Status Updates From Disgrace

The marriage of Cronus and Harmony, unnatural . Cronus instead of Cadmus, that’s pretty dark of Lurie, and no mistake by Coetzee, I’m sure… (p190)

20. Back in the Capetown house, burgled and plundered, university and old neighbourhood, Lurie wears a grim burlap cloth of atonement. And then seemingly out of nowhere, the Byron opera finally happens when he switches focus to an older ‘dumpy’ Teresa on a banjo, with Byron appearing ghostly from the underworld. Scenes and language equally beautiful…

On those pine-needles Byron had his Teresa — ‘timid as a gazelle,’ he called her — rumpling her clothes, getting sand into her underwear (the horses standing by all the while, incurious), and from the occasion a passion was born that kept Teresa howling to the moon for the rest of her natural life in a fever that has set him howling too, after his manner .

A woman in love, wallowing in love; a cat on a roof, howling; complex proportions swirling in the blood, distending the sexual organs, making the palms sweat and voice thicken as the soul hurls its longings to the skies. That is what Sorays and the others are for: to suck the complex proteins out of his blood like snake venom, leaving him clear-headed and dry. (p185)

19. Dinner with the Isaacs’

Lurie mentions he has been in a state of disgrace, while I thought the real disgrace is yet to come. Is the eponymous disgrace merely a humble lesson? I expected more shame, more isolation. Of course it’s tough to lose your livelihood and colleagues, your surroundings. But the attack has nothing to with it. I’m confused and a bit… disappointed? Let’s wait for the final part.

18. Lucie speaks. And writes.

How, he thinks to himself, can a man in this state find words, find music that will bring back the dead?

17. Bev, flushed. Lurie momentarily decent but then self-righteous again

…how the whiff of scandal excites women. Less decent though…

But I was the troublemaker in this case .

Seems to me like a decent thing to say, taking responsibility for his own mess…

16. Incinerator

He saves the honour of corpses because there is no one else stupid enough to do it. That is what he is becoming: stupidity, daft, wrongheaded.

Oh. Now I recall how upsetting this book was.