As a writer, Coetzee is a literary cascade, with a steady output of
fiction and criticism (literary and social) over the last two decades.
This latest book, his first novel in five years, is a searing evocation
of post-apartheid South Africa; it earned him an unprecedented second
Booker Prize. An uninspired teacher and twice divorced, David Lurie is
a 52-year-old poetry scholar-cum-"adjunct professor of communications"
at Cape Technical University. Spooked by the flicker of twilight in his
life trajectory, he sees himself as an aged Lothario soon to be "shuddered
over" by the pretty girls he has so often wooed; he is disappointed in and
unengaged by the academy he now serves by rote; and he cannot locate the
notes for his opera, Byron in Italy, in which he has placed so much
reluctant hope. He is, even at his best, a man of "moderated bliss."
So when he seduces Melanie Isaacs, a lithe student from his poetry elective
("She does not resist. All she does is avert herself"), he believes her to
represent the final object of his desire, his last act of lush, Romantic
desperation. And then he is found out. This not uncommon outrage earns him
a dismissal and censure from the university committee he refuses to
cooperate with in hopes of saving his job. He immediately shoves off for
Salem in the Eastern Cape where his daughter, Lucy, manages a dog kennel
and works her smallholding, harvesting a modest crop. Here David hopes to
cleanse himself with time-honored toil. But his new life in the country
offers scarce refuge. Instead, he is flummoxed to discover an unfamiliar
Lucy-principled, land-devoted, with a heroic resignation to the social and
political developments of modern South Africa. He also memorably encounters
Petrus, Lucy's ambitious colored neighbor and sometime assistant. Petrus
embodies the shifting, tangled vicissitudes of a new national schematic,
and forces David to relate to the broad segment of society previously
shrouded by the mists of his self-absorption. But a violent attack on the
estate irrevocably alters how the book's central figure perceives many
things: his daughter and her bewildering (to him) courage, the rights of
South Africa's grossly aggrieved majority, the souls of the damaged dogs
he helps put down at the local Animal Welfare League and even the character
of Lord Byron's mistress and the heroine of his operatic "chamber-play." But
this is no tale of hard-earned, satisfying transformation. It is, rather,
a paean to willfulness, an aria on the theme of secca, or the drying up of
"the source of everything." In Coetzee's tale, not a single note is false;
every sentence is perfectly calibrated and essential. Every passage questions
the arbitrary division between the "major and minor" and the long-accepted
injustices propped up by nothing so much as time. The book somehow manages
to speak of little but interiority and still insinuate peripheries of things
it doesn't touch. Somber and crystalline, it "has the right mix of
timelessness and decay." It is about the harsh cleansing of humiliation and
the regretfulness of knowing things: "I lack the lyrical. I manage love too
well. Even when I burn I don't sing, if you understand me." To perceive is
to understand in this beautifully spare, necessary novel.
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