Disgrace

It's not an easy book to read. The beginning sequence of a South African professor who pursues an affair with a much younger and not-entirely consenting student will make you a little squeamish, but I had reached a point where he moves out to the country to live with his grown daughter (I am not ruining anything; this is all on the book jacket) and when I picked up the book again today at page 80, it was beginning to feel a little All Creatures Great and Small-ish. All signs pointed to redemption.

Thirty pages later, the story had suddenly taken another turn, again, difficult to read, but this time you feel for the main characters. So when my cell phone rang and the called ID said "Dad" (with little hearts around it that show up for anyone in the "family" caller group), it took me a second to get out of the book and back into my life.

I think it will wind up being one of my favorites. Not in a warm, fuzzy way. More in an "art is meant to disturb" sort of way.

It occurs to me that in the last J.M. Coetzee novel I read (In the Heart of the Country), the main character was not instantly lovable, either, and I left the book feeling a little, well, disturbed.