Disgrace

Disgrace is a novel by the South African writer J. M. Coetzee, published in 1999. It is set in post-apartheid South Africa.

David Lurie is a white South African professor of English, twice divorced and dissatisfied with his job as a communications lecturer at a technical university in Cape Town, where he teaches a class in romantic literature. His sexual affairs are all inherently risky: before the relationship that ruins him he becomes attached to a prostitute and tries to begin a romantic relationship with her despite her having a family, and is rebuffed, and he then seduces a secretary at his university and ignores her afterwards. The disgrace of the title arrives when he begins an affair with one of his students, which leaves him without his job, shunned by his friends and ridiculed by his ex-wife. He goes to stay with his daughter Lucy on her isolated smallholding, where a brief visit becomes an extended stay as he tries to find some meaning in the one relationship he has left.

Coetzee writes spare novels about people whose position in their society comes apart, and this one is about what a man does after he has lost his standing.