If you’re the type of reader who takes solace from a relatively unsympathetic protagonist whose life is far worse than yours, you just might be attracted to J. M. Coetzee’s 1999 Booker Prize winner, Disgrace. On the surface, it tells the story of a fifty-something college professor who has an affair with one of his young students. This ill-conceived misadventure starts a series of events that go predictably (as the title obviously gives away) down hill. But the plot of Coetzee’s searingly brilliant novel is merely the skeleton that holds the blood, bone, marrow, muscle and flesh of a look into the darker recesses of aging, loneliness, withdrawal and alienation. You’ll notice I didn’t add “fat” to my metaphor. That’s because there isn’t an ounce of it in Disgrace.

Coetzee’s unsparing chronicle of David Lurie’s downward spiral takes him from Cape Town’s spectacularly beautiful coast to the hauntingly sterile vastness of South Africa’s interior. And in so doing, it also delineates Lurie’s wholly inadequate ability to make any real connection to his young lover, his lesbian daughter, or the potential friends and real enemies he meets along the way. What is it that isolates an individual even when he’s surrounded by those who wish him well? What is it that keeps him from
appreciating happenstance? Or makes him recoil from those who might help him even though they have precious little reason to do so. Coetzee wastes no adjectives exploring these questions as psychology. He is more than content to simply select his verbs with such precision that behavior alone achieves what mere moralizing never could.

A South African native, Coetzee lived in England prior to moving to the United States. After graduating with a PhD in English from the University of Texas in Austin, he taught English in Buffalo, New York before returning to his homeland. He left for the states again in the early eighties and held positions at Johns Hopkins University, Stanford, Harvard and the University of Chicago. In 2002 he emigrated to Australia. And in 2003 he won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Disgrace was actually one of the books that influenced the Fiction Fortune Hunter’s novel The Blunder. J. M. Coetzee’s work has been an inspiration to many an author and a joy (realizing joy can often be found in the deepest, darkest places) to readers around the world.

If stark landscapes, sparse prose, incisive wit and an abundance of intelligence whets your fiction appetite, bite into Disgrace. The initial shock might be bitter, but the aftertaste will be sweet.

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