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I first read this book the summer before I started my English degree, and it is a book I will never forget.
Set in Africa, the story follows David Lurie, an English professor who hates his life, and who allows himself to let his love for literature to romance him into a state of denial. This, of course, leads to disastrous consequences. I think that it is this self-blindness that drives the moral debate that runs throughout the book, evidenced by his statement that, "for a man of his age, 52, divorced, he has, to his mind, solved the problem of sex rather well." This sentence held new importance for me the more I read the novel, and cemented my theory that David was not only blind to others, but to himself also.
Not since reading Nabokov's Lolita, have I been so repulsed by a character as I was by David. This was largely down to David's actions concerning a sexual encounter with one of his students, and the way he does little to fight the loss of his job as a result, screams self-destruction. But, for me, this does nothing to redeem David's character. The ambiguity surrounding this encounter had me reading and re-reading the scene numerous times. But each time I read it, I failed to see how David could even come up with the idea that this was, "not rape, not quite that, but undesired nevertheless, undesired to the core." (I found myself yelling, 'just who are you trying to convince, David?!' at the pages each and every time).
The mystery surrounding the student's feelings for David as he has sex with her, furthers the ambiguity of the scene. For me, the point-of-view of a character who lives in such self-blindness cannot be trusted to determine whether or not he has raped a young a woman.
This is not the only point in the book where the subject of rape occurs. After David moves to stay with his daughter, Lucy, a group of black males infiltrate their home. He is violently attacked, and his daughter is gang-raped and falls pregnant as a consequence. A mixed-race child would have made Lucy's life even more difficult and would subject both mother and child to further prejudice in Africa back then. For me, David has failed as a father, the same way he failed as a teacher.
I appreciated the inclusion of the fact that the police were ineffective in post-apartheid Africa, but I missed the resistance that I felt David (or Lucy) could have brought to the book. With how much the book focuses on morality, I thought that at the very least, David would have changed for the better. Lucy, for example, could have been a character that changed David, that made him realise the kind of man he is/was becoming. Instead, he continues in his downward spiral until he becomes a pathetic waste of a man who has nothing, and believes in even less.
Despite the fact that I hated David, I enjoyed the book. What the "disgrace," really is, is never really revealed to the reader. They have to determine if David's 'encounter' or Lucy's rape (and pregnancy) is the disgrace in the novel. This is what elevates the book from being a scathing representation of morality in post-apartheid Africa, to a novel that makes the reader develop their own opinions on morality as a whole as well as in the novel.
For me, David is a failure, as a teacher, as a father, and as a man. I found that the David's of this world hold the world back, simply by failing themselves and those around them. A sad, infuriating, beautiful, thoughtless, and compelling book that is well worth the read.
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