don't like books like that (ahem, Atonement), but in this case it really worked.
At the same time, while I keep listing things I liked, there's something I can't quite put my finger on that kept me from loving this book. Maybe because it survives in a world of complete extremes, and ones that fall irresistibly into the abyss of depression. The student he has an affair with, for instance, would have been legally old enough to engage in the affair without it being some sort of pedophilia, rendering it as less of a big deal than it was made out to be in the novel; two consenting adults, irregardless of their student / teacher relationship are, after all, two consenting adults. The kind that have relationships all the time, everywhere.That being said, rape / accused rape is in fact a very a huge deal, but Coetzee was so ambiguous about whether or not it was rape that that also didn't quite seem to cover why it turned into such a huge deal. To give him credit, it's hard to be ambiguous about something like that, so perhaps therein lies his skill... It felt very much like a bad Humbert Humbert kind of sequence to me, mixed with, perhaps, a paperback novel kind of sex scene--all in all an awkward combination at best.
It's sort of like, the things Lurie does that are supposed to be his undoing don't really seem that awful to me. Maybe I'm totally wrong, but maybe not. I also felt like Lurie's relationships with people are unnatural and forced most of the time. While I get the point of that with his daughter, to some extent through the context of the plot, it feels off to me that 1. Lurie is such an awkward, strange person that it's shocking anyone would talk to him in the first place, and 2. He's simultaneously supposed to be really attractive and all that jazz, but he doesn't seem that way at all to me.
I feel like, maybe, if I understood more about the political climate in Africa, I would have felt differently about this book and would have been even more effected in a profound way by his daughter's plight, which, even without that background was moving and harrowing. Ultimately, though, for my money, I liked the book, but probably not enough to have awarded it a Nobel Prize in Literature; I guess that while the topic might be profound, the literary aspect of it all, the beautiful language, etc, just wasn't there for me as much as in other novels. Coetzee, despite his affairish plot, is no Nabokov.
FINAL VERDICT:
*** and 1/2 out of *****
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