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The Global Pages -> April 2004 -> Reviews in Brief
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Two Book Reviews |
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Disgrace J.M. Coatzee (New York: Penguin, 1999)
J.
M. Coatzee is last year’s Nobel laureate for fiction.
His Booker Prize-winning novel, Disgrace, tells the story of
Professor David Lurie who has “for a man of his age, fifty-two,
divorced…to his mind, solved the problem of sex rather well.” But within a
few pages, Lurie’s solution to sex, and to everything else in his life,
proves illusory. Once a privileged scholar of Romanticism at a Capetown
university, Lurie’s own small world of entitlement and privilege unravels
even as apartheid itself comes undone. He is to find that he can take
nothing for granted, even personal safety. Coatzee’s exquisite prose moves
this compelling and painful tale of one man, one country, one world from
beginning to end as disgrace at last becomes grace. Still, in the telling,
it is easy to imagine Alan Paton, Nadine Gordimer, Nelson Mandela looking
on sadly, saying, “yes, of course. What did you think would happen?”
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Reviewed by
Jacqueline Gray
SCC English
Associate Professor
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Walking on Fire: Haitian Women's
Stories of Survival and Resistance Edited
by Beverly Bell (Cornell University Press, 2001)
Haitian women may lake the
empowerment they require in matters of home, the economy and politics,
but they are acutely informed about the structures of oppression at work
both at home and abroad. This absorbing book of oral history and
analysis identifies their key flashpoints of struggle, and whether the
subject is neoliberalism or domestic violence, union organizing or the
quest for an education, they speak for themselves in compelling stories of
the way that these women persist and organize will leave no reader
untouched.
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The Global Forum
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Reviewed by
Michael Kuelker
SCC English
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This page updated
07/14/2004
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