Is this the greatest South African novel? If not, then what is?

Is this the greatest South African novel? If not, then what is?

let's just not even have this thread

why?

this book was awful

I actually really disliked this book, although I did read it to completion.

I was really annoyed when the main character had sex with that random nurse/woman who he constantly thought was really ugly, right after becoming friends with her partner.

saemfag here. to elaborate, this book felt like a tired moralizing tale that shoves the "apartheid is too complex for you to understand, retard" attitude in your face.

the characters arent motivated by real discernible feelings or stances, but just go through mechanical motions to fit the author's didacticism

the veneer of self-insert to push the trope of "shallow intellectual cant into primal human feelings" was also super cliche and not particularly well executed

i read life and times of michael k years ago and didnt like it at all. thought i'd give coetzee another chance with disgrace, but was nto imrpessed.

You've never had sex with someone you were not attracted to?

...

I think my main problem with it was not that he had sex with someone he was not attracted to, but more that he did it after befriending her boyfriend/husband (forget which it was), acknowledging that he thought he was a good guy, and then doing it anyway.

It was just such a dumb thing which I feel undermined the idea they had going about sex being a sort of destructive force, what with him losing his job over sleeping with a student, and his daughter getting gang banged and all. In this case, it seemed like he had this sexual escapade, but it served very little purpose. No one seems to really bring attention to it afterwards, and he keeps having sex with her on the side. It seemed unnecessary.

shit just sounds like normie problems to me, sounds wack

I don't think the book was didactic at all. In what was Coetzee moralising? The whole book seems fairly ambiguous and doesn't instruct the reader to feel a certain way about any of its themes or the events that occur

the book was very explicit in condemning lurie's actions/mindsets - and by extension, the mindset of everyone in academia, who considers himself "intellectual" while being actually a revolting human, and, i hate to say it, white

not to mention equating a violent armed robbery + rape with an older man sleeping with a student in terms of severity/moral reprehensibility

That's one way of looking at it. Another way of looking at it is as a simple comparison of "bad things that white academics do" with "bad things that blacks do".

and the conclusion of the comparison was "they're equal" which is a pretty preachy and moralizing opinion

It didn't sympathise with Lurie but I felt like it condemned his daughter just as much. She was hopelessly naive and committed to a liberal mindset at the expense of common sense. What happened to her seemed like a warning to the reader.

I feel like it's quite a cynical novel overall.

>the conclusion of the comparison was "they're equal"
No it wasn't. I mean, you certainly don't think so, and neither do I. Does the author think so? I didn't see any evidence for it.

I thought it was excellent, and I love Coetzee, but I have to disagree.

Pic related.

Can you give a brief recap of the novel user. Never heard of it.

Did not enjoy Disgrace, very much.
I feel that Cry, The Beloved Country is a far better option.

probably something by andre brink. a dry white season maybe. it's like the south african version of to kill a mockingbird or summat