After being found guilty on 34 counts of falsifying business records in New York this May, former President Trump declared that what had happened to him was a “disgrace” — choosing a word that conveys the utmost disgust and outrage. Fraught and weighty, the term leaves a stain. It’s also the title of the South African author J.
M. Coetzee’s eighth and perhaps most significant novel. My most lasting memory of “Disgrace,” published on July 1, 1999, is its stark and relentless brutality.
The plot is explosive to the point of implausibility, and since the mind can only hold onto so many awful incidents at once, it can be hard to recollect the novel’s many acts of violation and rupture. What lingers is a wound that won’t heal; Coetzee wants the reader to dwell in the aftermath of horror. But “Disgrace” has lasted long enough to connect with a reader immersed in the similarly profuse horrors of the contemporary news cycle because of his ability to reach beyond the moment of trauma.
He not only asks the reader to live with moral uncertainty and the discomfort of violent change, but also to accept that trauma is an ongoing state. Writing in the aftermath of South African apartheid, Coetzee could have penned a sprawling epic. Instead, against the backdrop of Nelson Mandela’s ascension to political power as president of the African National Congress (ANC), and the 1996 establishment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to help his countrymen grapple with th.
