Disgrace: A Novel

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   舞台はアパルトヘイト撤廃後の南アフリカ。離婚を2度経験している大学教授のデヴィッドは、若いころから奔放な性を楽しんできたが、52歳になった今でもその欲望は衰えを知らない。そんなある日、彼は20歳の女子学生に強烈に引かれ、歳の差も社会的な立場も考えずに彼女を追いまわすようになる。半ば強引に彼女と関係を持ったデヴィッドはセクハラで告発され、軽蔑されて憎まれて、追われるように大学を去る。娘が経営する自作農園に身を寄せて再生の道を模索するが、そこにはさらなる恥辱が待ち受けていた。

   本書でブッカー賞史上初となる2度目の受賞を果たしたJ・M・クッツェー。2003年には、文学的功績を認められてノーベル文学賞受賞の名誉にも輝いている。簡潔で鋭い文章を武器にするクッツェーが描くのは、新旧の思想や力が混在する社会に暮らす人々の心だ。カフカ的な不条理な展開を軸に、若さと老い、欲望と道徳のはざまで揺れる人間を冷徹なまでにまっすぐ見すえながら、読後感は決して冷たくはない。

   本書でも、主人公は性欲という泥沼の中で哀しいくらいこっけいにもがいてみせる。職も名誉も失いながら、それでも性欲に振り回されてしまう情けなさ。新しい価値観と古い価値観がぶつかり合う混乱の中で暮らす不安と無力感。だが、あまりにみじめな主人公に怒りすら感じながらも、読み手は物語から目を離すことができない。なぜなら、彼の弱さは人間（特に男性）そのものの弱さであり、彼が恥辱にまみれるとき、読み手もまた堕ちていく感覚を味わうからである。

   われわれはそうした情けなさから逃れることはできず、彼と同じくもがきながら生きていかねばならない。クッツェーの救いのない小説に不思議な温かみがあるとすれば、人生を不毛だとしながらも、苦闘する人間そのものは否定しない姿勢に共感を覚えるからであろう。（小尾慶一）

Product Description

Disgrace--set in post--apartheid Cape Town and on a remote farm in the Eastern Cape--is deft, lean, quiet, and brutal. A heartbreaking novel about a man and his daughter, Disgrace is a portrait of the new South Africa that is ultimately about grace and love.

At fifty--two Professor David Lurie is divorced, filled with desire but lacking passion. An affair with one of his students leaves him jobless and friendless, except for his daughter, Lucy, who works her smallholding with her neighbor, Petrus, an African farmer now on the way to a modest prosperity. David's attempts to relate to Lucy, and to a society with new racial complexities, are disrupted by an afternoon of violence that changes him and his daughter in ways he could never have foreseen. In this wry, visceral, yet strangely tender novel, Coetzee once again tells "truths [that] cut to the bone" (The New York Time Book Review).

A finalist for The National Book Critics Circle Awards
Coetzee is the only writer to have been awarded the Booker Prize twice

Amazon.com Review

David Lurie is hardly the hero of his own life, or anyone else's. At 52, the protagonist of Disgrace is at the end of his professional and romantic game, and seems to be deliberately courting disaster. Long a professor of modern languages at Cape Town University College, he has recently been relegated to adjunct professor of communications at the same institution, now pointedly renamed Cape Technical University:

Although he devotes hours of each day to his new discipline, he finds its first premise, as enunciated in the Communications 101 handbook, preposterous: "Human society has created language in order that we may communicate our thoughts, feelings and intentions to each other." His own opinion, which he does not air, is that the origins of speech lie in song, and the origins of song in the need to fill out with sound the overlarge and rather empty human soul.

Twice married and twice divorced, his magnetic looks on the wane, David rather cruelly seduces one of his students, and his conduct unbecoming is soon uncovered. In his eighth novel, J.M. Coetzee might have been content to write a searching academic satire. But in Disgrace he is intent on much more, and his art is as uncompromising as his main character, though infinitely more complex. Refusing to play the public-repentance game, David gets himself fired--a final gesture of contempt. Now, he thinks, he will write something on Byron's last years. Not empty, unread criticism, "prose measured by the yard," but a libretto. To do so, he heads for the Eastern Cape and his daughter's farm. In her mid-20s, Lucy has turned her back on city sophistications: with five hectares, she makes her living by growing flowers and produce and boarding dogs. "Nothing," David thinks, "could be more simple." But nothing, in fact, is more complicated--or, in the new South Africa, more dangerous. Far from being the refuge he has sought, little is safe in Salem. Just as David has settled into his temporary role as farmworker and unenthusiastic animal-shelter volunteer, he and Lucy are attacked by three black men. Unable to protect his daughter, David's disgrace is complete. Hers, however, is far worse.

There is much more to be explored in Coetzee's painful novel, and few consolations. It would be easy to pick up on his title and view Disgrace as a complicated working-out of personal and political shame and responsibility. But the author is concerned with his country's history, brutalities, and betrayals. Coetzee is also intent on what measure of soul and rights we allow animals. After the attack, David takes his role at the shelter more seriously, at last achieving an unlikely home and some measure of love. In Coetzee's recent Princeton lectures, The Lives of Animals, an aging novelist tells her audience that the question that occupies all lab and zoo creatures is, "Where is home, and how do I get there?" David, though still all-powerful compared to those he helps dispose of, is equally trapped, equally lost.

Disgrace is almost willfully plain. Yet it possesses its own lean, heartbreaking lyricism, most of all in its descriptions of unwanted animals. At the start of the novel, David tells his student that poetry either speaks instantly to the reader--"a flash of revelation and a flash of response"--or not at all. Coetzee's book speaks differently, its layers and sadnesses endlessly unfolding. --Kerry Fried