Oh, where to start with this little doozy. This was totally an impulse buy. I read Foe by J.M. Coetzee a couple of years ago and found it to be a difficult (in terms of characters and themes) but intriguing read. I don’t recall at the time wanting to run right out and read the rest of Coetzee’s work, but something made me pick this one up, and I know that in the right time (i.e. after I’m not so torn up over this one) I will try reading another- probably all- of his books.
David Lurie is a Professor of Communications at a small college in Capetown. His employment is terminated more for the fact that he offers no apologies for his questionable involvement with a drama student taking one of his courses, than for the inappropriate relationship he initiates and engages in with her. Wanting to get away, he goes to visit his daughter, Lucy, on her smallholding of land in the country. Their relationship is a tentative one and he doesn’t plan to stay long, but before he leaves they are brutalized in an attack that complicates his life in ways both unexpected and permanent.
Coetzee brings all of his considerable talent to bear on this book just in the fact that I was even able to finish it. Lurie brings new meaning to the word unsympathetic character. He is completely reprehensible, and in all things he is detached (which is usually an issue for me), displays little regard for others and is self-righteous to boot – but when I say that it’s almost impossible to put this book down, it really is. The reader is creepily inside his head – very close to his thoughts, and even in the most generous of terms, Lurie is unhinged and majorly abusive of his power over the young woman with whom he was involved. That’s at best – and ambiguous language about the relationship with his student completely aside, I think of him as the worst on the spectrum.
In a country in recovery from the vicious wounds of apartheid, South Africa is making inroads toward a new identity and experience among its people, but the old ways and the ugliness rear themselves up and influence the fabric of the country in ways that cannot be denied. Coetzee places many behaviors side by side to be examined and interpreted in a personal way, that that has a habit of being as revealing of the reader as it is of the characters. Nasty piece of work that Lurie is, there is no getting around the fact that you can identify with some of his thoughts and impulses in the aftermath of the attack he survives with his daughter, and you definitely have some of the same questions and concerns. You agree with him, and remind yourself of the flip side, you yourself that he is just as despicable.
Visceral reactions aside, Coetzee explores quite a bit here, and I don’t know how he does it since the book is just barely a novel at 220 pages. For any other author I would probably be wanting a bit more but between the subject matter, the beautiful writing and the suspense of it all, I was worn out by the end of this one. It definitely *felt* long enough. There are explorations of animal cruelty and the relationships between men and dogs, women and dogs, dogs and death; the responsibilities that individuals have for the collective actions of their countries and governments, and what constitutes that debt and the appropriate reparations; there is whether men have the capacity to understand what it means to be violated in the ways that women understand it; there are literary references to Byron and what he could get away with as a white man of privilege.
I could go on and on. Coetzee delivers it all up nicely and leaves you to muddle along with the moral complexities and emotional reactions which are more often than not in conflict with one another. Definitely worthy of a read and discussion, even if you have to force someone to read it just for that purpose, as I must now make my mother do.
