Disgrace

Disgrace is a landmark novel by the South African writer J. M. Coetzee. Published in 1999, it won that year's Booker Prize—Coetzee's second, after his first in 1983 for Life & Times of Michael K. It was also his first novel set in post-apartheid South Africa. David Lurie, a fifty-two-year-old professor of communications at Cape Technical University, is accused of misconduct with a student, Melanie Isaacs. He refuses to secure his position by making a public confession, loses his job, leaves the city, and goes to stay on his twenty-five-year-old daughter Lucy's farm in the Eastern Cape. Father and daughter have long been estranged and struggle to communicate; as a white intellectual, Lurie must also deal with neighbors and laborers he once dismissed and do farm work he once refused. Soon the farm is robbed by three Black men, and Lucy is gang-raped. Afterward, Lucy refuses to leave the farm and refuses to report the crime and pursue the perpetrators as her father wishes; she would rather stay and even considers marrying Petrus, the laborer, in exchange for protection in the community. In his shock and helplessness, Lurie gradually sheds his former arrogance and eventually volunteers at an animal clinic, where he euthanizes a disabled dog and stays with it through its final moments. Told in spare, cool prose, the novel traces the overlap of personal shame, moral shame, and historical shame, touching on racial conflict, land and power, desire and ethics in post-apartheid South Africa. It is a classic of contemporary English-language literature.