Disgrace is a novel set in post-apartheid South Africa. David Lurie, a middle-aged professor of literature in Cape Town, loses his position after an affair with a student leads to a public scandal. He refuses to offer the apology his colleagues want and leaves for the Eastern Cape, where his grown daughter Lucy lives alone on a small farm.
There the old certainties of his life no longer hold, and events test both father and daughter. The book looks at shame, privilege, desire, aging and the changing balance of power in a new South Africa. It is spare, unsettling and widely regarded as one of Coetzee's finest works.
Quotes
Isaacs has a cheap Bic pen in his hand. He runs his fingers down the shaft, inverts it, runs his fingers down the shaft, over and over, in a motion that is mechanical rather than impatient.
Talking to Petrus is like punching a bag of sand. 'Are you giving him up?' 'Yes, I am giving him up.'
Is he happy? By most measurements, yes, he believes he is. However, he has not forgotten the last chorus of Oedipus: Call no man happy until he is dead.
The company of women made of him a lover of women and, to a certain extent, a womanizer."