“For unnatural acts: for broadcasting old seed, tired seed, seed that does not quicken, contra naturam.

He believes himself guilty not of raping a student but simply of growing old, becoming one of those men from whom a prostitute might shudder “as one shudders at a cockroach in a washbasin in the middle of the night.” He had been put on trial “for his way of life,” he thinks. If his desire is real, how could it be wrong? When, later, he recalls the university’s investigation, he identifies his age as the real crime, and his decaying body the punishment. running a bath, stepping into the water, eyes closed like a sleepwalker.”īut Melanie’s experience feels immaterial to Lurie. So that everything done to her might be done, as it were, far away.” After it’s over, she asks him to leave, and in his car Lurie has “no doubt, she, Melanie, is trying to cleanse herself of it, of him. . . . As though she had decided to go slack, die within herself for the duration. . . . Not rape, not quite that, but undesired nevertheless, undesired to the core. Little shivers of cold run through her. . . . “All she does is avert herself: avert her lips, avert her eyes. . . . But “nothing will stop him,” and Lurie carries Melanie to her bedroom. But he is in the grip of something.” He shows up at her apartment, uninvited, and Melanie is “too surprised to resist the intruder who thrusts himself upon her.” Her limbs crumple, and she struggles, tells him no. She will not know how to deal with him he ought to let her go. When he calls Melanie on the phone, he hears in her voice “all her uncertainty. Lurie is unashamed of what he’s done-there is an icy near-clarity to the way he experiences the act of overpowering her. He is in retreat, having been fired from a university, where he taught Romantic poetry, over what he regards as a lusty affair with a student, and what that student, named Melanie, regards as coercion, perhaps rape. Prurience is respectable, prurience and sentiment.” Lurie is speaking with his daughter at her small landholding in eastern South Africa, which is serving as his temporary escape from Cape Town.

Coetzee’s novel “ Disgrace,” from 1999, tells his daughter, Lucy.

“These are puritanical times,” David Lurie, the protagonist of J.

Disgrace novel