A little `oomph'

By Christine Welsh
(“Disgrace” by J.M. Coetzee, Secker and Warburg, 1999, 220 pages)

J.M. Coetzee vividly tells a gentleman's tale, ridden with self imposed guilt and shame, in his 1999 Booker Prize winning novel “Disgrace”. The simplicity of the title however, is not foretelling of the nature of the complex story we are about to consume. Some of the issues included are divorce, racism, class distinction, gender, homosexuality, rape, and animals' rights.

Perhaps, then, it would be more appropriate to say that the reader is consumed by the story. Each page is devoured in search of the next as the reader lives in disgrace through the life of David Lurie, the gentleman whose tale is being told.

After a scandalous affair with one of his more intriguing female students, Lurie is forced to leave his mediocre teaching position in Cape Town and escape to his daughter Lucy’s kennel/farm in the country. She helps him find work at the makeshift office of the nearby Dr. Kevorkian of the veterinary world. The father and daughter also spend some time attempting to repair their broken relationship, but that road is one on which every baby step forward is accompanied by two gigantic steps backward.

Lucy lives alone. She is white, female, and her lover recently moved out, leaving her susceptible to a lot more than just stares. She takes advantage of the generous help that her neighbor provides as he is a local and is knowledgeable about farming and of the life and culture in that part of South Africa. Some morally bankrupt natives then take advantage of her in the scene that is most likely to be permanently tattooed on your conscience.

The attack is not only on Lucy, but also on the dogs in the kennel, David and David's car (which is stolen) leaving him feeling stranded with a bad case of city mouse/country mouse syndrome. Like an addict, he anxiously delves into his dream to claim fame in the form of an opera (written by him, starring a dog) and eventually moves out of his daughter's home, taking a flat in Grahamstown to continue with his newly established life instead of returning to Cape Town.

This powerful novel concludes with David learning about acceptance: of his life tasks, his dharma, and the idea that beauty does not always come bound in pretty packages.

Not an uncommonly seen word in the English language, disgrace may have lost some of its “oomph”. Therefore, I encourage each and every one of you to look it up. Get the formal definition of disgrace sometime while you read this novel, because it is quite an excellent and potent summation of just what the book is about: having one's honor stripped away, being squashed into a state quite lacking in grace, being put to shame. And it is thus that Coetzee unravels the life of David Lurie in his eighth work of
fiction, “Disgrace”. Coetzee has also published numerous works of nonfiction.