Disgrace (Coetzee) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
There is more in Disgrace than I can manage to describe here. But let me end by suggesting Coetzee's most impressive achievement, one that grows from the very bones of the novel's grammar. This novel stands as one of the few I know in which the writer's use of the present tense is in itself enough to shape the structure and form of the book as a whole. Even though it presents an almost unrelieved series of grim moments, Disgrace isn't claustrophobic or depressing, as some of Coetzee's earlier work has been. Its grammar allows for the sublime exhilaration of accident and surprise, and so the fate of its characters—and perhaps indeed of their country—seems not determined but improvised. Improvised in the way that our own lives are.... Disgrace surely deserves such recognition [his second Man Booker Prize]. But that may, in time, come to seem among the least of this extraordinary novel's distinctions.
Michael Gorra - New York Times Book Review


It may be that 200 pages have never worked so hard as they do in Coetzee's hands. He's a novelist of stunning precision and efficiency. Disgrace loses none of its fidelity to the social and political complexities of South Africa, even while it explores the troubling tensions between generations, sexes, and races. This is a novel of almost frightening perception from a writer of brutally clear prose.
Ron Charles - Christian Science Monitor


Written in deceptively spare prose that lets an eerie story unfold, Disgrace is a revelatory, must-read portrayal of racial fortunes reversed.
USA Today


J.M. Coetzee's new novel Disgrace, which last week won the South African writer his second Booker Prize is an absolute page-turner. It is also profound, rich and remarkable...is destined to be a classic.
New York Post


The most powerful novel this year.
Wall Street Journal


Disgrace is a relentlessly bleak novel.
Boston Sunday Globe


Disgrace is an act of literature...further proof that Mr. Coetzee stands with the very best writers in the world today.
Dallas Morning News


The richness of em>Disgrace lies in the elegant and allegorical role reversals, the spare symbolism of the language and in the characterization. We may not like David Lurie, but in Coetzee's skillful hands we can't dismiss him without pity.
Toronto Globe and Mail


Disgrace is a subtle, multilayered story, as much concerned with politics as it is with the itch of male flesh. Coetzee's prose is chaste and lyrical—it is a relief to encounter writing as quietly stylish as this.
Independent (UK)


The kind of territory J.M Coetzee has made his own.... By this late point in the century, the journey to a heart of narrative darkness has become a safe literary destination.... Disgrace goes beyond this to explore the furthest reaches of what it means to be human: it is at the frontier of world literature.
Sunday Telegraph (UK)


Disgrace is at the frontier of world literature
Sunday Telegraph (UK)


Compulsively readable.... A novel that not only works its spell but makes it impossible for us to lay it aside once we've finished reading it.... Coetzee's sentences are coiled springs, and the energy they release would take other writers pages to summon.
New Yorker


Disgrace is a gripping tale told with spare pose, steely intelligence and a remarkable degree of tenderness.
Paula Chin - People


A slim novel with a bleak powerful story to tell.... Coetzee writes with a cool, calm lucidity that fends off despair, and his characters find a kind of peace in acceptance, if not hope.
Newsweek


[A] searing evocation of post-apartheid South Africa.... [N]ot a single note is false; every sentence is perfectly calibrated and essential.... The book somehow manages to speak of little but interiority and still insinuate peripheries of things it doesn't touch. Somber and crystalline.
Publishers Weekly



Disgrace is a superbly constructed work of pain and candor, and although it involves events that require the largest generosity, it has as its hero a man gripped by habits of petty selfishness.
Penelope Mesic - Book Magazine


Middle-aged professor David Lurie shuffles numbly through the shifting landscape of postapartheid South Africa.... Winner of the Booker Prize, Coetzee's eighth novel employs spare, compelling prose to explore subtly the stuttering steps one man takes in a new world.
Library Journal