Book report: Disgrace

Nothing feels less appropriate to be reading when going to interview for a job at a girls' high school than reading a book on the plane about an old teacher who seduces his student without remorse (combine that with the Kim Basinger "Door in the Floor" stuff, and it just gets plain wrong).

But there I was, with J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace. It's set in post-Apartheid South Africa, and Coetzee writes with candor and misery about the state of race relations there.

The prose is simple. It reminds me a bit of Hemingway, but also of what little I know of the way sub-Saharan Africans speak. The sentences are short and direct, like Hemingway, but more rich and weighted. It's a style that permeates both the dialogue and narration of the book.

As for the plot, it's rather ordinary: old fogey teacher with lust problem seduces student, lacks guilt, ends up being punished in unexpected (to him) ways. The simplicity of the prose may work against the minimalist simplicity of the plot, where everything that happens serves as a lesson. The teacher must leave the university, so he goes to live with his hippie daughter on her farm. There, they are attacked, she is raped, and he is disfigured (let symbolism rain down upon us).

The use of dogs--the daughter runs a kennel, the teacher "lowers" himself to volunteer at an animal clinic, only to end up having an affair with the woman there and then befriend a disfigured (symbolism? maybe? perhaps?) dog, then he lets the dog be killed--is a bit more nuanced than Old Yeller, but Coetzee doesn't seem to be putting in much effort.

This book won the Booker Prize, and Coetzee has since won a Nobel Prize. I may read more of his stuff to see if people don't just get these awards for writing about "important" topics, like the Oscars for foreign films going to unoriginal stories set in "exotic" and "troubled" places. Here's a white man telling it like it is for white and blacks in South Africa, let's give him a million dollar prize. That seems fair.