Review of J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace

J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace has an extremely high acclaim to quality ratio. This leads me to wonder who gives out all these prizes,. I am now certain that it is all political, or at best academic, it has little to do with how good a story is told.

The story itself is notgreat, but neither is it altogether bad. Neither is the writing for that matter. It is the story of a professor of literature and communication in Cape Town, South Africa (That is what literature people call forshadowing, in this case of a very trendy PC story). At a certain point he has an affair with one of his students and the affair, for some mysterious reason goes awry, and she denounces him. Not being overly excited by his job, and somehow saddled with some odd principles, he allows himself to be fired and leaves his post at the university.

He then goes on to farm country, SA to spend some time with his hippy, lesbian daughter. One gets the impression from the novel that there he is supposed to attempt to find himself and fail due to his own (old male?) stubbornness. Actually in the end he does not really fail.

Soon after he arrives three black men enter his daughter's house, burglarize it, gang-rape his daughter and set him on fire. The daughter is obviously traumatized, but refuses to do anything to help herself. She keeps the child, and refuses to tell the police about the rape. It also becomes obvious that her black neighbor/assistant who she implicitly trusts was involved. It is likely that he orchestrated it. She knows this, but accepts it as her fate, almost as punishment for the immoral history of white people in South Africa. She ultimately agrees to marry this neighbor, as a sort of pragmatic fiction, even as one of the rapists lives in his house.

Do not really bother reading this novel. It seems like it was written in 1999 just so all those trendy lit crit students who are doing PhDs in stuff like "Post-colonial Literature", or "The New South African Novel" or "Truth and Reconciliation Literature" . . . will have something new to write about. There is no deep meaning, and one gets little insight in to what South Africa is like. One is not driven to feel for any of the characters except possibly for the daughter who is obviously a victim of her own stupidity.