Disgrace by J.M.Coetzee: A review

Disgrace won the Booker in 1999; it was J.M. Coetzee’s second Booker and was followed by the Nobel Prize in literature being bestowed upon him. He is a writer of the highest pedigree and immense skill. This novel glows with such aesthetic beauty that you are left with a wonderful sense of blithe satisfaction after a reading. It is about David Lurie, Professor of Communications at Cape Technical University in South Africa - a sensual man, a disciple of the romantic poets, Wordsworth in particular. He is over fifty but his passion for women is undimmed. He has had two wives, but has not been successful in those relationships. Unheeded indulgence of his passions is the way out for him. But when his gaze turns to 18-year old Melanie Isaacs, it is only time before trouble erupts. This is a conservative South African University after all, not given to tolerating the escapades of elderly professors. The scandal that hits him, notwithstanding Melanie’s own role in the fling, uproots him from the University. He would rather quit than beg for forgiveness for a guilt he cannot feel.

That takes him to his daughter Lucy, who lives a peasant’s life on a farm in the Eastern Cape. But the South Africa of the day, in spite of Mandela’s reconciliation, is a place where history has taken an ugly turn. Suddenly, the former oppressed have tasted power; and some would be only too willing to wield it against their previous masters. As it is, Lucy and David’s worldviews clash. But when an act of horrifying brutality rips apart their life, the chasm between them is opened wide. Lurie no longer has the luxury of continuing his old ways. He cares about his daughter too much, though often they don’t see eye to eye. Lurie must change himself and in the process, he must also redeem himself. He must find answers if he has to live with honour. He must learn to be humble and to accept the realities of life. Along the way, he must also find a reason to live.

Coetzee’s prose is never pompous, but graceful, silky and even, at times, melodious. The scenes are set alight by a descriptive ability which always enthralls the imagination. The narrative grips you throughout. His intuitive grasp of the atmospherics of a scene lets conflicting strands of thought brew together until they are ready to explode. And that is handled with the skill of a master artist, who knows the way to tell a beautiful story. It is a work of exceptional power and aesthetic beauty.

J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye

J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye has always been a controversial novel – both reviled and celebrated in equal measure. Sundry guardians of morality and upright behaviour, whom Holden Caulfield - the book’s angst-ridden teenage protagonist – would probably have called ‘phonies’, have always panned the book for its disturbing themes of sexuality and its use of obscene language. Still, the book is among the most read in American schools. Though it was meant for adults, it finds great resonance among adolescents due to the subject, conversational tone and language which reflects a teenager’s vocabulary almost perfectly. Salinger boasted in college that he would write the defining American novel someday. He did not miss the mark by much.

It is essentially the story of an adolescent who faces struggles as he grows up in this imperfect world. Once Holden leaves the sheltered environs of his home for those prep schools that purportedly make something of teenagers, he sees things he cannot understand. Why people act as they do, he probably asks himself. Why does someone behave so snottily when you have probably never met him before? Why is money such a cause for resentment even among kids? The list could be endless. Holden is himself a caring, kind and honest boy before he goes to these schools. That makes it difficult for him to see what adult life is all about. He flunks schools out of this apathy to the ways of the world. Most teachers and students are ‘phonies’ to him, his ultimate insult to people who are contrived or conceited in their behaviour. When the book starts, Holden is flunking yet another school - Pency Prep – and this time he decides to leave without a word to anybody. He makes for New York, his hometown, but does not want to go home yet. So he checks into a rundown hotel and thinks he’ll have a vacation before heading home to face his parents’ inevitable wrath. Only, he spends the time drinking and feeling so alienated that he’s badly depressed most of the time. He has an encounter he did not want with a prostitute, which finally ends without much action and with some regret. He meets up with a girl he has known in the past, but he’s fed up even there. He encounters three women in a bar who are among the most bizarre characters you would ever see. The whole world seems to him to be full of phonies. There are two nuns he meets at the Grand Central station in NY and he donates some money to them. They are probably the only ones he thinks are genuine of all those people he meets during his little getaway. Holden has a little sister Phoebe, who is very perceptive and intelligent. She is the only person he really likes. He turns so morose now that he wants to sneak in to his home and see Phoebe late at night. She’s very happy and animated to see him but also guesses the reason why he’s there. During their talk, he confesses to her that the only thing he wants in his life is to be like a Catcher in the Rye, someone who stands at the edge of some cliff and catches children who stray close to it while playing in the rye. It’s only a metaphor for a person who wants to save himself from impending adulthood, which he thinks is akin to falling off a cliff.

He and his siblings are all good at English; it’s the one subject he does not fail. So he has an English teacher Mr. Antolini he likes who he goes to after seeing Phoebe. He gives Holden a place to stay overnight and also gives him advice on life. He says to Holden, “you are not the first person to be confused and frightened and even sickened by human behaviour” and then he tells him to try to engage with the world. It’s all perfunctory to Holden, who, on a fancy, decides next morning that he’ll leave everything behind to live a solitary existence in the woods, doing menial jobs to survive and allowing only people he likes to visit him. He tells Phoebe about it, but she is adamant about going with him. It probably makes him see some sense and he decides that he would stick it out and see what happens. The ending does not offer any fixes to life’s problems and Holden himself is probably unsure about his future. But he ‘thinks he will apply himself’ in his next school. That perhaps makes the novel stand out as more gritty and realistic than other works on teenage delinquents.
We are all pristine early in our lives, untouched by the ugly realities of life and the need to adapt. But as you grow up, you have to deal with all kinds of people, many of whom you don’t like. The whole business of life is such that it cannot be attempted without adapting yourself. The book shows this aspect of human life, how humans become indifferent towards others and only think of themselves, how they tend to be conceited and shallow as they mature into adults. Life makes people like that. It makes youngsters like Holden become frustrated, alienated from the world and leads to the existential angst that people talk of in teenagers.

A final word on the literary style of the novel: Salinger intuited that the best way to make Holden believable would be to write from his own perspective. The novel uses a style called the Stream of Consciousness, where a person’s thoughts are one with the narrative. So even an aside such as when he describes how the Ossenburger dorm room makes him feel tell us a great deal about him and enhance the incisiveness of the novel. His use of teenage colloquialisms used in the 1940s NY sets the tone and frequent profanities only light up various facets of Holden’s character, like the word ‘goddam’ which underlines his dislike for something when used in that sense. Overall, it sets the feel of the unfolding of a teenage story, told from his perspective.

Thoughts on Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment

Anyone having read Crime and Punishment cannot but be left with their head spinning. This story of a young man, ideologically driven by radical ideas, who commits a crime he does not consider one and yet finds his conscience tormenting him until he can either atone for his sin or end his life, can be a cathartic experience. The novel is a psychological study, a detective thriller and a foray into the philosophy of life itself. It is by turns, gripping, horrifying, saddening, and in the end through a reaffirmation of faith in life, it is also revitalizing. Raskolnikov is an intelligent man, proud and even egoistic, but is beset with poverty as he studies at university, and has fantastic notions of his intellectual superiority, probably a result of new theories he has learnt in St.Petersburg. His desire to improve the lot of his mother and sister coupled with a visceral need to prove his own superiority to himself brings him through a convoluted logic, to commit a murder which he despises inwardly. He has a theory that men are divided into two kinds: one who simply live and others who control the living. The latter provide the law but to them the law does not apply. They are men who make the world in their images. Raskolnikov is obsessed with Napolean and constantly asks himself what Napolean would have done in his place. His oppressive and cramped surroundings further contort his thoughts and contribute to the murder of an old hag who, in his view, is of no use to anyone and only causes suffering to others. His idea is to murder her and take her money so that he can start on a completely different life wherein he can benefit mankind and in the process, expiate for the murder, if it were necessary to do so. He finds no logical flaw in his reasoning as he believes completely in his theory and wishes to establish himself as one of the law-givers. Yet, he cannot commit the crime boldly as he wanted to. His dithering leads him to torment himself as he perceives himself as a coward for his inability to carry out his plans without moral repugnance. For a man of obvious intellectual ability, his refusal to tame his ego proves to be his undoing. His conscience excoriates him every moment whereas his mind tells him that he has failed in his endeavour. How does he stop this mental agony? 

The answers he finds in the novel reveal Dostoevsky’s beliefs in life. The novel was influenced by Dostoevsky’s personal experiences and his eventual acceptance of a conservative and religious philosophy. As a young man, Dostoevsky described himself as a “dreamer.” He became a literary sensation at the age of 24 and came to participate in many liberal intellectual organizations of the time. Strangely enough, he went on to support the very institution of the Tsar that had imprisoned him for 5 years and caused him the immense suffering, but it only proves how influential those prison years were in shaping his thought. He abandoned the reactionary tendencies of his early youth in favour of a more sedate worldview which recognized that human nature could not change suddenly and drastically to facilitate the various kinds of utopia that revolutionaries and theorists in the Russia of then dreamed of. Though most characters in the novel are timeless since they essentially symbolize ideas, their reality is born out of the reality of the land they inhabit where Russian Nihilism and Utilitarianism threatened to take root. Dostoevsky portrayed major characters as men believing in some form of these theories and imaginatively brought them into the aggrieved and sometimes despicable state they reached in their lives by such beliefs. The novel primarily dealt with this specific issue; but its relevance has not diminished a bit as the genius of Dostoevsky created a vision which still finds echoes in world we inhabit. Apart from this philosophical aspect of the novel driven by social realities of the Russia of the 1860s, it is as thrilling a murder mystery as any in the way the detective Porfiry Petrovich psyches out Raskolnikov, having nothing but an indelible intuition to lead him to identify the latter as the murderer. The passages where they duel with each other knowing that their words can work both ways are the stuff of genius. Though it is unconventional in that the murderer is always known, it is enthralling to read whether or not Raskolnikov will submit to the legal law which acts as the bulwark of the moral code by which society lives. Another striking feature is the religious angle explored by Dostoevsky. The idea that suffering is necessary to become a better person appears many times and is responsible for the eventual transformation of Raskolnikov. Dostoevsky became an orthodox Christian after his travails, and his experiences are clearly mirrored in the narrative. However his religious view is less ecclesiastical and more in tune with the moral code and precepts that early Christianity taught. Indeed he parodies the practice of mediation by a priest when a Christian asks forgiveness on his deathbed. Perhaps the notions of fate and circumstance playing a huge role in the novel – where crucial events are attributed to simple chance – are also religious in nature. Eventually, the masterful telling of this epic tale, coupled with his profound insights into human nature make it a fascinating read, one of the best novels of all time.