Coetzee, J.M. Disgrace ISBN 13: 9780436204890

Disgrace - Hardcover

9780436204890: Disgrace
View all copies of this ISBN edition:
 
 
Now a major motion picture starring John Malkovich.

A divorced, middle-aged English professor finds himself increasingly unable to resist affairs with his female students. When discovered by the college authorities, he is expected to apologize and repent in an effort to save his job, but he refuses to become a scapegoat in what he sees as a show trial designed to reinforce a stringent political correctness.

He preempts the authorities and leaves his job, and the city, to spend time with his grown-up lesbian daughter on her remote farm. Things between them are strained — there is much from the past they need to reconcile — and the situation becomes critical when they are the victims of a brutal and horrifying attack.

In spectacularly powerful and lucid prose, Coetzee uses all his formidable skills to engage with a post-apartheid culture in unexpected and revealing ways. This examination into the sexual and political law lines of modern South Africa as it tries desperately to start a fresh page in its history is chilling, uncompromising and unforgettable.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

Review:
David Lurie is hardly the hero of his own life, or anyone else's. At 52, the protagonist of Disgrace is at the end of his professional and romantic game, and seems to be deliberately courting disaster. Long a professor of modern languages at Cape Town University College, he has recently been relegated to adjunct professor of communications at the same institution, now pointedly renamed Cape Technical University:
Although he devotes hours of each day to his new discipline, he finds its first premise, as enunciated in the Communications 101 handbook, preposterous: "Human society has created language in order that we may communicate our thoughts, feelings and intentions to each other." His own opinion, which he does not air, is that the origins of speech lie in song, and the origins of song in the need to fill out with sound the overlarge and rather empty human soul.
Twice married and twice divorced, his magnetic looks on the wane, David rather cruelly seduces one of his students, and his conduct unbecoming is soon uncovered. In his eighth novel, J.M. Coetzee might have been content to write a searching academic satire. But in Disgrace he is intent on much more, and his art is as uncompromising as his main character, though infinitely more complex. Refusing to play the public-repentance game, David gets himself fired--a final gesture of contempt. Now, he thinks, he will write something on Byron's last years. Not empty, unread criticism, "prose measured by the yard," but a libretto. To do so, he heads for the Eastern Cape and his daughter's farm. In her mid-20s, Lucy has turned her back on city sophistications: with five hectares, she makes her living by growing flowers and produce and boarding dogs. "Nothing," David thinks, "could be more simple." But nothing, in fact, is more complicated--or, in the new South Africa, more dangerous. Far from being the refuge he has sought, little is safe in Salem. Just as David has settled into his temporary role as farmworker and unenthusiastic animal-shelter volunteer, he and Lucy are attacked by three black men. Unable to protect his daughter, David's disgrace is complete. Hers, however, is far worse.

There is much more to be explored in Coetzee's painful novel, and few consolations. It would be easy to pick up on his title and view Disgrace as a complicated working-out of personal and political shame and responsibility. But the author is concerned with his country's history, brutalities, and betrayals. Coetzee is also intent on what measure of soul and rights we allow animals. After the attack, David takes his role at the shelter more seriously, at last achieving an unlikely home and some measure of love. In Coetzee's recent Princeton lectures, The Lives of Animals, an aging novelist tells her audience that the question that occupies all lab and zoo creatures is, "Where is home, and how do I get there?" David, though still all-powerful compared to those he helps dispose of, is equally trapped, equally lost.

Disgrace is almost willfully plain. Yet it possesses its own lean, heartbreaking lyricism, most of all in its descriptions of unwanted animals. At the start of the novel, David tells his student that poetry either speaks instantly to the reader--"a flash of revelation and a flash of response"--or not at all. Coetzee's book speaks differently, its layers and sadnesses endlessly unfolding. --Kerry Fried

About the Author:
J.M. Coetzee’s work includes Waiting for the Barbarians; Life & Times of Michael K; Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life; Youth; Elizabeth Costello; Slow Man; and, most recently, Diary of a Bad Year. He has won the Booker Prize twice and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003.

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.

Other Popular Editions of the Same Title

9780140296402: Disgrace: A Novel

Featured Edition

ISBN 10:  ISBN 13:  9780140296402
Publisher: Penguin Books, 2000
Softcover

  • 9780099289524: Disgrace

    Secker..., 1999
    Softcover

  • 9780670887316: Disgrace

    Viking..., 1999
    Hardcover

  • 9780099284826: Disgrace

    Pengui..., 2000
    Softcover

  • 9780143115281: Disgrace: A Novel

    Pengui..., 2008
    Softcover

Top Search Results from the AbeBooks Marketplace

Stock Image

Coetzee, J. M.
ISBN 10: 0436204894 ISBN 13: 9780436204890
New Hardcover Quantity: 1
Seller:
tttkelly1
(Fresno, TX, U.S.A.)

Book Description hardcover. Condition: New. Seller Inventory # GF-2ZQT-WL5R

More information about this seller | Contact seller

Buy New
US$ 17.07
Convert currency

Add to Basket

Shipping: US$ 4.49
Within U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds
Stock Image

Coetzee, J.M.
ISBN 10: 0436204894 ISBN 13: 9780436204890
New Hardcover Quantity: 1
Seller:
GoldenWavesOfBooks
(Fayetteville, TX, U.S.A.)

Book Description Hardcover. Condition: new. New. Fast Shipping and good customer service. Seller Inventory # Holz_New_0436204894

More information about this seller | Contact seller

Buy New
US$ 22.38
Convert currency

Add to Basket

Shipping: US$ 4.00
Within U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds
Stock Image

Coetzee, J.M.
ISBN 10: 0436204894 ISBN 13: 9780436204890
New Hardcover Quantity: 1
Seller:
Books Unplugged
(Amherst, NY, U.S.A.)

Book Description Condition: New. Buy with confidence! Book is in new, never-used condition. Seller Inventory # bk0436204894xvz189zvxnew

More information about this seller | Contact seller

Buy New
US$ 29.73
Convert currency

Add to Basket

Shipping: FREE
Within U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds
Stock Image

Coetzee, J.M.
ISBN 10: 0436204894 ISBN 13: 9780436204890
New Hardcover Quantity: 1
Seller:
Book Deals
(Tucson, AZ, U.S.A.)

Book Description Condition: New. New! This book is in the same immaculate condition as when it was published. Seller Inventory # 353-0436204894-new

More information about this seller | Contact seller

Buy New
US$ 29.73
Convert currency

Add to Basket

Shipping: FREE
Within U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds
Stock Image

Coetzee, J.M.
ISBN 10: 0436204894 ISBN 13: 9780436204890
New Hardcover Quantity: 1
Seller:
Wizard Books
(Long Beach, CA, U.S.A.)

Book Description Hardcover. Condition: new. New. Seller Inventory # Wizard0436204894

More information about this seller | Contact seller

Buy New
US$ 26.26
Convert currency

Add to Basket

Shipping: US$ 3.50
Within U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds
Stock Image

Coetzee, J.M.
ISBN 10: 0436204894 ISBN 13: 9780436204890
New Hardcover Quantity: 1
Seller:
GoldBooks
(Austin, TX, U.S.A.)

Book Description Hardcover. Condition: new. New Copy. Customer Service Guaranteed. Seller Inventory # think0436204894

More information about this seller | Contact seller

Buy New
US$ 27.44
Convert currency

Add to Basket

Shipping: US$ 4.25
Within U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds
Stock Image

Coetzee, J.M.
ISBN 10: 0436204894 ISBN 13: 9780436204890
New Hardcover Quantity: 1
Seller:
BennettBooksLtd
(LOS ANGELES, CA, U.S.A.)

Book Description Condition: New. New. In shrink wrap. Looks like an interesting title! 0.85. Seller Inventory # Q-0436204894

More information about this seller | Contact seller

Buy New
US$ 57.60
Convert currency

Add to Basket

Shipping: US$ 4.13
Within U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds
Stock Image

Coetzee, J. M.
ISBN 10: 0436204894 ISBN 13: 9780436204890
New Hardcover Quantity: 1
Seller:
The Book Spot
(Sioux Falls, SD, U.S.A.)

Book Description Hardcover. Condition: New. Seller Inventory # Abebooks83180

More information about this seller | Contact seller

Buy New
US$ 64.00
Convert currency

Add to Basket

Shipping: FREE
Within U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds