Mark has accumulated many books. Unfortunately, he hasn’t read them yet. Each week, Mark will be read a book he hasn’t finished and offer his impressions.

I enjoy a good Lars Von Trier movie because they incite a little fascist in me. That is to say my base emotions are briefly exposed due to provocation from the work. J.M. Coetzee manages in Disgrace to incite fear, hatred, eroticism, guilt and creative impulse without sacrificing clarity of language or stridently writing as provocateur.

Like the last book I bought by Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians, I was assigned to read Disgrace but didn’t. At least not in a willing way. I read enough to write papers on both books, but I’m sure my professors were not pleased. For me it’s a difficult thing to be seduced and study at the same time and a great work is an act of seduction by necessity. The audience has to trust the artist to a certain extent and for the greatest effect they must not spurn the artist’s advances but accept them and become intoxicated with a feeling similar to love.

Coetzee seems to challenge this idea in Disgrace. Seductions are followed with demoralizing acts that serve as counter points to the reader’s impressionable loyalties. As soon as we understand David Lurie’s vision of passion it is confronted by a violent act, after we follow him through the creative exhilaration of his opera, we see it is a fruitless endeavor of a broken man.

It seems to me that readings of Coetzee’s work often place a great deal of emphasis on identities and power roles which seems ultimately misleading. Coetzee presents identity, philosophies and power as unstable and fluctuating illusions indifferent to an individual’s desires.

My greatest relief was that Coetzee knows how to make his postmodern tendencies subtle rather than making them the primary motivation of the work as other authors, or even Lars Von Trier, are prone to do.