Disgrace

I’m starting to think my love for a book is directly proportional to how difficult it is for me to explain its brilliance. Disgrace is a perfect example. It was nothing like I expected. Based on the back-cover blurb, I was expecting the whole story to be about David's experience dealing with the immediate aftermath of sleeping with a student. But that was really just the initial setup for a much broader narrative full of nuanced themes related to power and accountability and self-awareness and compassion and race and gender and sexual violence. I'm not quite sure how Coetzee was able to cohesively weave together the disparate threads of a professor/student love affair, the management of a dog kill shelter, and the complications of post-apartheid land ownership and living as a single woman in a rural area, but somehow it all felt right.

David is an absolutely despicable character, as evidenced by his mindset: "A woman's beauty does not belong to her alone. It is part of the bounty she brings into the world. She has a duty to share it… She does not own herself. Beauty does not own itself."

And yet, it's impossible for me to hate a character I feel like I understand so well. He is both shockingly self-aware and depressingly myopic: frank about his relationship with the prostitute in the first chapter and unbothered in admitting wrongdoing at the university, yet unable to connect his own mistreatment of women with his daughter’s victimization. He appreciates romantic poetry, but struggles to understand love and compassion in his own life.

There's really no clear moral messaging. It's a story with an emphasis on misogyny, told through the eyes of a misogynist. I'm not sure how much he actually learns and grows at the end. We don't hear a lot from the perspective of women. It is what it is. And yet I think that's all part of what makes it interesting. That, and the stellar writing. Kudos to an author who can tell such a complex story in less than 250 pages.

Book author: J.M. Coetzee