All it's cracked up to be. A tough but fair indictment of men. I'd never read anything like this, subtle and direct, not over the top, which culminated in a twist that broadens and sharpens the message of the book. (Don't want to spoil it). Apartheid and Africa are the backdrops but this is a book about men and women and the life we're in. Read this.

I just finished J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace last night, and woke up this morning thinking that it was loathsome in almost every regard. The very bad behavior of the protagonist is punished, without exception, by the terrible and gratuitous suffering of women, homosexuals, and animals.

Just in case you don't get the point, his redemption, his apotheosis, is seen through his trying to write an opera -- the composition process beautifully well described but founded on the awful, shamelessly sadistic suffering of its female protagonist. Coetzee permits himself literally to scapegoat his repellent hero's suffering on to an abandoned 19th century woman. Asked how to keep the attention of jaded Paris audiences of the Belle Epoque, Victorien "Tosca" Sardou replied, Torture the women. Spielberg's wet t-shirt scenes in Schindler's List spring to mind.

The book is touted as a brave face-to-face encounter with post-apartheid south Africa, which consists, apparently, of miscegenation of every kind, punished by panels composed of mixed race or South Asian women's libber harpies in charge of human rights, or untrammelled by worthless police. The protagonist starts by screwing a prostitute with dark-haired children, presumably Indian, and moves on to a 20-year-old student named Isaacs. His punishment -- literally, his disgrace -- is that his Lesbian daughter should be raped by three black Africans, and not only not bring charges, but not get an abortion, and not leave her hopeless flower business farm in the countryside. Worse, he is forced to screw a deeply unattractive woman who euthanizes the few animals not brutally slaughtered or brutally permitted to reproduce by rapacious, multiplying, mentally deficient, congenitally immoral, and improvident blacks. In case you don't get the point that women are in charge now, on the last page he brings the one dog he has been able to care for to the killer woman for euthanizing. Because he can't keep it up on his own any more.

The misogynism cascading from subsidiary passages entailing dialogue spoken by his ex-wife, or the demands of the educated women of the academic panel which investigates his affair with Isaacs (only the men on the panel are semi-humane) is awful to feel.

And so on.

Um, no.

If I want real black and white race relations, I'll just stick to George Pelecanos. Or The Wire.

The spareness of the prose disguises it, as I've suggested, until you've slept on it. It's a time bomb of nastiness.

Ugh.

The quick-moving, complex story that is Disgrace is somewhat hard to follow, but provides an interesting read through the narrative focus on the felon rather than the victim. When David Lurie turns to his daughter Lucy's farm in the country, Coetzee's ability to spark the reader's sympathy of the womanizing old man gives the story a whole new meaning by introducing the complexity of Lurie's character. As Lurie redefines his life, the reader gains insight into the reflective predator while maintaining sympathy for the victim. For example, his newfound love and respect of animals opposes his initial conceited view of the world. Additionally, the events in the plot that cause Lurie to act as the hero introduce yet another aspect of his contradictory character to consider. The character traits of the accused introduce a complicated irony to face the reader's initial, straightforward disapproval of Lurie. This complexity is intriguing to comprehend and makes Disgrace impossible to lie down.
While the complex nature of Lurie's personality bends the reader's mind over its seemingly conflicting quality, it also impedes the reader's comprehension at times. Most of the time, the words are creative, understandable choices that convey the message very well; however, even when the writing isn't crystal clear, Coetzee's literary mastery allows the reader to muster the meaning and continue the appealing story. Coetzee creates a very interesting story and unravels an unfortunate event through the eyes of the villain, which provides a surprisingly enjoyable read.