I picked up this book on the recommendation of a well-read friend. It did not disappoint.
The subject matter of this book is not at all easy to digest, and in another author's less capable hands it would merely be an uncomfortable shock to the reader. Coetzee's superb mastery of the written word enables you to become an unseen participant in a world that is as intriguing as it is disturbing. I was riveted by the complicated individuals that populate this book, the equally complicated and sometimes brutal environment they live in, and found myself alternately rooting for or scolding them for the decisions they made. Any writer that can affect me so with their characters is a master. But more than that, the world he creates is so real I found myself wondering what I would do, what decisions I would make... truly broadening and enlightening.

This is the first book that I have read by Coetzee and intend to seek out more of his work.

Intellectual and thought-provoking. I actually felt badly for the main character despite his egocentric, sexist manner. Well-deserving of it's Book Award.

This is such an intense book. It will get under your skin for so many reasons. It's not an easy book to read, but yet I could not put it down. Everyone I know who read this book thought it was quite amazing.

Finalist for the Nat'l Book Award, this novel brings to life the problems, some terrifyingly dangerous, that a South African father and his daughter face in trying to repair their relationship.

Unique, engaging, and also sad. Overall an excellent book.

Though well-written, this book is a bewildering look at the life of an amoral academic with whom it is fantastically difficult to empathize. He makes all the wrong moves at all the wrong times, and leads you to wonder, first, how he's managed to survive into his 50s, and second, how he's going to keep it up. The one thing I did enjoy about the book was the look into rural white South African life, which reveals just where the real differences, between the United States/Europe and the "developed" countries in Africa, lie.

Very good read!

EXCELLENT, exceptional literature! I loved reading this great novel and was glued to it the entire day.

Well the people at Nobel are doing a fine job. This book was compellingly written, also insightful.

A disturbingly uncomfortable read about the personal effects of shifting cultural/social mores. It makes you think - what would you do if all the social rules and customs you had grown up with, that were instilled, ingrained, and part of your very identity - what if you were suddenly told that you had it all wrong? Highly recommended!

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I just finished this book and I found it very disturbing. I admit it has a real feel to it that is poetic at times and has you sympathizing for the main character. The ending left me feeling depressed and wishing for more redemption. A good but emotional read.

A beautifuly written, disturbing story about choices and consequences in South Africa.

Thoughtful and thought provoking. Well written.

National bestseller and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature and the Booker Prize. This is a story of a man in his 50's, well established in his career as a professor, and his relationships with two women: a student he has an affair with and his daughter. The novel begins in London and moves to South Africa about half way through. As the back cover says, "...an incident of unimaginable terror and violence forces father and daughter to confront their strained relationship --and the equally complicated racial complexities of South Africa."

I loved this book

Book about the nature of disgrace and the nature of race relations in South Africa. Here, the personal is political.

Read for my book group for the month of August. This was a powerful book that left feeling weak & out of control. There are not a lot of books that I have read that could really leave me feeling this way. I was shocked by the callous way Lucy saw herself & her lack of self-esteem truly affected me. David is an interesting character that attracted & repelled me at the same time. Here is a review from amazon.

Amazon.com
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.

This provided one of our best book group discussions ever. A short book that is subtly brilliant.

Nobel Prize winning author that reaches 'close to the bone and heart of human condition'. Set in So Africa. Booker Prize winner.

Author is a Nobel prize winner in literature. Set in South Africa, this book explores the strained relationship between father and daughter and the racial complexities in the region.

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