Disgrace

I woke up at 8:55am then went straight back to sleep. Woke up again at 11:00am and finished reading Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee. The book is about 52-year-old English Literature professor David Lurie, who teaches at a university in Cape Town. He's been married and divorced twice, now he's got a girl he pays money to fuck every Thursday afternoon. When he sees her one day in the street with her two sons, and she sees that he saw her and them, she drops him like a hot potato and won't see him again. Then he gets the hots for one of his students, a cute little 18-year-old, and manages to fuck her a few times. Her boyfriend gets jealous about this and reports his ass to the university. He has to go to a hearing, he doesn't really give a fuck, the men on the panel seem to care that he doesn't seem to mind throwing his career away, while the women on the panel are clearly REPULSED by him. To them, he is a monster and would best be done away with as soon as possible. Anyway, in DISGRACE, he goes out of the city to stay with his daughter on her little farm, she's a lesbian but her girlfriend bailed on her months ago. The daughter makes a living by selling flowers and vegetables at a Saturday market and she has dog kennels where people pay her to mind their dogs while they go on holiday or whatever. Things are going pretty good, there on the farm, the father even starts volunteering at a local animal welfare shelter, but then something really shitty happens. Father and Daughter are out walking some of the dogs when they see three black dudes up ahead in the road, the father is instantly nervous, but they walk past. But then they turn and head back home, the three black dudes are there waiting for them. You can probably figure out what happens next, it ain't pretty, but it's not graphic. Coetzee is restrained in his descriptions of sex and violence. Anyway, this event makes things pretty uncomfortable and tense from now on between father and daughter, as you could probably imagine. It doesn't help when the daughter's neighbour, an old black dude, seems to know something about the three dudes and what they were up to. This old guy, he is not a very likeable guy. Actually, none of the characters in this book are very likeable. The weird thing is, this book was hard to put down, I wanted to read it right through in one go, but about two thirds the way through, I realised there were all these things that I didn't like about it. There were good things about it, like the guy defending himself in front of the stupid committee, and some pretty good writing about old men and young girls, but a lot of annoying things about it, too. By the end of it, the annoying things seemed to neutralise the good things. For instance, the way I figure it, if a writer knows what he's doing, you feel like you know the characters. But here, aside from the father (the main character), I never felt like I knew any of the other characters, they just pop up and say things. It was like I was at a carnival, at the shooting gallery, and these heads kept popping up and saying stupid things. Who the fuck are they? Do I know 'em? No. Do I care about 'em? No. *BANG! BANG! BANG!* Not only that, but the dialogue was terrible. And none of the characters were likeable. Except for the father, in the first half of the book. That's what I think it is, the first half or two-thirds was good, but then it all went to hell. One of the blurbs on the back cover reads, "A masterpiece...perhaps the best novel to carry off the Booker in a decade." Firstly, if this book is a masterpiece, the moon is a tomato. Secondly, if this is the best book to win the Booker Prize (what the fuck is the Booker Prize anyway?) in a decade, then it seems to me that either the judges for the Booker Prize don't know a good book from an Elvis Pizza flier, or that THE NOVEL is in a goddam sorry state these days. Which is it? What do I think is a fine novel? Easy. I read one recently and it was called To Kill a Mockingbird. If somebody can point me in the direction of a novel published in the last ten years that even comes CLOSE to that kind of quality, I will put it at the top of the list.
Meanwhile, I am going back to take a second crack at Moby Dick. UGH!