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To begin with, let me make something clear: J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace left me intellectually fulfilled and severely shocked. Fulfilled at the simplicity and beauty of its narrative which resulted in a powerful drama; shocked at the impact it had on my innermost self. This is not a book for the faint-hearted. If you lack faith in your fortitude, do not even start, read something easier. But that would be a pity, for you would be deprived of an experience that will only enrich your understanding of the world. If you stay, Coetzee will grant you a masterpiece. And there have been some moments of genuine awe in my reading experiences, but I can without any trace of doubt testify that reading Coetzee is always one of them.

Disgrace follows David Lurie’s fall from grace, a professor of poetry and communications, that is unable to fit in a tormented post-apartheid South Africa. David clashes with the University’s politically correct environment as well as with the land dispute barbarism in the country’s interior, where his daughter lives.

With an immaculate prose, in which no word is wasted, the novel is a plunge into a society lacerated by poverty, criminality and a social conduct values deadlock. Disgrace is a work of art, rare nowadays: that that refuses simple explanations, which reinvents and enriches reality.

“But the truth, he knows, is otherwise. His pleasure in living has been snuffed out. Like a leaf on a stream, like a puffball on a breeze, he has begun to float towards his end. He sees it quite clearly, and it fills him with (the word will not go away) despair. The blood of life is leaving his body and despair is taking its place, despair that is like a gas, odourless, tasteless, without nourishment. You breathe it in, your limbs relax, you cease to care, even at the moment when the steel touches your throat.�

At 52, twice divorced, David is solitary, resigned, erudite and sarcastic. He does not care for the disinterest of his students show his poetry classes.

“He continues to teach because it provides him with a livelihood; also because it teaches him humility, brings it home to him who he is in the world. The irony does not escape him: that the one who comes to teach learns the keenest of lessons, while those who come to learn learn nothing.�

He contemplates writing an opera on Lord Byron, but always postpones the project. He believes to have “solved the problem of sex rather well�: on Thursdays afternoons he visits a prostitute that could be his daughter, pays what he owes her and has the right to the oasis of one and half hours of his continuous and dreary mundane existence.

(view spoiler)[His life, bureaucratically justified, capsizes when the prostitute dismisses him and, even knowing the mistake it is, has an affair with one of his students. By disdaining political correct codes, accused of abuse, David falls in disgrace. He becomes an outcast and retreats to the country to his daughter Lucy's � the only person he has some affectionate bond � remote piece of land in the Eastern Cape. He comes, then, in contact with the post-apartheid South Africa, “country where it is a risk to own things: a car, a pair of shoes, a pack of cigarettes�. (hide spoiler)]

In what is to come, he will face a brutal reality, made of vengeance, banditry, submission. Brutality against which occidental culture is simply worthless: “He speaks Italian, speaks French, but Italian and French are useless to him in Black Africa�.

J.M. Coetzee builds in Disgrace flesh and blood characters and, through them, weaves relationships between classes, between men and women, between parents and children, black and white, between a long exploration history and a present of explosive resentments.

Situated in nobody's land, where civilization and barbary mingle - a region well known by Brazilian readers, Coetzee slowly denudes realities and ultimately tells us that there are no just rewards, there are not even fairness.

�'How humiliating, ' he says finally. 'Such high hopes, and to end like this.'
'Yes, I agree, it is humiliating. But perhaps that is a good point to start from again. Perhaps that is what I must learn to accept. To start at ground level. With nothing. Not with nothing but... With nothing. No cards, no weapons, no property, no rights, no dignity.'
‘Like a dog.'
'Yes, like a dog.'"

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