Disgrace

Coetzee's 1999 post-apartheid South African novel of guilt, violence, and grace

Tradition: Late-twentieth-century anglophone South African literature

Coetzee's 1999 post-apartheid novel of guilt, violence, and grace — Booker Prize 1999

Disgrace is J. M. Coetzee's 1999 post-apartheid South African novel (Booker Prize 1999; Coetzee Nobel 2003). David Lurie, a Cape Town professor of communications, is dismissed for a sexual relationship with a student; he retreats to his daughter Lucy's smallholding in the Eastern Cape, where they are attacked and Lucy raped by three black men. Lurie's and Lucy's incommensurable responses — Lurie's rage, Lucy's decision to stay, raise the child, and accept her place in the new order — become a meditation on guilt, violence, embodied dignity, and the possibility of grace in post-apartheid South Africa. Foundational for late-twentieth-century anglophone literature.