By J. M. Coetzee
Shame, desire and survival in post-apartheid South Africa
Subject
Themes
David Lurie, a fifty-two-year-old professor of communications in Cape Town, has managed his sexual life through controlled arrangements: weekly visits to a sex worker, brief affairs, the careful cultivation of distance. When his escort Soraya disappears, he turns his attention to Melanie Isaacs, a twenty-year-old student in his Romantics course. Their encounters escalate from an awkward dinner to sex she endures passively, to an afternoon at her flat where he forces himself upon her in an act he recognises as "not rape, not quite that, but undesired nevertheless, undesired to the core." He falsifies her academic records to cover the absences his attentions have caused.
David Lurie, a fifty-two-year-old professor of communications in Cape Town, has managed his sexual life through controlled arrangements: weekly visits to a sex worker, brief affairs, the careful cultivation of distance. When his escort Soraya disappears, he turns his attention to Melanie Isaacs, a…
Published in 1999, five years after South Africa's first democratic elections, J. M. Coetzee's novel arrived at a moment when the country was still negotiating the terms of its transition from apartheid to majority rule. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, chaired by Desmond Tutu, had recently…
At the centre of the narrative lies a question that neither the university committee nor David Lurie himself can resolve: what does it mean to genuinely confess wrongdoing, and can any institution compel that confession? The disciplinary hearing demands more than a legal plea of guilt. Farodia…
The transfer of land from white to black ownership operates as the material foundation of every relationship in the narrative. Petrus begins as Lucy's assistant, the "gardener and the dog-man," cheerfully subordinate. By the time the narrative ends he has purchased a hectare through a government…
Lurie's relationship with animals undergoes a transformation that parallels, and eventually surpasses, every other change in the narrative. He arrives at Lucy's farm indifferent to animals, dismissing Bev Shaw's earnest do-gooding and comparing animal welfare people to Christians who make you want…
Desire is the engine that drives David Lurie's downfall, and one of the narrative's most unsettling achievements is its refusal to let that engine stall even after the consequences have been catastrophic. Lurie begins as a man who has "solved the problem of sex rather well" through weekly visits to…
Fatherhood, and its failures, runs through the narrative as a persistent counterpoint to the themes of desire and power. David Lurie is a father twice over in the biological sense, but the narrative focuses relentlessly on the gap between his love for Lucy and his inability to act effectively on her…
David Lurie is a fifty-two-year-old professor at Cape Technical University, a man who has arranged his entire existence around the management of desire. Twice divorced, he visits a sex worker every Thursday, teaches communications courses he despises, and nurses a dream of composing a chamber opera…
Lucy Lurie is David's daughter from his first marriage, a woman in her mid-twenties who has deliberately constructed a life as far from her father's intellectual, urban world as possible. Living on a smallholding near Salem in the Eastern Cape, she runs boarding kennels, sells flowers and vegetables…
Petrus is Lucy's assistant and, since purchasing a hectare of her land through a government grant, her co-proprietor and neighbour. A man in his forties with a lined, weathered face and shrewd eyes, he introduces himself cheerfully as "the gardener and the dog-man," savouring the phrase with…
Melanie Isaacs is a twenty-year-old student in David Lurie's Romantics course at the Cape Technical University, a young woman from George whose family is modest, teetotal, and churchgoing. She is small and slim, with close-cropped black hair, wide cheekbones, and large dark eyes. Her outfits are…
Bev Shaw is a dumpy, bustling woman with black freckles, close-cropped wiry hair, no neck, and a chin that protrudes from her chest like a pouter pigeon's. She runs the volunteer animal clinic in Grahamstown from the old Animal Welfare League premises after the charity shut down. Her husband Bill…
David Lurie, fifty-two, twice divorced, has settled into a routine of managed desire. Every Thursday afternoon he visits Soraya, a sex worker at Discreet Escorts in Cape Town's Green Point, paying four hundred rand for ninety minutes of companionship he finds entirely satisfactory. A former…
Melanie withdraws from Lurie's course and her father telephones from George, pleading with the professor he does not yet know is the source of his daughter's distress. Lurie promises to help but recognises he is "the worm in the apple." When cousin Pauline tells him coldly that Melanie will not…
Lurie settles into farm life. He agrees to volunteer at Bev Shaw's clinic on condition that no one asks him to become a better person. "I am not prepared to be reformed," he says; Lucy teases him with Byron's label: "Mad, bad, and dangerous to know." Lying beside the abandoned bulldog Katy on the…
Bev Shaw tends Lurie's burns with the same gentle precision she showed the goat, and he feels the peacefulness of submission to her hands. But a grey despair has settled over him, odourless and tasteless, draining his pleasure in living drop by drop. Two young policemen arrive, and Lucy gives her…
After a Sunday killing session at the clinic, Bev Shaw asks Lurie about his scandal. He admits he was the troublemaker. On impulse he runs a finger over her lips; she brushes them against his hand, blushing furiously. The next afternoon she telephones and announces they should meet at four. She has…
Rosalind meets Lurie at a coffee shop and tells him bluntly his life is thrown away. She has seen Melanie performing in the revived Sunset at the Globe Salon and describes her as "just your type." Lurie attends the play and finds Melanie more confident, positively gifted. A flood of memory washes…
David Lurie is a fifty-two-year-old professor at Cape Technical University, a man who has arranged his entire existence around the management of desire. Twice divorced, he visits a sex worker every Thursday, teaches communications courses he despises, and nurses a dream of composing a chamber opera…
Lucy Lurie is David's daughter from his first marriage, a woman in her mid-twenties who has deliberately constructed a life as far from her father's intellectual, urban world as possible. Living on a smallholding near Salem in the Eastern Cape, she runs boarding kennels, sells flowers and vegetables…
Petrus is Lucy's assistant and, since purchasing a hectare of her land through a government grant, her co-proprietor and neighbour. A man in his forties with a lined, weathered face and shrewd eyes, he introduces himself cheerfully as "the gardener and the dog-man," savouring the phrase with…
Melanie Isaacs is a twenty-year-old student in David Lurie's Romantics course at the Cape Technical University, a young woman from George whose family is modest, teetotal, and churchgoing. She is small and slim, with close-cropped black hair, wide cheekbones, and large dark eyes. Her outfits are…
Bev Shaw is a dumpy, bustling woman with black freckles, close-cropped wiry hair, no neck, and a chin that protrudes from her chest like a pouter pigeon's. She runs the volunteer animal clinic in Grahamstown from the old Animal Welfare League premises after the charity shut down. Her husband Bill…
David Lurie, a fifty-two-year-old professor of communications in Cape Town, has managed his sexual life through controlled arrangements: weekly visits to a sex worker, brief affairs, the careful cultivation of distance. When his escort Soraya disappears, he turns his attention to Melanie Isaacs, a twenty-year-old student in his Romantics course. Their encounters escalate from an awkward dinner to sex she endures passively, to an afternoon at her flat where he forces himself upon her in an act he recognises as "not rape, not quite that, but undesired nevertheless, undesired to the core." He falsifies her academic records to cover the absences his attentions have caused.