J. M. Coetzee Disgrace

Book cover of J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace (Italian edition, “Vergogna”).

Reading before travel

Synopsis

In post-apartheid Cape Town, Disgrace follows David Lurie, a university professor whose life unravels after an affair with a student. Refusing public remorse, he retreats to the rural Eastern Cape to live with his daughter Lucy, where personal disgrace opens onto deeper questions of power, land, violence, and survival in a country still reckoning with its past.

Disgrace – Listening to a Country Through Its Wounds

J. M. Coetzee’s

Disgrace is not a novel that asks to be liked.
It asks to be endured — and that’s exactly why I struggled with it.

I turned to this book while preparing for a journey to South Africa — a journey sparked not by itineraries or landmarks, but by stories. By the kind of travel that begins with listening. Literature, for me, has always been a way to approach a place before setting foot on its soil: to sense its fractures, its silences, its unresolved tensions.

Disgrace is a quiet, devastating descent.
David Lurie, a university professor in post-apartheid Cape Town, is introduced as a man who believes desire can still be governed by intellect, culture, and entitlement. His fall — following an affair with a student and his refusal to perform public repentance — is swift, but never theatrical. Coetzee strips the narrative of moral comfort. There is no catharsis, no easy condemnation, no redemption arc neatly offered.

What unfolds instead is far more unsettling.

Power, shame, and the refusal of absolution

Lurie does not defend himself convincingly, nor does he truly repent. He simply refuses the language demanded of him — the ritualized confession of a society attempting to recalibrate its moral compass after apartheid. In this refusal, he becomes both outdated and exposed: a remnant of an old order that no longer knows how to justify itself.

When he retreats to the Eastern Cape to live with his daughter Lucy, the novel’s focus subtly shifts. The urban scandal gives way to a rural landscape marked by history, land ownership, and unresolved violence. The farm is not a refuge — it is a frontier where past and present collide.

Women, land, and endurance

What struck me most — and what stayed with me long after closing the book — is how central women are to this story, and yet how consistently they bear the deepest cost.

Lucy does not symbolize innocence. She symbolizes endurance.

After the brutal attack she suffers, her decision not to report the crime, not to leave the land, not to reclaim power through confrontation, is deeply unsettling. I wasn’t ready for how quietly resolute this choice felt. But it is also profoundly coherent within the world Coetzee portrays. Lucy’s choice is not weakness. It is not forgiveness. It is a form of survival that rejects heroic narratives altogether.

Here, Disgrace begins to feel like an allegory — or perhaps it simply started to read that way for me.

South Africa appears as a wounded woman — violated by history, shaped by colonial violence, and left to negotiate the aftermath without the luxury of moral purity. Men, throughout the novel, often seem associated with power, possession, and language; women with land, body, and consequence — at least, that’s how it stayed with me after reading.

A landscape that does not console

Coetzee’s prose is famously spare. The land is described without romanticism. Animals are euthanized. Dogs are burned. Nothing is elevated. Nothing is redeemed. Even compassion arrives stripped of transcendence — quiet, procedural, almost exhausted.

And yet, in this starkness, something truthful emerges.

David Lurie’s slow, painful awakening does not lead him to moral clarity, but to humility. Not understanding — but attention. He learns, belatedly, to stay with suffering rather than explain it away.

Why this book matters before traveling

Disgrace does not teach you how to love South Africa.
It teaches you how not to simplify it.

It is a book about shame — personal, historical, inherited — and about what remains when the old narratives collapse. It does not resolve the tensions it exposes. It leaves them open, raw, unresolved.

Reading it feels less like preparation for a trip, and more like preparation for listening.

For walking through landscapes without expecting them to heal you.
For entering a country — and a history — with humility rather than answers.

This is why this book belongs on RoamWithLens.
Because some journeys don’t begin with movement, but with stillness.
And some truths are only audible when we stop asking literature to comfort us — something this book never tries to do.