I love Coetzee for his conciseness.
The whole story is like a punch in your guts: shocking and eye opening.
David Lurie is a university professor who falls in disgrace: he loses his post following an affair with a young student.
One can't really empathize with him throughout, for all his knowledge and status he's actually quite a lonely, miserable, pompous man.
He goes and stays with his only daughter on a farm in the coutryside after his dismissal.
An uspeakable crime with life changing consequences happens there. David is forced to reasess his life, his inner motivations, his place in the world and his vision of his fellow humans.
All the arrogance and the selfishness he has always shown have to be tackeld. His shaky relationship with his daughter is under a microscope. Issues of race, history, politics and ethics in modern day, post apartheid South Africa are faced courageously as always, almost clinically but most definately masterfully.
Coetzee writes acute observations with sparse, punching prose.
This is, without a doubt, a great book.
In the book Lurie goes through some sort of redemption journey looking after stray dogs and disposing of the corpeses of the ones that have to be put down.
I know this is quite gruesome but as I was reading this book I was camping and my mum's dog was always around. She couldn't be more different from the dogs in the book, and she got some extra cuddles as I felt for them, nevertheless I took some photos of her whilst reading this so here they are!
Isn't she a gorgous lady (although bearded!) with the most adorable eyes?
