This next book ends my (latest) trilogy of Booker Prize related reads... the 1999 winner, J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace.
This particular book had been on my radar for quite some time. I had not yet read any Coetzee and besides the Booker, this book also went on to win the Nobel. Again, not that these awards are a guarantee that I'll love, or even like, the book... but given everything I heard, it seemed like a book I should read. But it just never happened. So late last year, when I saw Coetzee's latest book, Slow Man, newly in paperback I decided to give him a try. I was pretty impressed with that book... so I was determined to get back to Disgrace, and was pleased when it was part of the "buy 3 for the price of 2" purely evil deal on a recent trip to the bookstore.
I am certainly glad I did, it is certainly easy to see why this book won so many literary awards... and it is certainly a contender for my increasingly crowded field for my book of the year.
Our protagonist is Professor David Lurie, a fifty-ish year old college professor in Cape Town, South Africa. An indiscretion with a student leads to his pretty much voluntary dismissal from the college and is just one of the titular disgraces of this book. Without much els eto do, Lurie goes to visit his daughter Lucy who lives in the desolate landscape of the Eastern Cape... and I will leave it at that. If you can resist the temptation, I recommend not reading the back cover run-down of this book (or any book for that matter... just let the book "happen")... because just when you think you know what the book is about and where it is going... there is a pretty dramatic event that seriously shakes things up.
As the cover of the book suggests, Coetzee is known for his sparse style of prose... but that's not to say it isn't rich. I was constantly impressed with the bang Coetzee gets out of his words. There is a lot going on here too... with the novel taking place in a post-Apartheid South Africa, though unmentioned in my plot summary above, there is quite a bit about race relations (another disgrace?) as well as family relations... and one can have a field day analyzing Lurie, a Professor of Communications... who is not quite good at that subject when it comes to his personal life.
My only caveat about the book is that it is not "feel good" at all... and the characters, at least in my opinion, would not rank high on a likability scale... but that doesn't really matter to me, but if you are more of a "read for entertainment" person, this one might not be your proverbial cup of tea. Otherwise, this is a high recommendation.
As you can see below (and in the above graphic), this book pushed me over the 5k page mark in reading challenge. I am still a couple of books behind blogging-wise, so pretty comfy in reaching my year-end goal of 10k... but with some upcoming vacations that are not going to be terribly reading time friendly, it's probably a good thing that I have a bit of a buffer.
2007 10K Reading Challenge: + 220 pages (Total Pages: 5180 pages)
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