It wasn’t just what happened to Lucy that disturbed me the first time, but David’s utter inability to comfort, understand or avenge her. That propulsive, disorientating scene in particular, so vivid and haunting in its details – the grass in a shoe viewed from the floor, the splash of toilet water over singeing hair, the youngest of the attackers gleefully scooping ice cream from a tub – is a masterpiece within a masterpiece, a writer at such peak powers the book seems to tremble slightly in your hands. Returning to it this year, the mastery of plot (somehow, it is only 220 pages long) and the perfect weight of his prose are no less startling. 'Twenty years on, the prose is no less startling.'ĭisgrace won Coetzee both the Booker Prize in 1999 and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003. While David is locked in a toilet, Lucy is victim to a terrible sexual assault for which she can never seek justice, thanks to indifferent authorities and her complicated relationship with a neighbour whose complicity in the event is never fully revealed. Returning from a walk, father and daughter are stopped by three strangers who break into their home and attack them.

It’s there, in the baking South African heat, where Disgrace's most cataclysmic scene takes place. After she breaks it off and makes a formal complaint to the university, David is – partially through his own refusal to apologise, like a sort of inverted John Proctor – exiled from his job, and goes to seek refuge on a small farm owned by his daughter Lucy. The novel follows David Lurie, a middle-aged English professor in Cape Town who has an affair with a younger student, Melanie. It was more like a feud I felt unable to resolve. On the contrary, I thought about it strangely often. It’s not that I ever forgot about Disgrace. It was 2005, my first year at university, and the same dog-eared copy that was stuffed into the back pocket of my jeans that day has sat, untouched, on the bookshelf of every home I’ve lived in since. I can still remember, fifteen years ago, walking through the frost-bitten campus trying to escape the feeling of horror left in me by J.

Disgrace 1999