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Kelsey Ford: From the Stacks: J. M. Ledgard's Submergence (0 comment)
Our blog feature, "From the Stacks," features our booksellers’ favorite older books: those fortuitous used finds, underrated masterpieces, and lesser known treasures. Basically: the books that we’re the most passionate about handselling. This week, we’re featuring Kelsey F.’s pick, Submergence by J. M. Ledgard...
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  • Kelsey Ford: Five Book Friday: Year of the Rabbit (0 comment)
  • Kelsey Ford: Powell's Picks Spotlight: Grady Hendrix's 'How to Sell a Haunted House' (0 comment)

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Disgrace

by J. M. Coetzee
Disgrace

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  • Synopses & Reviews

ISBN13: 9780140296402
ISBN10: 0140296409
Condition: Standard


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From Powells.com

"For a man of his age, fifty-two, divorced, he has, to his mind, solved the problem of sex rather well," begins J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace. Yet protagonist David Lurie's complacency is short lived, for piece by piece his life begins to crumble around him. David is a middle-aged professor of modern languages, who, under the guise of "the great rationalization," has been relegated to adjunct professor. He now teaches Communications 101. Like his employer Cape Technical University (formerly Cape Town University College), post-apartheid South Africa has also gone through a process of rationalization. The changes wrought by this shifting of political thought and enforced political correctness (which, as Coetzee illustrates, has not been absorbed by the collective consciousness) form a bleak backdrop for David's struggle to rebuild his life, or to at least make sense of his existence.

A brittle affair with a student in his Romantic poetry class leads to his being fired on sexual harassment charges, and he seeks refuge at his daughter's house in the country hoping to write a libretto on Byron. Far from a pastoral idyll, however, rural South Africa presents David with a harsh and violent reality, forcing him to reassess life as he has lived it. In spare and razor sharp prose, and in just over 200 pages, Coetzee presents us with an almost hopeless scenario and an almost tragic hero. Yet Coetzee's brilliance lies in whispering the possibility of hope and managing to reveal the humanity in his deeply flawed protagonist. It is a remarkable book, winner of the 1999 Booker Prize, which captures the political and the personal in a story that is dark, merciless and yet ultimately life affirming. Georgie, Powells.com


Synopses & Reviews

Review

"J.M. Coetzee's distinguished novels feed on exclusion; they are intelligently starved. One always feels with this writer a zeal of omission. What his novels keep out may well be as important as what they keep in. And Coetzee's vision is impressively consistent: his books eschew loosened abundance for impacted allegory. Waiting For The Barbarians, his finest allegory, set in a nameless Empire with resemblances to turn-ofthe-century South Africa, has an Orwellian power. Even when his novels are set in a recognizable and local South African world, as is the case with Coetzee's new novel, the dry seed of parable can always be felt underfoot, beneath the familiar surfaces of contemporary life.

"But this is a harsh exchange. Coetzee's novels eschew society, and the examination of domestic filaments, for the study of political societies..." The New Republic

Review

"The kind of territory J.M Coetzee has made his own....By this late point in the century, the journey to a heart of narrative darkness has become a safe literary destination....Disgrace goes beyond this to explore the furthest reaches of what it means to be human: it is at the frontier of world literature." Sunday Telegraph

Review

"A subtly brilliant commentary on the nature and balance of power in his homeland...by a writer at the top of his form." Time

Review

"Disgrace is not a hard or obscure book — it is, among other things, compulsively readable — but what it may well be is an authentically spiritual document, a lament for the soul of a disgraced century." The New Yorker

Synopsis

At fifty-two, Professor David Lurie is divorced, filled with desire, but lacking in passion. When an affair with a student leaves him jobless, shunned by friends, and ridiculed by his ex-wife, he retreats to his daughter Lucy's smallholding. David's visit becomes an extended stay as he attempts to find meaning in his one remaining relationship. Instead, an incident of unimaginable terror and violence forces father and daughter to confront their strained relationship and the equallity complicated racial complexities of the new South Africa.

About the Author

Born in Cape Town, South Africa, on February 9, 1940, John Michael Coetzee studied first at Cape Town and later at the University of Texas at Austin, where he earned a Ph.D. degree in literature. In 1972 he returned to South Africa and joined the faculty of the University of Cape Town. His works of fiction include Dusklands, Waiting for the Barbarians, which won South Africa’s highest literary honor, the Central News Agency Literary Award, and the Life and Times of Michael K., for which Coetzee was awarded his first Booker Prize in 1983. He has also published a memoir, Boyhood: Scenes From a Provincial Life, and several essays collections. He has won many other literary prizes including the Lannan Award for Fiction, the Jerusalem Prize and The Irish Times International Fiction Prize. In 1999 he again won Britain’s prestigious Booker Prize for Disgrace, becoming the first author to win the award twice in its 31-year history. In 2003, Coetzee was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

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Average customer rating 5 (5 comments)

`
viraga , September 02, 2011
On the face of it, this is the story of a rape. Or man's relationship with animals. But it is so multilayered and faceted that several readings are needed to delve into the nuances.

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elesperance , January 01, 2010
Best novel of the decade.

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OneMansView , July 02, 2009 (view all comments by OneMansView)
Disgrace is only the beginning This short novel begins as a story of personal excess, even disgrace, but quickly becomes much more. David Lurie is a fifty-two-year-old, twice-divorced, academic teaching poetry at a small college in South Africa, who sees his life and career ebbing away. Still a reasonably good-looking man, he partly counters his boredom, even disgust, at teaching indifferent students by keeping sexuality as an important part of his life, usually via paid services. However, his, by accident, though insistent, seduction of a female student in his class, who is not really all that willing, is, not surprisingly, turned back on him as a case of sexual harassment. In the subsequent hearing, his quick admission of guilt is actually quite offensive to college officials, especially the women in attendance. To expectations that he admit that his behavior was inappropriate, even deviant, and then seek counseling, he contends that sexual desire is only natural and “enriching.” And that gets him dismissed, which he almost seems to welcome. Little does Lurie realize that he is now on a path where gritty realities will come crashing into his life far exceeding the unpleasantness of violating petty sexual correctness rules. In what begins as only a short visit, he is quite surprised to find his daughter Lucy eking out a minimal living by growing and selling vegetables and flowers and boarding dogs on little more than a large patch of dirt, hardly a farm. He is startled by the isolation, the harshness of conditions, the dirt, and the danger of living in rural S. Africa. Simmering racial tensions suddenly intrude as he is stunned by the brutal assault by three black men on Lucy’s holdings and on them both. Not only is there physical devastation and personal injuries, but more significant is the physic damage and the shattering of personal and social illusions. Forced to manage Lucy’s affairs while she recovers, Lurie is astounded by her lack of vindictiveness and willingness to remain. However, Lucy recognizes that harmony with the land and one’s neighbors comes at a cost. Her neighbor Bev Shaw, who attempts to help broken down animals, mirrors that same toughness and acceptance. In fact, its Lurie’s work at Bev’s makeshift clinic that has a transforming impact on him. Euthanasia is a reality at the clinic. It is gut-wrenching to inject the drug, while a dog, seemingly aware of what is happening, licks his hand. Lurie accepts that there comes a time for us all. Perhaps one would want more character development in the book; there is little of their backgrounds provided. But they are well sketched for the author’s purpose. No doubt life is rather bleak in the author’s world, yet somehow accepting and dealing with gritty reality is strengthening, perhaps ennobling. This is a book that will stay with one for quite a while.

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leaf slayer , January 13, 2009 (view all comments by leaf slayer)
I read this book a few years ago and intend to read it, and more by this author, later this year. How a book can be so sparse and so complex is beyond me. It's not a pleasant read but it's an amazing piece of literature. I would have loved to have read this in college. I imagine a classroom discussion of this book would be intense.

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pebbeb , September 22, 2006 (view all comments by pebbeb)
A heartbreaking story so magnificently and tautly written that one cannot help but be propelled along with the story. This is a book that is destined to become a literary classic.

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Product Details

ISBN:
9780140296402
Binding:
Trade Paperback
Publication date:
11/01/2000
Publisher:
PENGUIN PUTNAM TRADE
Pages:
224
Height:
.60IN
Width:
5.00IN
Thickness:
.75
Age Range:
18 and up
Grade Range:
13 and up
Number of Units:
1
Copyright Year:
1999
Series Volume:
106-510
UPC Code:
2800140296404
Author:
J M Coetzee
Author:
J. M. Coetzee
Subject:
Domestic fiction
Subject:
Fiction
Subject:
Literature-A to Z
Subject:
Fathers and daughters
Subject:
Veterinarians
Subject:
Farm life

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