The first Heschel Book Group met on Wednesday, November 11. It was a lovely gathering of parents, grandparents, and alumni. The group decided that the next book we would tackle would be Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee. This novel, set in post-apartheid Cape Town and on a remote farm in the Eastern Cape, is a heartbreaking novel about Professor David Lurie and his daughter. An affair with one of his students leaves David jobless and friendless. His attempts to relate to his daughter, and to a society with new racial complexities, are disrupted by an afternoon of violence that changes him and his daughter in ways he could never have foreseen.
From The New Yorker, "Disgrace has just made literary history by winning Coetzee an unprecedented second Booker, and what seems striking about it, right from the start, is its almost unnatural sense of poise, the way it takes you by the hand and leads you through unrecognizable terrain only to pull the ground out from under you with such accumulated force that by the time you come to the last sentence you feel as if you'd lost your bearings, and you aren't sure how useful they'd be now, anyway. Disgrace is not a hard or obscure book-it is, among other things, compulsively readable-but what it may well be is an authentically spiritual document, a lament for the soul of a disgraced century."
From The New Yorker, "Disgrace has just made literary history by winning Coetzee an unprecedented second Booker, and what seems striking about it, right from the start, is its almost unnatural sense of poise, the way it takes you by the hand and leads you through unrecognizable terrain only to pull the ground out from under you with such accumulated force that by the time you come to the last sentence you feel as if you'd lost your bearings, and you aren't sure how useful they'd be now, anyway. Disgrace is not a hard or obscure book-it is, among other things, compulsively readable-but what it may well be is an authentically spiritual document, a lament for the soul of a disgraced century."
This novel deals explicitly with the downfall of one man and dramatizes, with unforgettable, at times almost unbearable, vividness the plight of a country caught in the aftermath of centuries of racial oppression. Although this is a bleak and emotionally wrenching novel, I encourage you to read this Nobel Prize winning author's work. We will meet on Tuesday, December 9, in the Lainer Library at 7:00. Come and share your insights or just listen to the discussion. This group is open to faculty and staff, parents and grandparents, alumni, and friends of Abraham Joshua Heschel Day School.
