The stark white cover of the copy of Disgrace that I read reflects the simplicity and depth contained on the pages within. The brief novel (only about 215 pages) by J.M. Coetzee tells the story of an older, anachronistic university professor in South Africa, who following an ill-advised sexscapade, loses his job, falls into disgrace, and then visits his daughter in the countryside, where a tragedy befalls them.
Coetzee's storytelling created a world in which I felt as if I were a third-party observer more than a reader. His descriptions seem true and concise and the language never struck me as indulgent or verbose. The story was very believable. For example, an important scene that dealt with a home break in was so well crafted that I spent the next couple nights being hypervigilant about the doors being locked and responding to creaks in the house. While the action drives the story, Coetzee does not center the book around action, but around the underlying causes of those actions and the surrounding circumstances.
Some of the book's themes were societal division based on age and race, the exploitation of the disparity of power, and a desire to subjugate. Central to the themes is that the book is set in post-apartheid South Africa. Division because of age or race is the book's most prominent theme. The author seems to draw a parallel between the older professor's age-based division from the younger generation of his student lover and his daughter and his white daughter's race-based division from the black community amongst whom she lives. The author depicts both the age divide and the racial divide as a cruel and jagged schism.
Despite the gravity of the book's predominant themes, the book has a certain levity, which in retrospect is kind of inexplicable. It could have something to do with the whole unbearable lightness of being thing (from the book The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera, which wikipedia explains best:
The book [The Unbearable Lightness of Being, that is] centers on Nietzsche's idea of eternal return - that is, the idea that the universe and all the events therein have all happened before, and will continue to recur ad infinitum. Kundera challenges this idea, offering an alternative: each of us has only one life to live, and what happens once will never occur again. He calls this idea "lightness", and refers to the concept of eternal return as "heaviness" or "weight".
In describing the effect his idea of "lightness" has on a person's life, Kundera says Einmal ist keinmal ("what happens but once, might as well not have happened at all. If we have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all"). By this logic life is ultimately insignificant; in an ultimate sense, no single decision matters. Since decisions do not matter, they are light — that is, they don't cause us suffering. Yet simultaneously, the insignificance of our decisions — our lives, our being — causes us great suffering. Hence the phenomenon Kundera terms the unbearable lightness of being: because life occurs only once and never returns, no one's actions have any universal significance. This idea is deemed unbearable because as humans we want our lives to mean something, for their importance to extend beyond just our immediate surroundings.).
Or it could be that I wasn't in a real pensive, dark, the world sucks kind of mood when I read the book.
One way or the other, this book was excellent and I would highly recommend it. Even if you don't like it, it's only 215 some odd pages, so, unless you are majorly busy or a really slow reader, you're not dedicating a month of your time to some book you feel provides more value as kindling (as an aside: I don't think any books should be burned unless I don't agree with them. Here's my books to burn list: anything by this guy, this guy, or this gal -- all three are blights on progress and sacrifice honest, well-founded ideas for entertainment dollars -- this guy too -- actually, I wouldn't burn any of their books, but I would throw them away, because they are in fact garbage).
