DISGRACE by JM Coetzee -

This is clearly a great novel, and I hated it.

It is set in South Africa tells the story of an older university professor who has an affair with a student. She complains about it to the authorities, and he refuses to comply with the standard processes, and so is fired. I fear he is making a statement, though what that statement is is not clear. Perhaps that old white men are mad about the removal of their privileges? (I mean, I hear you, I would be mad too. Patriarchy pretty sweet).

He then goes to live with his daughter, who is living on a rural smallholding. She gets gang raped, possibly by the relatives of her foreman. She doesn’t go to the police. Eventually the foreman offers for her to become one of his wives, and she accepts, because she feels to continue to live on the smallholding, she needs the protection of the local community. Apparently, this is because of white guilt. Rather, I say someone has untreated trauma and urgently needs therapy. I need hardly tell you that JM Coetzee himself emigrated to Australia. OF COURSE HE DID. Wikipedia tells me this, but I didn’t need Wikipedia. The book drips with a kind of ‘South Africa is finished’ and ‘white people are cursed’ mindset that I am very familiar with. The professor starts working at a dog shelter and eventually manages to bring himself to put down his favourite stray dog.

Let’s take this, the professor’s reasoning for why his student should sleep with him:

Because 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.

I mean, I don’t know how to deal with it. How can you be so un-self-aware and still be alive? Don’t you keep walking into walls because you don’t know you are alive?

I was annoyed throughout, but I can’t pretend it wasn’t written with great elegance and precision. And even though I hated the protagonist, when he gave up the dog I did have a small cry. So clearly I have very confused feelings about this book.

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