There are books which you write about immediately once they are done with. There are books which take time to sink in - those which suffocate you and you have to wait till you start breathing again before you write about them. And then there those which smother and punch you, are so violently poignant that you don’t even fight back, you give in to the “disgrace”, your fingers don’t want to rest even as your mind wants to stop thinking for a while.

Coetzee’s “Disgrace” is set up in post-Apartheid Africa, spans the locales of Cape Town and the country-life of Grahamstown in the South Africa. The word “Disgrace” hovers around the reader right from the first sentence of the story. Not a word wasted, not one useless sentence, the entire book is like a haunting opera. Exactly like the Lord Byron-Theresa opera that the protagonist/antagonist is planning to pen down. My playing “Apocalyptica” in a loop while reading the book (a suggestion by a friend) made it even more stirring for me. How does one feel when everything is fictional yet actual, affecting yet at some level you remain detached? This book is a horror for animal-lovers. You need a strong heart to endure some parts. No, I didn’t cry exactly like some sad books make you cry, but I could feel the tears inside me, frozen. Stay away if you want to, but try and see if you want to tighten your heart a little because you might not want to be deprived of an extremely enriching experience that is Coetzee’s writing and the theme of the novel. In spite of the book making me think that the world is a void, I can still say I have been awarded. My prize is a renewed sensitivity.

“But the truth, he knows, is otherwise. His pleasure in living has been snuffed out. Like a leaf on a stream, like a puffball on a breeze, he has begun to float towards his end. He sees it quite clearly, and it fills him with (the word will not go away) despair. The blood of life is leaving his body and despair is taking its place, despair that is like a gas, odourless, tasteless, without nourishment. You breathe it in, your limbs relax, you cease to care, even at the moment when the steel touches your throat.”

This despair and melancholy is what makes “Disgrace” the work that it is. The entire novel is full of sheer misery and in some places which hit home, my heart bled. I have disgraced. I have been disgraced. I have seen people getting stripped off their dignity in most ruthless of manners. Coetzee has ripped apart words and placed them on a sheet of paper, without using large sentences and artistic syllables, he has made his point, loud and clear.

“It’s admirable, what you do, what she does, but to me animal-welfare people are a bit like Christians of a certain kind. Everyone is so cheerful and well-intentioned that after a while you itch to go off and do some raping and pillaging. Or to kick a cat.”

Such harsh and cringe-worthy justification of heinousness, written in that lucid a manner and for a minute I sat and wondered what I just read.

Professor David Lurie of poetry, language and communications, aged 52, twice-divorced, has disgraced and has been disgraced. In an age where one wants to make peace with everything in life, Lurie has to abandon everything that was his till a day before and sets out on an insufferable journey that is only the beginning of his agonies. No, he doesn’t want to give in to the norms of the society and despite being on the wrong side of the moral compass, wants to stand by his principles.

"These are puritanical times. Private life is public business. Prurience is respectable, prurience and sentiment. They wanted a spectacle: breast-beating, remorse, tears if possible. A TV show, in fact. I wouldn't oblige.'"

And when life comes to give it back to him, his immediate past comes back to irk him in more menacing ways, Lurie knows he has nowhere to go anymore. It is here, with his daughter, that he will have to survive. He was never a “good” parent, although he doesn’t know what that means, because he has tried everything he could, but looking at Lucy now, he questions his very existence.

“She does not reply. She would rather hide her face, and he knows why. Because of the disgrace. Because of the shame. That is what their visitors have achieved; that is what they have done to this confident, modern young woman. Like a stain the story is spreading across the district. Not her story to spread but theirs: they are its owners. How they put her in her place, how they showed her what a woman was for.”

“Disgrace” questions morals. It made me desperate to pull both David and Lucy together and scream at them for choosing what they are choosing. It frustrated me to see that the lesson of “Acceptance” is applied and implied so harshly, it makes me not want to accept any darn atrocity that comes my way anymore.

"Vengeance is like a fire. The more it devours, the hungrier it gets.”
“'How humiliating, ' he says finally. 'Such high hopes, and to end like this.'
'Yes, I agree, it is humiliating. But perhaps that is a good point to start from again. Perhaps that is what I must learn to accept. To start at ground level. With nothing. Not with nothing but... With nothing. No cards, no weapons, no property, no rights, no dignity.'
‘Like a dog.'
'Yes, like a dog.'

There are chapters like these that I hated. I didn’t want to read about animals because one mustn’t distinguish between humans and animals and yet here we are, the food-chain toppers, succumbing to the animal instinct more than the animals themselves.

The book has left me deeply shocked and yet very fulfilled. Very few books do that to you. Trigger your conscious and subconscious and then leave you fending for your righteousness because no matter what morals you come to survive with, they are never enough - for the world is largely mingled – where there are beasts who are human and humans who are beasts.

For those who like dismal books, if you are going to read one wretched, distressing book in the whole year, let this be the one.