Returning from a walk, father and daughter are stopped by three strangers who break into their home and attack them. It’s there, in the baking South African heat, where Disgrace's most cataclysmic scene takes place. After she breaks it off and makes a formal complaint to the university, David is – partially through his own refusal to apologise, like a sort of inverted John Proctor – exiled from his job, and goes to seek refuge on a small farm owned by his daughter Lucy. The novel follows David Lurie, a middle-aged English professor in Cape Town who has an affair with a younger student, Melanie. It was more like a feud I felt unable to resolve. On the contrary, I thought about it strangely often. It’s not that I ever forgot about Disgrace. It was 2005, my first year at university, and the same dog-eared copy that was stuffed into the back pocket of my jeans that day has sat, untouched, on the bookshelf of every home I’ve lived in since. I can still remember, fifteen years ago, walking through the frost-bitten campus trying to escape the feeling of horror left in me by J.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |