Tuesday, 17 July 2012

{PMONKZ BOOK REVIEW} DISGRACE BY POETOBY

"Disgrace" is a Novel written by South African born J.M Coetzee. The author was also awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature four years when "Disgrace" was published. This Novel explore the authenticity of South Africa contemporary and social life, a novel which hold the extremity of human significance at a dis-satisfactory level. 

The central character is a confusing person, at once an intellectual snob who is contemptuous of others and also a person who commits outrageous mistakes. His story is also local; he is a white South African male in a world where such men no longer hold the power they once did. He is forced to rethink his entire world at an age when he believes he is too old to change and, in fact, should have a right not to.

David Lurie is a South African professor of English who loses everything: his reputation, his job, his peace of mind, his good looks, his dreams of artistic success, and finally even his ability to protect his own daughter. He is twice-divorced and dissatisfied with his job as a communications lecturer, teaching one specialized class in romantic literature at a technical university in Cape Town in post-apartheid South Africa. His "disgrace" comes when he seduces one of his students and then does nothing to protect himself from the consequences. Lurie is working on Lord Byron 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.
   He is dismissed from his teaching position, after which he takes refuge on his daughter's farm in the Eastern Cape. For a time, his daughter's influence and natural rhythms of the farm promise to harmonise his discordant life. But the balance of power in the country is shifting. Shortly after becoming comfortable with rural life, he is forced to come to terms with the aftermath of an attack on the farm in which his daughter is raped and impregnated and he is violently assaulted.

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