Disgrace

by J.M. Coetzee
Disgrace
published
April 6th 2000 (first published 1999) by Vintage UK
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binding
Paperback, 224 pages

literary awards
Booker Prize Winner 1999; 1999 National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist

isbn
0099289520   (isbn13: 9780099289524)

description
David Lurie is hardly the hero of his own life, or anyone else's. At 52, the protagonist of Disgrace is at the end of his professional and roma...more





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Eleni
04/28/08

I am traveling to Tanzania this summer with a group of seven other students and in preparation for our trip, we were assigned to read two books written by African authors. I choose the novel Disgrace by John Maxwell Coetzee, a South African author who won the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Disgrace is the story of David Lurie, a white professor of English at a technical university in Cape Town, South Africa. He is a lonely man, twice divorced, who craves adventure because of his discontent in his m...more
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Liza
02/10/08

Read in December, 2007
I would like very much to be able to coherently refute this novel. After finishing it I felt as though I had maybe been taken in because while reading it I accepted its premise(s), but afterwards I wondered if what had seemed true really held up to the glare of daylight.

There was a review by James Wood that I liked a lot, and here is a quote from it: “But people like novels that, however intelligently, tell them what to think, that table ideas and issues - novels that are discussable. Abo...more
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Shannon
Shannon rated it: 5 of 5 stars5 of 5 stars5 of 5 stars5 of 5 stars5 of 5 stars
05/27/08

bookshelves: 2007, bookclub, contemporary-fiction, favourite
Read in September, 2007
I had had no interest in reading Disgrace for many years but am now thoroughly glad I did, especially with the movie adaptation coming out (starring John Malkovich).

It's a quick read - I read it in about 6 hours (non-continual) - and very light on its feet. For all that, it deals with many political, cultural, racial and social issues and is definitely worthy of some in-depth study at college or university level.

David Lurie is a white Professor at Cape Town Technical University; s...more
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Maria
07/20/08

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.
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  2 comments

She-Who-Reads
bookshelves: academia, africa, animalrights, disturbing, gender, literary, race, rape, sexualpolitics, thoughtprovoking, worthrereading
Read in July, 2007
I literally just finished this book a few minutes ago, so I have not by any means worked though all of my reactions to it yet. It is written in a very spare, emotionally distanced style, even though it deals with very emotional topics. It is a page-turner, an absorbing, fast read that keeps you anxious to find out what happens next -- but that seems almost incidental, besides the point. I thoroughly disliked the main character, David Lurie -- he is unbelievably arrogant and chauvinistic -- bu...more
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Jamie
02/19/08

Read in February, 2008
recommended to Jamie by: Miina
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Philip
09/19/08

Disgrace is a novel of a man’s, even a family’s decline. David Lurie is a university teacher, the kind of teacher who was at home with academic material that current course requirements no longer demand. He is also divorced, twice, and even on his best form he has to grapple with the trials and tribulations that his frayed life and career present.

He needs regular sex and visits a prostitute with regularity, always the same one, and harbours suspicions that he provides her with more than ...more
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Marigold
Read in August, 2008
Quite possibly the most depressing great book I’ve ever read! Still not sure what to think of this – it may take me quite a while to process it. This is a novel with no mercy. Setting – South Africa, just after the end of apartheid. I don’t even know where to start in saying what it’s about, without retelling the story. It’s about David, a 52-year old professor whose life is changed by disgrace and (perhaps) redemption. It’s about his daughter Lucy whose life is (perhaps) changed b...more
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Marguerite
Read in June, 2008
I thought this was a beautiful study in black and white -- and not just the obvious skin colors in modern South Africa. Coetzee's David Lurie is a throwback in many ways, stuck teaching communications at a post-apartheid technical university after being a professor of languages/literature at a more ivory-tower institution. He's indifferent about his students, and he makes no impression on them -- until he beds one of them. Then he becomes an outcast and goes to his daughter's rural farm rather i...more
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Felicity Ford
Felicity rated it: 2 of 5 stars2 of 5 stars2 of 5 stars2 of 5 stars2 of 5 stars
08/06/08

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Ritz
01/19/08

bookshelves: autor_c_d
Read in January, 2008
recommended to Ritz by: Alexis Romero
La quinta estrella me la reservo porque el libro me entristeció y no puedo decir que me guste completamente algo que me entristece.

Desgracia gira en torno a la renuncia. Es una lectura dinámica narrada en tercera persona que permite conocer al “erudito” Profesor David Lauri, aunque de un modo bastante íntimo el narrador se ahorra la descripción de ciertos pasajes mórbidos y sádicos, pero sin evitar el horror, el espanto, ni la desgracia.

Sabemos lo que sabe Lauri y vemos lo que...more
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Andy
06/19/07

bookshelves: readownedloved
Rarely have I read and loved so thoroughly depressing of a writer as Coetzee. That's an endorsement, isn't it? No, he's not so much depressing as it is that he does not sugar coat the stark and often unhappy nature of reality. Many of my friends and I have had discussions on the nature of "happiness", and what is it, and how elusive this grandiose idea of how we are supposed to be able to be "happy" and free to pursue it, etc...and then we have so much literature and cinem...more
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arjun
03/11/07

Read in August, 2005
I just finished reading JM Coetzee's Disgrace. I have read 2 other books by him and think that he is an
excellent author. Disgrace is about an old white South-African
professor who has sex with his student and gets expelled as a
consequence. Later he goes and lives in the countryside with his
daughter, but even that doesn't end happily as her house gets burgled
by some Africans, and the daughter gets raped. There is some intense
description of what goes through the daughter's mind after th...more
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Suzanne
Read in July, 2008
This is a brilliantly written, literary novel in the tradition of Conrad's Heart of Darkness. The canvas is South Africa and South Africa's tragic history of racial strife and economic struggle. The location is essential to the narrative and provides the electrical current sparking the explosions of violence, violation, captivity, despair and acceptance?? as the main characters struggle against their inner "animalness".
The main character is a male English professor who teaches R...more
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Bryant
09/10/08

Read in September, 2008
In this book, J.M. Coetzee refrains from sacrificing plot to ideas or vice versa. Both the story itself and the manner of its telling compel. Yet the coiled energy of Coetzee's prose, delivering up zippy asides all along the page-turning way, can also produce an unexpected convulsion that does not jibe with the celerity of the story: we want to turn the page to see what happens, but Coetzee's cogent commentary makes turning the page backward, re-reading, all the more necessary and appealing.
...more
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Kathleen
Kathleen rated it: 3 of 5 stars3 of 5 stars3 of 5 stars