Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee Vintage, HK$85
J.M. Coetzee is on a hat-trick. Should his novel Summertime bag the Man Booker Prize on October 6, the South African polymath will become the first author to win one of literature's most exalted gongs three times for three different books.
His second success came in 1999 courtesy of Disgrace, now craftily reissued by Vintage in a set of nine novels trumpeting the publisher's Booker triumphs thus far.
In a continual state of disgrace is divorced Cape Town professor David Lurie, 52, who has settled complacently into a comfortable niche in violent post-apartheid society. Comfortable because he has an intellectual arrogance that keeps him in a job when courses are 'rationalised' off the curriculum; complacent because 'he has ... solved the problem of sex'.
His solution is to seduce girls young enough to be his daughters, first his weekly prostitute, then a student taking his remaining literature course. Both are dark skinned, the inference being that Lurie is clutching the wreckage of the old order, acting as an exploitative colonial chief and taking whatever he desires without fear of recrimination.
But that order has dissolved and the repercussions visited on Lurie the self-satisfied sexual predator culminate, professionally, in scandal and resignation.
