2011 Book #14: Disgrace

J.M. Coetzee has been following me around. I hadn't heard of him until relatively recently, and then his name started popping up everywhere. Book-related everywheres, anyway. So when I happened to pick up Disgrace and read the blurb, I decided to give it a try, recalling how much I've liked South African lit in the past. And it was good. At the very least, it was a nice break from the intensity of books like The Hunger Games and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?.

Disgrace is about different kinds of disgrace and how people deal with it and try to move on. David Lurie (who reminds me of Tomas in The Unbearable Lightness of Being), a Romantic poetry professor, has an affair with the student and gets in trouble. He refuses to cooperate with the university committee dealing with his case, and he is dismissed. He goes to visit his daughter, who lives on a farm in the country, a very unsafe place in recently post-Apartheid South Africa. One day, as she and David return home from a walk, they are robbed, and she is raped by three people. She refuses to report the rape and deals with it by herself, her own form of disgrace. David deals with it, too. There are, of course, a few subplots, one of which involves a veterinary clinic with the basic purpose of euthanizing dogs from which David learns to deal with his own disgrace.

Oprah should be all over this one. As I said, it reeks of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which I didn't like, though it's not so preachy. Coetzee has his Kundera moments in which he philosophizes a bit excessively, but at least he keeps it in the mind of the protagonist rather than doing the moralizing himself.

My favorite part of the novel, and what will keep me reading Coetzee, is the prose style. It's beautiful. It also makes for easy reading: I think I started Disgrace this time yesterday.

2011 Book #3: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

I didn't like this one. I should qualify that: I didn't like this one except for the last thirty pages. It's a novel about love and sex. I could only identify with one character and the dog because everyone else was busy sleeping with people who weren't their spouses. There are only a few types of novels I don't like: mysteries, novels about people being taken away or imprisoned (I find those incredibly frustrating, and it's why, as much as I love The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver, I couldn't get through its sequel, Pigs in Heaven), and novels in which the principal plotline focuses on infidelity.

There are five important characters: Tomas, Tereza, Sabina, Franz, and the dog, Karenin. Tomas is married to Tereza, who adores him and is generally faithful, and he likes to have affairs with many women. He has a prolonged affair with Sabina, who, after Tomas dies (I think - the story isn't exactly linear) has a prolonged affair with Franz, who is also married to someone else. And then there's Tereza's dog, who is very nice and doesn't have sex with anyone, though, in Tereza's dream, gives birth to two rolls and a bee. Kundera explores the difference between love and sex and how love affects people differently. I wasn't enthused until the last thirty pages when the dog dies. That made me cry.

I probably should have liked it more. The only other Kundera novel I've read is Life is Elsewhere, which I adored, though I don't really even remember what it's about. I read it five years ago, or so, so I guess that's to be expected. The Unbearable Lightness of Being reminds me of the only Paulo Coelho novel I've read, Veronika Decides to Die, which annoyed me in its preachiness. A first-person narrator (Kundera himself?) tells the story from the first person: the novel is generally written in third person, but the narrator breaks in often with nonjudgmental ideas about what's going on. It was like inspirational nonfiction (which annoys the hell out of me) on top of what could have been a good novel - like Kundera was filling in all the spaces the reader should be able to figure out on his own.