Coetzees Disgrace - Book Report/Review Example

This status quo will move the story, the punctuation marks interrelating his situation, indicating his limits, his regular Thursday afternoons ("luxe et volupte") with Soraya, when he meets her at her "Windsor Mansions", "goes straight 'to the bedroom, which is pleasant-smelling and softly-lit, and undresses" (Coetze, 2000, page 1). Lurie is an ironic man, but Coetzee's own irony has a surgical precision that slices through and beyond and around the character's own. One evening Lurie, an ironic man, invites Melanie Isaacs, a female student home for a drink and dinner and then asks her ''to do something reckless.

'' And though he believes, that ''a woman's beauty does not belong to her alone,'' eventually comes to realize that he is wrong and starts an affair with her (Coetze, 2000, page 46). She goes slack but not silent, and so comes Lurie's disgrace. Even though Melanie goes loose she does not keep mum and thus becomes Lurie's disgrace. Her boyfriend starts pressuring him. . He closes up and accepting his expulsion in disgrace.Lurie was working on Nord Byron, a leading Romantic poet of the 19th century (also known for his snobbish excesses and plentiful love affairs) at the time of his disgrace, and "the irony is that he comes to grief from an escapade that Byron would have thought distinctly timid" (Mars-Jones, 1999).

After his dismissal he goes back to his daughter, Lucy, who has a small land in the Eastern Cape to settle in, resolute to work on a opera he has been keen on writing about-- Lord Byron in Italy. But then one day three black people (two men and a boy) turn up requesting Lucy if they can use her telephone. When she lets them in, they rape Lucy in front of Lurie. Disgraced and incensed, he seeks justice, but Lucy asks him not to spread the news. The reader can immediately find a parallel between Lurie's position as a father and that of the father of Melanie.

The reader might as well think that maybe Lurie is getting paid in his own coins. But yet again that is not what implies-his point is to show the changing values in post-apartheid South Africa which are a bit like the work of Lurie's Byron opera. The novel is Coetzee's most remarkable work starting from the very structure of the sentences.. Lurie considers that he has wasted much of his valuable time by ''explaining to the bored youth of the country the distinction between drink and drink up, burned and burnt.

The perfective, signifying an action carried through to its conclusion.'' ''Disgrace'' , written in the present tense, its title representing a long-lasting condition also insinuates the very same to the characters' lives, that remain uncertain and incomplete till the end of the book, their problems and prospects still not