Disgrace

Disgrace is a novel by the South African writer J. M. Coetzee, published in 1999, following David Lurie, a middle-aged professor of communications in Cape Town whose affair with a vulnerable young student leads to a disciplinary hearing and the loss of his academic position after he refuses to offer anything beyond a bare admission of guilt. Disgraced and unemployed, Lurie retreats to the rural Eastern Cape smallholding of his adult daughter Lucy, where the two are attacked by three men who beat and rob Lurie and rape Lucy, an assault Lucy refuses to report fully to the police or to frame simply as a racial crime, choosing instead to remain on the land and accept an uneasy, compromised arrangement with a Black neighbor for her own protection. Coetzee uses Lurie's inability to fully understand either his own conduct or his daughter's choices to stage a wider reckoning with power, sexual entitlement, land and racial history in post-apartheid South Africa, refusing any resolution that would let its characters, or its readers, off easily. Disgrace won the Booker Prize in 1999, making Coetzee the first writer to win the prize twice, and Coetzee was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature four years later, with Disgrace widely cited as central to that recognition.