Post-apartheid novel

Carol Iannone reviews a novel about life in post-apartheid South Africa:

Disgrace is written in a deliberately hard, dry, ungenerous idiom, albeit one intense and gripping in its own sullen way. “English is an unfit medium for the truth of South Africa,” declares the novel’s main character, David Lurie. Lurie (whose apparently Jewish identity figures only in the background) is a middle-aged professor at Cape Town University College, which has been made over to serve the newly enfranchised populations under post-apartheid “rationalization.” As a result, the college is now an intellectually threadbare technical school. When he loses his job over an affair with a student, Lurie goes to rethink his life at his daughter Lucy’s small farm in the countryside, where she raises flowers and cares for dogs. There he endures his disgrace, undergoing a thorough divestment of all his former privileges and adjusting to a new, humbler life.

Some time after his arrival, the farm is invaded by three black strangers who rape Lucy, ransack her house, shoot her dogs, and set her father afire, leaving him with a disfigured ear, a further divestment of his former self. Lurie wants his daughter to report the crime and bring the perpetrators to justice. But Lucy decides that it would be impossible for her to continue living in such a remote and lawless area if she called in the police, as she would be open to future reprisals.

Far from seeking justice, she decides to bear the child she is carrying as a result of the rape. She also deeds her share of the property to Petrus, her former assistant turned coproprietor thanks to post-apartheid land adjustments, and agrees to become part of his extended family, in effect his third wife, in order to secure enough protection to continue to live on the land she loves. The clear implication is that the attack was part of a plan by Petrus to gain complete control of her property. “They see me as owing something,” she says of her assailants. “They see themselves as debt collectors, tax collectors.” Her father at first objects but then comes to accept the new arrangements. The closing scenes of the novel show father and daughter both reduced to a kind of speechless submission, stripped of control over their lives, dependent on the menacing black power all around them, yet strangely serene and content.

The novel seems to deal with the fact that it is difficult - if not impossible - for different races to live together without one eventually subjugating the others.