Disgrace (review)

and the flinty eloquence of its folk. The generosity and sweetness of a people happy to have Uved, and been part of one another, now and perhaps forever, sing loud and clear in these bountiful hundreds ofpages. (BA) Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee Viking, 1999, 220 pp., $23.95 "These are puritanical times. Private life is public business," announces David Lurie, the twicedivorced , joyless academic protagonist of Disgrace, the novel for which J. M. Coetzee received an unprecedented second Booker Prize. After teaching for a quarter century, Lurie loses his job as an adjunct professor of communications at Cape Technical University for his refusal to pubUcly repent of his brief affair with a pretty yet mediocre student. At 52, Lurie suddenly finds himself job-less, friendless, despised by his ex-wife and unable to write (his current project is an eccentric chamber opera about Byron's last years). Contemptuous and angry, he arrives at his daughter Lucy's smaU, isolated farm in the uplands of Eastern Cape, intending to temporarily escape what she sarcasticaUy calls his "higher Ufe" for one he beUeves to be simpler and less compUcated. Lurie becomes a farm worker and animal-shelter volunteer and tries to reestabUsh a relationship with his twenty-something daughter, who refuses to coddle him despite his selfinflicted despair. Beginning a new life in the country as a recluse is filled with its own peril, and Lurie soon finds himsetf in a dangerous place, where all his sophistication and extensive learning prove useless. Lurie and Lucy are unable to protect themselves from an afternoonlong , savage attack by three black men. Beaten, disgraced and humiUated , the former professor must help himselfand his daughter recover from the violence. The process is slow, and the suffering they endure raises for Lurie myriad questions about human isolation, parenthood and racial confrontation . He finds few answers. Worn and weary, yetwiser and kinder, Lurie concludes, "One gets used to things getting harder." The author of eight novels, Coetzee writes in concise yet gorgeous prose, and with a fierceness of attitude, about what it means to be human and in search of your soul in a complex time and place. Disgrace is a touching and perplexing novel, a major achievement . (KS) Beowulf translated by Seamus Heaney Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000, 220 pp., $25 Seamus Heaney's new translation ofBawul/plunges readers to the "first stratum of the language," and they apparently like what they find there. A New York Times best-seUer and a seUout at megastores, this is a Uvely yet responsible rendering by the Nobel laureate of one of English Uterature's oldest heirlooms. This shining translation abounds in idiomatic language, local metaphor and even the occasional diche. For example, BeowuU repUes to a drunken Unferth's criticisms that "it 198 · The Missouri Review ...