Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee

This month's read was 'Disgrace' by J M Coetzee. Everything about reviewing this was difficult. It’s well written, with clean concise language. This would make it an easy read were it not for the subject matter: the shift in power in post-colonial South Africa. This makes it really challenging, especially for our group members with personal history in that country (remarkably, we have more than one). One member had terrifying memories, triggered by the farm raid episode in this book, of being a child at the wrong end of an AK47.

The themes are so deep and complex that it's difficult to tease them apart. It's also hard to separate out which aspects of the main protagonist, David, are just fictional 'character', and what are actually representative of Coetzee writing himself onto the page.
In David, we see laid bare the attitudes of a white male beyond his prime who has been shifted away from unassailable privilege by the end of apartheid, but who still sees his control and power over women as his birthright. David is also an intellectual snob and again it’s hard to prise apart the professor writing an opera about Byron and the author throwing in Italian words when an English (or even Afrikaans) word would do.

Several of our members had read this book when it first came out and none of them had intended to read it again.... but they did and found over time their perspective had shifted. This was, in part, due to the global phenomenon that was the #MeToo movement and awareness campaign against sexual violence, which is the antithesis of this book. Even at its nadir, when David’s daughter Lucy is sexually assaulted, women characters are not given a voice, as David’s misogyny runs right through the book, alongside his distaste for lesbians.

We thought it a shame that our group isn't very diverse. We would have welcomed a male perspective on a book that we described as confusing, distasteful and disturbing (although one member hoped for a happy ending right to the last sentence... which proved to be most unsatisfactory and ambivalent).

When it came to counting the thumbs up and thumbs down this proved almost impossible. We wanted to applaud the writing and the author’s obvious love of animals... but there were no likeable characters (except the dogs) or any section of the story that
wasn't uncomfortable in some way.

This is a book that shouldn't work – but it does, and perhaps that's the reason it won the 1999 Booker Prize, and why Coetzee went on to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003. However, we all agreed 'Disgrace' is well worth reading even if you regret it afterwards. We'll call it a 50/50 read... except it didn't just divide the group, it tore each and every one of us in two.

Our next meeting is on Tuesday 21 May when we will be discussing ‘Our Missing Hearts’ by Celeste Ng, about the unbreakable love between a mother and child and in which libraries and librarians play a prominent part. You are very welcome to join us.