Friday, September 28, 2007
Deep Dish Book Book Selection for "A Lesson from Aloes" is Disgrace, by J.M. Coetzee
The Deep Dish Book Selection for the current production of "A Lesson from Aloes" is Disgrace, by Nobel Prize-winner J.M. Coetzee. Time Magazine hailed it as a “subtly brilliant commentary on the nature and balance of power in his homeland... by a writer at the top of his form.” A discussion of the book, free and open to the public, will be held at 6:30 p.m., prior to the performance on Thursday, November 8.
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For anyone interested in purchasing a copy of the current Deep Dish book selection, the Bull's Head Bookstore on the UNC campus will offer a 20% discount at the time of purchase if you mention that you are participating in the Deep Dish book group.
Lucinda Thompson
Welcome to the first online Deep Dish book discussion. The New York Times book review just initiated a month-long discussion of War and Peace to herald a new translation of the book. One of the first questions about the book might be adapted to a discussion of Coetzee's Disgrace, the book chosen to accomplish Fugard's play, "A Lesson from Aloes": How much of Disgrace describes a history; how much is a novel?
The book is set in post-apartheid South Africa and tells the story of David Lurie, a twice divorced 52-year-old professor who, already somewhat in disgrace, seduces one of his unwilling students, and when brought before an academic committee on charges refuses to express any repentance. He is forced to resign and flees to Cape Town where his daughter Lucy lives in the country. Here he tries to reestablish a relationship with his daughter and also come to terms with the changing black and white relations, made even more difficult by a violent invasion of his house by three black strangers.
One of the first sentences in the book is "For a man his age, fifty-two, divorced, he has, to his mind, solved the problem of sex rather well." His solution depends on regularly scheduled sex with a prostitute. What do you think this says about David Lurie's character? Does it have any larger implications for the country?
Evelyn
I attended the opening session of A Lesson from Aloes. As we have learned to expect from Deep Dish, it was a deeply rewarding experience. Orla Swift's review in the 10/20 N&O called it "finding the personal in the political." The phrase is apt and applies equally well to the Coetzee book.
Some of the issues treated in the book include these three: rights -- not only of people but of animals as well, trust -- in oneself, in others and in the "system", language -- the protagonist/narrator is a professor of communications and likes the distanced analytic professorial somewhat-supervior perspective that becomes less easy to maintain during the events of the novel.
Many parallels exist between the book and the play -- I would be interested in what others find here. One of the differences that always fascinates me is the difference in the genre. In the play we are third person observers of all the actors and their surroundings. In a novel we have only internal pictures. In Coetzee's novel, Disgrace, we have a strong point of view expressed through a narrator. We learn David Lurie's thoughts, but those of his daughter, his young student, and the possibly untrustworthy black neighbor are withheld from us. It is we who must judge, not just individual actions but actions as they take place in the particular environment that is South Africa at the time of the novel (approximately the same time as that of Fugard's play).
One strong similarity I found is in the way both play and novel begin quietly and build almost surreptitiously to dramatic eruptions. A big part of that comes from the central characters' isolation--David Lurie withdraws from the academic world he only barely inhabits, then goes to visit his daughter who lives alone on a farm; Piet and Gladys, for reasons we discover in the play, haven't had any visitors for months other than a proselytizer for the Watchtower Society. And yet, despite that isolation, the outside world ends up having enormous impact on them all.
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