1999 Booker Prize It's a disgrace! J.M. Coetzee has become the only author in history to win the prestigious Booker Prize twice. Honored for his apocalyptic "Life and Times of Michael K" in 1983, Coetzee wins this time around for a searing novel about shame and responsibility in the new South Africa. The much-praised "Disgrace" concerns itself with history both personal and political, as professor David Lurie struggles with amorous scandal, his country's troubled past, and last but not least, the plight of unwanted animals. You can pre-order "Disgrace" at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0670887315/entertainmentsit Can't wait? Visit Amazon.co.uk and buy the 1999 Booker Prize winner today: http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0436204894/entertainments08 David Lurie is hardly the hero of his own life, or anyone else's. At 52, the protagonist of "Disgrace" is at the end of his professional and romantic game, and seems to be deliberately courting disaster. Long a professor of modern languages at Cape Town University College, he has recently been relegated to adjunct professor of communications at the same institution, now pointedly renamed Cape Technical University: Although he devotes hours of each day to his new discipline, he finds its first premise, as enunciated in the Communications 101 handbook, preposterous: "Human society has created language in order that we may communicate our thoughts, feelings and intentions to each other." His own opinion, which he does not air, is that the origins of speech lie in song, and the origins of song in the need to fill out with sound the overlarge and rather empty human soul. Twice married and twice divorced, his magnetic looks on the wane, David rather cruelly seduces one of his students, and his conduct unbecoming is soon uncovered. In his eighth novel, J.M. Coetzee might have been content to write a searching academic satire. But in "Disgrace" he is intent on much more, and his art is as uncompromising as his main character, though infinitely more complex. Refusing to play the public-repentance game, David gets himself fired--a final gesture of contempt. Now, he thinks, he will write something on Byron's last years. Not empty, unread criticism, "prose measured by the yard," but a libretto. To do so, he heads for the Eastern Cape and his daughter's farm. In her mid-20s, Lucy has turned her back on city sophistications: with five hectares, she makes her living by growing flowers and produce and boarding dogs. "Nothing," David thinks, "could be more simple." But nothing, in fact, is more complicated--or, in the new South Africa, more dangerous. Far from being the refuge he has sought, little is safe in Salem. Just as David has settled into his temporary role as farm worker and unenthusiastic animal-shelter volunteer, he and Lucy are attacked by three black men. Unable to protect his daughter, David's disgrace is complete. Hers, however, is far worse. There is much more to be explored in Coetzee's painful novel, and few consolations. It would be easy to pick up on his title and view "Disgrace" as a complicated working-out of personal and political shame and responsibility. But the author is concerned with his country's history, brutalities, and betrayals. Coetzee is also intent on what measure of soul and rights we allow animals. After the attack, David takes his role at the shelter more seriously, at last achieving an unlikely home and some measure of love. In Coetzee's recent Princeton lectures, "The Lives of Animals," an aging novelist tells her audience that the question that occupies all lab and zoo creatures is, "Where is home, and how do I get there?" David, though still all-powerful compared to those he helps dispose of, is equally trapped, equally lost. "Disgrace" is almost willfully plain. Yet it possesses its own lean, heartbreaking lyricism, most of all in its descriptions of unwanted animals. At the start of the novel, David tells his student that poetry either speaks instantly to the reader--"a flash of revelation and a flash of response"--or not at all. Coetzee's book speaks differently, its layers and sadnesses endlessly unfolding. --Kerry Fried What's all the fuss about? "You can say many things about the Booker Prize but what you cannot afford to do, not if you care about literature, is ignore it," "The London Times" wrote in 1996, and it's no less true today. For a list of past Booker Prize winners and a short history of the award, visit our Booker page at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?tag=entertainmentsit&path=subst/lists/awards/booker.html ****** You'll find more great books, articles, excerpts, and interviews in Amazon.com's Award Winners section at Award Winners ******
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