When you read J.M Coetzee, in quite many works (here we take into consideration Disgrace and Summertime) what hits or blows you is dolour, suffering that ultimately generates also physical pain.
The characters of these books are prisoners of themselves, prisoners of the place where they live and belong to: South Africa. His dolour seems to spring from the reason of being a white person who does not find the right way of living because is living in an inappropriate place where to live.
The story of Disgrace is the best example, where David Lurie and his daughter Lucy have to bend their personalities to the disquieting's will of Petrus, a native that used to be the assistant on the farm of Lucy, which/who also through the complicity of three criminals who rape Lucy and brutalize David he (Petrus) will slowly take possession of.
In Summertime, where the main character, Coetzee himself, recollects his life through a fictitious biographer, who is writing a biography of Coetzee by interviewing five persons who had contact with Coetzee before he died. In Summertime Coetzee's ineptitude of living is expressed by women who knew him or had an affair with him and a University colleague who reflect, as a mirror, upon Coetzee the drama of his own ineptitude as the root of their difficulty of coping with the social reality around them, which forcibly pushed them to act in a certain way that in the end is the very cause of the Coetzee misalignment between Coetzee, them and the society where they all live, triggering in him a personality that, we deduce sparsely, it would have been different if he had lived in a different country.
The characters of these books are prisoners of themselves, prisoners of the place where they live and belong to: South Africa. His dolour seems to spring from the reason of being a white person who does not find the right way of living because is living in an inappropriate place where to live.
The story of Disgrace is the best example, where David Lurie and his daughter Lucy have to bend their personalities to the disquieting's will of Petrus, a native that used to be the assistant on the farm of Lucy, which/who also through the complicity of three criminals who rape Lucy and brutalize David he (Petrus) will slowly take possession of.
In Summertime, where the main character, Coetzee himself, recollects his life through a fictitious biographer, who is writing a biography of Coetzee by interviewing five persons who had contact with Coetzee before he died. In Summertime Coetzee's ineptitude of living is expressed by women who knew him or had an affair with him and a University colleague who reflect, as a mirror, upon Coetzee the drama of his own ineptitude as the root of their difficulty of coping with the social reality around them, which forcibly pushed them to act in a certain way that in the end is the very cause of the Coetzee misalignment between Coetzee, them and the society where they all live, triggering in him a personality that, we deduce sparsely, it would have been different if he had lived in a different country.
But if you resist the pain and suffering coming from those pages you receive the benefit that you only receive from books that make people think, which is a grace you receive lastly, in such a world where the brain's homologation and the brain's flatness is the brand of the majority.
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