Not quite:
Though Lurie wants it to be no more than "a quick little affairquickly in, quickly out," it rapidly spins out of control, with the girl's boyfriend, parents then, finally, the university all involved. Unwilling to be contrite, Lurie simply pleads guilty as charged, so is dismissed.
What does Lurie's plight have to do with post-Apartheid South Africa? Plenty. We'll get to it.
Fleeing his disgrace, Lurie takes refuge at his daughter's farm in Salem, a good 542 miles away. City-raised and with even a stint in Holland, Lucy is a novice farmer, living alone. Her lesbian partner has just left.
Since Lurie has just screwed someone younger than Lucy, there's sometimes a creepiness to their interactions, such as here, "He sits on the bed, idly fondles her bare foot. A good foot, shapely. Good bones, like her mother. A woman in the flower of her years, attractive despite the heaviness, despite the unflattering clothes."
Lurie squeezes his daughter into a fleeting fantasy about households of three, "Three. That would be a solution of sorts. He and Lucy and Melanie. Or he and Melanie and Soraya." The last is a married prostitute with two children.
With her dark, liquid eyes, Soraya still haunts him. Lurie has concluded that their intercourse "must be, he imagines, rather like the copulation of snakes: lengthy, absorbed, but rather abstract, rather dry, even at its hottest." Only her eyes are wet, professor.
Lurie can't help but rue Lucy's sexual bent, "Attractive, he is thinking, yet lost to men. Need he reproach himself, or would it have worked out like that anyway? From the day his daughter was born he has felt for her nothing but the most spontaneous, most unstinting love. Impossible she has been unaware of it. Has it been too much, that love? Has she found it a burden? Has it pressed down on her? Has she given it a darker reading?"
Odd, but not so odd, to think that his pressing down on her with a frantic, insatiable and self-absorbed burden may have steered the woman towards the female.
Constantly appraising women, Lurie finds Lucy's best friend repulsive, "He has not taken to Bev Shaw, a dumpy, bustling little woman with black freckles, close-cropped, wiry hair, and no neck. He does not like women who make no effort to be attractive."
Lurie also doesn't think much of her unpaid stewardship of an animal clinic, to which Lucy also volunteers, "That's wonderful, then. I'm sorry, my child, I just find it hard to whip up an interest in the subject. It's admirable, what you do, what she does, but to me animal-welfare people are a bit like Christians of a certain kind. Everyone is so cheerful and well-intentioned that after a while you itch to go off and do some raping and pillaging. Or to kick a cat."
The very next time raping appears in this novel, it's no longer just a word, casually spat out.
As the white father and daughter walk home with two Dobermanns, they encounter three strange blacks. Reaching their house, they're surprised to see the same blacks, one of whom is described by Coetzee as tall and "handsome, strikingly handsome, with a high forehead, sculpted cheekbones, wide, flaring nostrils."
Obeying some obscure logic, the white woman disarms herself by caging her Dobermanns, before asking these blacks what they want. One explains that they must use her phone because of an accident, a bad accident, which, almost immediately, turns into the handsome one's sister having a baby. Since the blacks are from a village without phone, it makes enough sense for the white woman to let the tall, handsome black man inside.
Over six harrowing pages, we read about these blacks ransacking the house, shooting the dogs, hitting Lurie then setting his head on fire, stealing everything of value, including his car, and, yes, raping Lucy, all three of them, including one described as just a boy. When not learning sexual violence, this apprentice in a flowered shirt eats from a tub of ice cream. Done with their work, these blacks laugh and drive off.
She does not resist. All she does is avert herselfavert her lips, avert her eyes. She lets him lay her out on the bed and undress her: she even helps him, raising her arms and then her hips. Little shivers of cold run through her; as soon as she is bare, she slips under the quilted counterpane like a mole burrowing, and turns her back on him.It's their second coupling, after he has shown up at her apartment unannounced, so that she's "too surprised to resist the intruder," but since it's only passion, his, and his only, it's justified, "Strange love! Yet from the quiver of Aphrodite, goddess of the foaming waves, no doubt about that."
Not rape, not quite that, but undesired nevertheless, undesired to the core. As though she had decided to go slack, die within herself for the duration, like a rabbit when the jaws of the fox close on its neck. So that everything done to her might be done, as it were, far away.
Though Lurie wants it to be no more than "a quick little affairquickly in, quickly out," it rapidly spins out of control, with the girl's boyfriend, parents then, finally, the university all involved. Unwilling to be contrite, Lurie simply pleads guilty as charged, so is dismissed.
What does Lurie's plight have to do with post-Apartheid South Africa? Plenty. We'll get to it.
Since Lurie has just screwed someone younger than Lucy, there's sometimes a creepiness to their interactions, such as here, "He sits on the bed, idly fondles her bare foot. A good foot, shapely. Good bones, like her mother. A woman in the flower of her years, attractive despite the heaviness, despite the unflattering clothes."
Lurie squeezes his daughter into a fleeting fantasy about households of three, "Three. That would be a solution of sorts. He and Lucy and Melanie. Or he and Melanie and Soraya." The last is a married prostitute with two children.
With her dark, liquid eyes, Soraya still haunts him. Lurie has concluded that their intercourse "must be, he imagines, rather like the copulation of snakes: lengthy, absorbed, but rather abstract, rather dry, even at its hottest." Only her eyes are wet, professor.
Lurie can't help but rue Lucy's sexual bent, "Attractive, he is thinking, yet lost to men. Need he reproach himself, or would it have worked out like that anyway? From the day his daughter was born he has felt for her nothing but the most spontaneous, most unstinting love. Impossible she has been unaware of it. Has it been too much, that love? Has she found it a burden? Has it pressed down on her? Has she given it a darker reading?"
Odd, but not so odd, to think that his pressing down on her with a frantic, insatiable and self-absorbed burden may have steered the woman towards the female.
Constantly appraising women, Lurie finds Lucy's best friend repulsive, "He has not taken to Bev Shaw, a dumpy, bustling little woman with black freckles, close-cropped, wiry hair, and no neck. He does not like women who make no effort to be attractive."
Lurie also doesn't think much of her unpaid stewardship of an animal clinic, to which Lucy also volunteers, "That's wonderful, then. I'm sorry, my child, I just find it hard to whip up an interest in the subject. It's admirable, what you do, what she does, but to me animal-welfare people are a bit like Christians of a certain kind. Everyone is so cheerful and well-intentioned that after a while you itch to go off and do some raping and pillaging. Or to kick a cat."
The very next time raping appears in this novel, it's no longer just a word, casually spat out.
As the white father and daughter walk home with two Dobermanns, they encounter three strange blacks. Reaching their house, they're surprised to see the same blacks, one of whom is described by Coetzee as tall and "handsome, strikingly handsome, with a high forehead, sculpted cheekbones, wide, flaring nostrils."
Obeying some obscure logic, the white woman disarms herself by caging her Dobermanns, before asking these blacks what they want. One explains that they must use her phone because of an accident, a bad accident, which, almost immediately, turns into the handsome one's sister having a baby. Since the blacks are from a village without phone, it makes enough sense for the white woman to let the tall, handsome black man inside.
Over six harrowing pages, we read about these blacks ransacking the house, shooting the dogs, hitting Lurie then setting his head on fire, stealing everything of value, including his car, and, yes, raping Lucy, all three of them, including one described as just a boy. When not learning sexual violence, this apprentice in a flowered shirt eats from a tub of ice cream. Done with their work, these blacks laugh and drive off.
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