Disgrace

A BBC Radio 4 Good Read

By: J.M. Coetzee

Narrated by: Jack Klaff

After years teaching Romantic poetry at the Technical University of Cape Town, David Lurie, middle-aged and twice divorced, has an impulsive affair with a student. The affair sours, he is denounced and summoned before a committee of inquiry. Willing to admit his guilt, but refusing to yield to pressure to repent publicly, he resigns and retreats to his daughter Lucy's isolated smallholding.

For a time, his daughter's influence and the natural rhythms of the farm promise to harmonise his discordant life. But the balance of power in the country is shifting. He and Lucy become victims of a savage and disturbing attack which brings into relief all the faultlines in their relationship.

By the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature and twice winner of the Booker Prize.

Critic reviews

What is remarkable about Coetzee’s vision as a novelist is that it remains intensely human, rooted in common experience and replete with failure, doubt and frustration

A masterpiece

Exhilarating... One of the best novelists alive

Coetzee captures with appalling skill the white dilemma in South Africa (Justin Cartwright)

Disgrace explores the furthest reaches of what it means to be human; it is at the frontier of world literature (Geoff Dyer)

A great novel by one of the finest authors writing in the English language today (Russel Celyn Jones)

Disgrace is a defining novel of our time, its apparently simple lyricism belying a grave incomprehension that threatens to sever our world in two. There is an answer, but it is very hard and painful to come to

A searing book, and though it is often called spare, it is delightfully intricate, containing a tissue of literary allusions that are brilliantly used (John Mullan, professor of English and Booker of Bookers Judge)

Told with searing emotional and intellectual honesty, this beautifully written novel is as much a meditation on parenthood, old age and the pursuit of love and beauty as it is a snapshot of a country in turmoil

Such dilemmas are so obviously at the heart of South African politics that the allegorical parallels are inescapable...the issues raised, such as the demands of justice versus the need for reconciliation, are timeless

Harrowing

A harrowing tale, cuts close to the bone for those who have come through the transition in South Africa

Engaging

As sick and as twisted as the main character of the book is, you can not help but be engaged with his story and wonder how much more sick and entitled he is going to behave. The book has a lot of dark themes but they are not themes that we are not familiar with they have just been emphasized in very dark and violating ways. The main characters' obsession with death and desire, Eros and Thanatos are probably what intrigued me the most about this book. Hard to listen to at times because of the graphic nature but very well-written book overall.

A very tough book

I had first heard of this book while I was in varsity and finally decided to give it a listen. I did so with a deep discomfort - gritting my book all the way through it. Very brutal, honest to a fault and deeply moving (not always in a good way). I’ll be thinking a lot about this one in days to come

Nothing likeable about this character at all

I know the book was well written, the characters well drawn and the narrator did a great job. But the main character is just an unlikeable creep. I didn't want to read about him. This from a reader that felt sympathy for the pedophile "Hiroshima Joe" when reading that book. The author wrote in such a way that you just don't care about this man, and I disliked him and his moral compass.

An excellent painful read

(maybe a spoiler) There were several excruciating parts to this novel, starting with the main character’s disgraceful sexual exploitation of a student of his, then moving on to a brutal rape, and also, for me most painful, the euthanasia of many dogs. I especially admired how Coetzee evolved the main character from someone largely indifferent to others’ pain to being able, at last, to apply his literary critical skills to the suffering of others (human and not). It is an amazing story of incomplete but ongoing evolution of empathy.