Monthly Archives: December 2010

Set in post-apartheid South Africa, written in prose that is spare and precise, Disgrace explores the nature of power and desire through the personal fall from grace of a white Capetown academic, David Lurie, and the subsequent rape of his daughter, Lucy, by three black men.

David, a fifty-two year old divorced Professor of Romantic Poetry and Communications believes he “has, to his mind, solved the problem of sex rather well” until the prostitute he sees weekly discontinues their arrangement. Afraid he is losing his “magnetism” he approaches one of his students and coerces her into having an affair. Privately recognising that his advances were “not rape, not quite that, but undesired nevertheless, undesired to the core” he pleads guilty to the charges she eventually presses before the university but refuses to admit he was wrong. He later rests his case on “the rights of desire”. It’s difficult to discern, however, to what extent he believes this making him a fascinating character as we are never quite sure of who he is. Fired from his job and disgraced, he visits Lucy at her smallholding where both of them are attacked.