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Lacuna
Winner of the Sala Novel Award
Winner of the Humanities and Social Sciences Award for the Novel
A cry for reparations for Lucy Lurie. She is the victim of an act of terrible sexual violence that devastes her life. Afterwards, she becomes obsessed with the author John Coetzee, the man who wrote the scene of violence in which she was attacked. Withdrawn and fearful of crowds, Lucy nonetheless makes occasional forays into the world of men in her search for Coetzee himself. She means to confront him. The Lucy in his novel, Disgrace, is passive and almost entirely lacking agency. Lucy means to right the record, for she is the lacuna that Coetzee left in his novel—the missing piece of the puzzle. Lucy plans to put herself back in the story, to assert her agency and identity. For Lucy Lurie will be no man’s lacuna.
This riveting, feminist reply to the book considered to be Coetzee’s masterwork is also a moving story of one woman trying to put her life back together after trauma.
Winner of the Humanities and Social Sciences Award for the Novel
A cry for reparations for Lucy Lurie. She is the victim of an act of terrible sexual violence that devastes her life. Afterwards, she becomes obsessed with the author John Coetzee, the man who wrote the scene of violence in which she was attacked. Withdrawn and fearful of crowds, Lucy nonetheless makes occasional forays into the world of men in her search for Coetzee himself. She means to confront him. The Lucy in his novel, Disgrace, is passive and almost entirely lacking agency. Lucy means to right the record, for she is the lacuna that Coetzee left in his novel—the missing piece of the puzzle. Lucy plans to put herself back in the story, to assert her agency and identity. For Lucy Lurie will be no man’s lacuna.
This riveting, feminist reply to the book considered to be Coetzee’s masterwork is also a moving story of one woman trying to put her life back together after trauma.
256 pages, Hardcover
First published April 1, 2019
17 people are currently reading
494 people want to read
About the author
Fiona Snyckers
46 books72 followersFiona Snyckers is the author of the "Trinity" series of novels and the "Sisterz" series of mobile novels. She has also published various short stories.
She was educated at Rhodes University and the University of the Witwatersrand. She lives in Johannesburg with her husband, three children, and four cats.
Fiona loves to interact with fellow readers and writers about the writing process, books in general, family life, and of course cats.
She was educated at Rhodes University and the University of the Witwatersrand. She lives in Johannesburg with her husband, three children, and four cats.
Fiona loves to interact with fellow readers and writers about the writing process, books in general, family life, and of course cats.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 64 reviews
May 18, 2022
The concept behind Fiona Snyckers’s award-winning Lacuna’s intriguing, a feminist perspective on J. M. Coetzee’s controversial Disgrace. Snyckers takes Coetzee’s character Lucy Lurie, daughter of protagonist David, and victim of gang rape and turns her into Lacuna’s narrator. It’s an approach that recalls similar retellings like Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea. Snyckers response to Disgrace rests on a particular interpretation of Lucy’s role in the narrative, one in which her rape operates almost entirely as metaphor. Lacuna’s Lucy’s also been raped but her experience’s appropriated by an imagined version of Coetzee. Coetzee produces a hugely successful book that makes Lucy both notorious and desperate for revenge.
Snyckers’s topic’s clearly important, especially in the context of South Africa, frequently labelled “rape capital of the world”. A number of Snyckers’s choices worked well to highlight difficulties faced by women like Lucy, for instance Lucy’s portrayal as unlikeable and unreliable, an indirect comment on how often female rape victims are pressured to conform to gendered stereotypes to be taken seriously. But, for me, Snyckers’s over-ambitious novel raised some puzzling questions. Coetzee’s Lucy's a lesbian, setting up a possible link between her ordeal and ‘corrective rape,’ another major problem in South Africa. So why is Snyckers’s Lucy firmly heterosexual? Snyckers positions Lucy as the ‘lacuna’ or gap in Coetzee’s text, sidestepping another of Coetzee’s characters, David’s student Melanie. Again why? Melanie’s a far more marginalised figure than Lucy. Melanie’s a woman of colour, the “dark” to Lucy’s “light” and her date rape by David deliberately mirrors Lucy’s assault. In Disgrace these parallel occurrences of sexual violence seem crucial: they resist readings that fall back on racist assumptions about Black men attacking white women; and bring into play issues around power and colonialism, spaces in which white men, like David have routinely assumed women of colour are there for the taking.
Disgrace’s a very slippery text, still an object of debate over twenty years post publication. Are the female victims of trauma who recur in Coetzee’s novels voiceless? Or have they been silenced? Is Coetzee really using rape as metaphor or is he critiquing gender inequality and the centrality of sexual violence in South African society? Lacuna appears to gloss over Disgrace’s complexities and ambiguities. It attempts to address weighty issues around abuse of power and white privilege but I didn’t feel it dealt with them in any real depth. In addition, I was uncomfortable with the understanding of feminism here: predominantly white and overwhelmingly heterosexual.
Thanks to Edelweiss and publisher Europa Editions for an arc
Snyckers’s topic’s clearly important, especially in the context of South Africa, frequently labelled “rape capital of the world”. A number of Snyckers’s choices worked well to highlight difficulties faced by women like Lucy, for instance Lucy’s portrayal as unlikeable and unreliable, an indirect comment on how often female rape victims are pressured to conform to gendered stereotypes to be taken seriously. But, for me, Snyckers’s over-ambitious novel raised some puzzling questions. Coetzee’s Lucy's a lesbian, setting up a possible link between her ordeal and ‘corrective rape,’ another major problem in South Africa. So why is Snyckers’s Lucy firmly heterosexual? Snyckers positions Lucy as the ‘lacuna’ or gap in Coetzee’s text, sidestepping another of Coetzee’s characters, David’s student Melanie. Again why? Melanie’s a far more marginalised figure than Lucy. Melanie’s a woman of colour, the “dark” to Lucy’s “light” and her date rape by David deliberately mirrors Lucy’s assault. In Disgrace these parallel occurrences of sexual violence seem crucial: they resist readings that fall back on racist assumptions about Black men attacking white women; and bring into play issues around power and colonialism, spaces in which white men, like David have routinely assumed women of colour are there for the taking.
Disgrace’s a very slippery text, still an object of debate over twenty years post publication. Are the female victims of trauma who recur in Coetzee’s novels voiceless? Or have they been silenced? Is Coetzee really using rape as metaphor or is he critiquing gender inequality and the centrality of sexual violence in South African society? Lacuna appears to gloss over Disgrace’s complexities and ambiguities. It attempts to address weighty issues around abuse of power and white privilege but I didn’t feel it dealt with them in any real depth. In addition, I was uncomfortable with the understanding of feminism here: predominantly white and overwhelmingly heterosexual.
Thanks to Edelweiss and publisher Europa Editions for an arc
March 8, 2022
It would be hard to love this novel more than I did. It captivated me for the way it plays off of Coetzee's Disgrace and for the way it sometimes reflects, sometimes refutes that novel's core premises.
There is just one other book I'm aware of in this genre of "literary criticism presented as a novel"--The Meursault Investigation, a novel by Kamel Daoud, which is a critique-as-fiction of Camus's The Stranger. I wish there were more. I feel as if I've spent time with an extraordinary writer who also loves reading, and who understands how literary language works. It made my brain light up in entirely new ways. Marvelously entertaining for all you nerdy people out there like me. You know who you are.
Disgrace by Coetzee was a mighty interesting read to me, primarily for its flaws. Now, whether these flaws are the author Coetzee's fault, or the fault of the protagonist, is an interesting question. It's an interesting question when reading Lacuna, too. As in the source novel, the protagonist here has some unpleasant views, and she is dead wrong about so many things, including what she says about the novel Disgrace and what she says about the author Coetzee--the "Coetzee" in the novel doesn't correspond with the real author, in some significant ways.
The rape scene in Disgrace outraged me for a completely out-of-the-box reason--it required me to believe that the protagonist was locked -inside- of a bathroom and therefore powerless to help his daughter when she is gang raped on the other side of the door. Huh? Since when do bathrooms lock on the outside? This critical flaw at the center of the most critical scene of the novel left me wondering about just what is and isn't real in the entire novel of Disgrace....and it left me more than ready to read Lacuna, a novel about an equally flawed protagonist, who also gets so many things wrong!
=======
Updating to include a link to Steven G. Kellman's masterful meticulous review of Lacuna for the LA Review of Books:
Unreliable Witness: On Fiona Snyckers’s “Lacuna”
Kellman's review delves deep into the layers of obfuscations and misrepresentations in this novel. One of the things I loved most about it was trying to find the resting point for its many diversions either from the truth of Coetzee's novel, or the truth of Coetzee's life, both of which are deliberately, playfully altered in Snyckers's novel.
There is just one other book I'm aware of in this genre of "literary criticism presented as a novel"--The Meursault Investigation, a novel by Kamel Daoud, which is a critique-as-fiction of Camus's The Stranger. I wish there were more. I feel as if I've spent time with an extraordinary writer who also loves reading, and who understands how literary language works. It made my brain light up in entirely new ways. Marvelously entertaining for all you nerdy people out there like me. You know who you are.
Disgrace by Coetzee was a mighty interesting read to me, primarily for its flaws. Now, whether these flaws are the author Coetzee's fault, or the fault of the protagonist, is an interesting question. It's an interesting question when reading Lacuna, too. As in the source novel, the protagonist here has some unpleasant views, and she is dead wrong about so many things, including what she says about the novel Disgrace and what she says about the author Coetzee--the "Coetzee" in the novel doesn't correspond with the real author, in some significant ways.
The rape scene in Disgrace outraged me for a completely out-of-the-box reason--it required me to believe that the protagonist was locked -inside- of a bathroom and therefore powerless to help his daughter when she is gang raped on the other side of the door. Huh? Since when do bathrooms lock on the outside? This critical flaw at the center of the most critical scene of the novel left me wondering about just what is and isn't real in the entire novel of Disgrace....and it left me more than ready to read Lacuna, a novel about an equally flawed protagonist, who also gets so many things wrong!
=======
Updating to include a link to Steven G. Kellman's masterful meticulous review of Lacuna for the LA Review of Books:
Unreliable Witness: On Fiona Snyckers’s “Lacuna”
Kellman's review delves deep into the layers of obfuscations and misrepresentations in this novel. One of the things I loved most about it was trying to find the resting point for its many diversions either from the truth of Coetzee's novel, or the truth of Coetzee's life, both of which are deliberately, playfully altered in Snyckers's novel.
March 8, 2022
"I was never that woman - fiction-Lucy. I was never her. I don't believe any woman is her. She is the product of male fantasy. The angelic victim who accepts her rape as a natural part of the order of things. Who takes the punishment for colonialism upon her own body and happily bears the child that results from it. Who chooses to live amid her assailants and share her life with them [...] If the message of atonement and reconciliation had been framed in any other way, I could have accepted it. If it had been represented in any other way besides the rape of a woman. That's what places it beyond the pale."
What a dizzying, smart, rich and troubling book this is! Meta and postmodernist, it functions as a critical reading of Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee (and I love the shadowed link made by the cover art) while simultaneously opening up all kinds of lacunae and questions in the mind of the reader as fissures gape between JM Coetzee and the John Coetzee of the novel who has only written Disgrace two years ago in a contemporary present complete with Cinder (Tinder), social media and BLM.
I have to say here that I haven't read Disgrace - and am now part pushed to do so to see if Lucy's reading is one that I also see in the book. And that it might be, makes me also feel I don't want to read it. It is, of course, the case that primarily male authors have long used rape as sexualised metaphor for, especially, military action - just think of Shakespeare's Henry V, off the top of my head, where the language is all about penetration, submission, occupation and so on. So it is both literary tradition and also an innovation to use rape as a metaphor for the violent upheaval of apartheid in South Africa - but it's perhaps one that only a male author might have conceived. Indeed, one of the points this book makes is the well-known one of how the world looks different through gendered eyes.
What complicates this narrative in a dense and rich way is that Lucy is far from reliable and the narrative consists as much of her acknowledged fantasies as it does of any kind of literary 'reality', whatever that means in a piece of fiction. We're never quite sure if she really is the 'Lucy Lurie' upon whom the character in Disgrace was based or whether she's a rape victim or survivor (and the book interrogates those terms) suffering from PTSD, attaching herself to a piece of relevant fiction as a way of channeling her trauma, her voice, and her rage.
And to add another twist, Lucy finally gets called out by a Black sociologist who points out Lucy's white privilege in being able to afford a therapist, lock herself away in her house and talk about self-care:
I thought the world held no further terrors for me. I was wrong. It turns out that the prospect of losing one's privilege is the biggest terror of all [...] She is wrong. She must be wrong, because it is inconvenient for me if she is right. I force the impulse down. I make myself stop trying to raise objections, to exceptionalise myself, to legitimise my pain. I stop talking altogether, and listen. This is not something I am good at. I have spent so much time trying to make my voice heard that my ears are out of practice.
The wonderful irony is that Lucy who has been filling the lacuna in Coetzee's book, is also speaking over women whose racial or economic status is perceived to be (race) or is (economics) lesser than hers. It's a sobering moment and a challenging one for both the character and the reader, however much we are attentive to intersectionality.
Overall, then, a fascinating book for me which functions partly as literary criticism while also being an absolutely contemporary story of rape, trauma, mental health, privilege and a surprising dark humour at times. To end on a quotation, this is Lucy's response when the Black sociologist tells her to write a novel of her own:
'Oh, no, I couldn't do that. It would make people uncomfortable. No one would want to read it. Coetzee's story would stand head and shoulders above it. His story is a clean, coherent narrative. It is powerful and iconic. Mine is an uncontrolled emotion dump, lacking in structure and framework. If John Coetzee's story is a fountain pen on vellum, mine is menstrual blood on toilet paper.'
Bold, outspoken and yes, challenging at times - but isn't that what literature is for?
Many thanks to Europa Editions for an ARC via NetGalley
October 17, 2021
Over 20 years ago, I read J.M. Coetzee’s masterwork, Disgrace, which earned him the Nobel Prize I Literature. The book, set in post-apartheid South Africa, is incantatory and unflinching. Its most memorable scene is the brutal gang rape by black men of Lucy Lurie, a white woman. The rape is a metaphor of the old order, and a necessary action for the new order to begin: black men and a white woman who work side-by-side to farm the land together. In effect, Lucy “takes upon her body the sins of apartheid like some dungaree-wearing lamb of God.”
I begin my review with a look-back to J.M. Coetzee because It’s importance to know the basics to fully appreciate the inventiveness and audacity of Fiona Synckers. In this must-read book, she brings Lucy Lurie to life and provides her with a voice that desperately wants to assert its own agency and story.
Lucy in this novel is a fiction of a fiction. She is the fictional junior colleague of J.M. Coetzee, who was a professor first, who shares her name with the fictional Lucy Lurie of Disgrace. She is, for all intents and purposes, the lacuna—the missing piece of the novel. She is also one of the most unreliable narrators of all time, trying out various stories and then discarding them for other, presumably truer stories.
The book touches on the theme of appropriation: can anyone other than the victim commandeer and relay a story? Or, as J.M. Coetzee himself once said, is a book the property of the readers once it is launched? Interestingly, Ms. Synyckers is guilty of the same transgression in her reimaging of J.M. Coetzee’s writing decisions and in his depicture but that, perhaps, is part of the complicated themes she takes on.
It is the questions that the fictional Lucy Lurie asks that are the most fascinating. Should a brutal rape ever be a metaphorical device that leads to redemption? Isn’t patriarchy as dangerous, in its own way, as racism – especially when the patriarchy enables powerful white males to diminish the horror of rape (even if the intentions on doing so seem noble?) How do we navigate a world of privilege, where those of us with means get therapy and those of us without get silenced? For that matter, how do we navigate law and social media that twist words and shape opinions? Most of all, how do we reach a point of self-care, when we stand up and say, “I will not be violated or appropriated. I will tell my own truth.”
Lacuna is a thought-provoking novel that doesn’t hold back, and which raises vital questions about the lacuna – the gaps – in our society. In addition to Disgrace, it also has wisps of Moby Dick, as Ahab goes in search of the White Whale (in the person of J.M. Coetzee). I am now eager to read Disgrace again to find out how my perception of this central scene has (or maybe has not) transformed. For those of us who love insightful books that spark our mind, this is a must-read. Thanks to Europa Editions for giving me the privilege of being an early reader in exchange for an honest review.
I begin my review with a look-back to J.M. Coetzee because It’s importance to know the basics to fully appreciate the inventiveness and audacity of Fiona Synckers. In this must-read book, she brings Lucy Lurie to life and provides her with a voice that desperately wants to assert its own agency and story.
Lucy in this novel is a fiction of a fiction. She is the fictional junior colleague of J.M. Coetzee, who was a professor first, who shares her name with the fictional Lucy Lurie of Disgrace. She is, for all intents and purposes, the lacuna—the missing piece of the novel. She is also one of the most unreliable narrators of all time, trying out various stories and then discarding them for other, presumably truer stories.
The book touches on the theme of appropriation: can anyone other than the victim commandeer and relay a story? Or, as J.M. Coetzee himself once said, is a book the property of the readers once it is launched? Interestingly, Ms. Synyckers is guilty of the same transgression in her reimaging of J.M. Coetzee’s writing decisions and in his depicture but that, perhaps, is part of the complicated themes she takes on.
It is the questions that the fictional Lucy Lurie asks that are the most fascinating. Should a brutal rape ever be a metaphorical device that leads to redemption? Isn’t patriarchy as dangerous, in its own way, as racism – especially when the patriarchy enables powerful white males to diminish the horror of rape (even if the intentions on doing so seem noble?) How do we navigate a world of privilege, where those of us with means get therapy and those of us without get silenced? For that matter, how do we navigate law and social media that twist words and shape opinions? Most of all, how do we reach a point of self-care, when we stand up and say, “I will not be violated or appropriated. I will tell my own truth.”
Lacuna is a thought-provoking novel that doesn’t hold back, and which raises vital questions about the lacuna – the gaps – in our society. In addition to Disgrace, it also has wisps of Moby Dick, as Ahab goes in search of the White Whale (in the person of J.M. Coetzee). I am now eager to read Disgrace again to find out how my perception of this central scene has (or maybe has not) transformed. For those of us who love insightful books that spark our mind, this is a must-read. Thanks to Europa Editions for giving me the privilege of being an early reader in exchange for an honest review.
December 19, 2022
If you could autofiction fiction, and write it with an unreliable narrator, then Fiona Snyckers’ LACUNA could fit neatly into that genre. This story supposes that Booker winner J.M. Coetzee wrote DISGRACE as a factually flawed true story. The rape victim, Lucy Lurie, is the “lacuna,” the silenced voice of Coetzee’s prize-winning narrative. In response, LACUNA is Lucy Lurie’s feminist retelling of her rape, and how she deals with her subsequent trauma. Lucy’s personal anger toward and campaign against Coetzee figures prominently in her story; she identifies LACUNA as her “intertextual conversation” with Coetzee’s original work. “He turned my rape into a spectacle and me into a public figure.” Lucy attests that her rape was an ordeal that she suffered alone, and her post-trauma is not the way that he portrayed it—as a metaphor for post-apartheid South Africa. “If John Coetzee’s story is fountain pen on vellum, mine is menstrual blood on toilet paper.”
You don’t have to be a close reader to note that Lucy’s references to DISGRACE are often counterfactual. She even altered by three the number of men who raped her. LACUNA is supposed to be told two years after Coetzee’s1999 DISGRACE, but Lucy’s retelling includes social media and other implications of contemporary life. In DISGRACE, Lucy had the baby, but in LACUNA, she terminated the pregnancy. By doing this, Lucy reinforces that her rape was a vicious attack upon her body, not an allegory. “You can’t declare the country free and ready to move on from apartheid on the back of a woman who has been raped. Your analogy itself is oppressive.”
Moreover, Lucy is reclaiming her agency by narrating LACUNA in her own furious voice-- by turns ironic, angry, passionate, removed, and witty. Even Coetzee’s biographical information is feigned in LACUNA. He was already a celebrated author of many books prior to DISGRACE, and had accumulated a feast of literary prizes. But Lucy redefines his life, the way she felt he had done to hers via DISGRACE. She describes him as a previously unpublished writer, attempting for years to complete an unfinished book. Then, when her rape became widespread news, he appropriated it as a convenient plot device to finish his manuscript. He published DISGRACE on the back of her tragedy and became a breakthrough success. Lucy is obsessed with finding Coetzee and confronting him personally, even as she learns that he absconded to Australia.
There are multiple layers to this intertextual dialogue between DISGRACE and LACUNA. But here, in Snyckers novel, Lucy proclaims, “I am nobody’s lacuna” and finally becomes the main character in her story, placing Coetzee as the minor one, the patriarch who is complicit in the abuse of women. By the end, I had to remind myself that Coetzee is, of course, no villain! DISGRACE is entirely fictional, and if not for Lucy’s opposing story, the reader would not have to pause and remember that. Fiona Snyckers wrote one heck of an audacious, complex, feminist novel. I can’t wait to see what she will do next.
You don’t have to be a close reader to note that Lucy’s references to DISGRACE are often counterfactual. She even altered by three the number of men who raped her. LACUNA is supposed to be told two years after Coetzee’s1999 DISGRACE, but Lucy’s retelling includes social media and other implications of contemporary life. In DISGRACE, Lucy had the baby, but in LACUNA, she terminated the pregnancy. By doing this, Lucy reinforces that her rape was a vicious attack upon her body, not an allegory. “You can’t declare the country free and ready to move on from apartheid on the back of a woman who has been raped. Your analogy itself is oppressive.”
Moreover, Lucy is reclaiming her agency by narrating LACUNA in her own furious voice-- by turns ironic, angry, passionate, removed, and witty. Even Coetzee’s biographical information is feigned in LACUNA. He was already a celebrated author of many books prior to DISGRACE, and had accumulated a feast of literary prizes. But Lucy redefines his life, the way she felt he had done to hers via DISGRACE. She describes him as a previously unpublished writer, attempting for years to complete an unfinished book. Then, when her rape became widespread news, he appropriated it as a convenient plot device to finish his manuscript. He published DISGRACE on the back of her tragedy and became a breakthrough success. Lucy is obsessed with finding Coetzee and confronting him personally, even as she learns that he absconded to Australia.
There are multiple layers to this intertextual dialogue between DISGRACE and LACUNA. But here, in Snyckers novel, Lucy proclaims, “I am nobody’s lacuna” and finally becomes the main character in her story, placing Coetzee as the minor one, the patriarch who is complicit in the abuse of women. By the end, I had to remind myself that Coetzee is, of course, no villain! DISGRACE is entirely fictional, and if not for Lucy’s opposing story, the reader would not have to pause and remember that. Fiona Snyckers wrote one heck of an audacious, complex, feminist novel. I can’t wait to see what she will do next.
May 22, 2022
There shall be no more novels which are really about other novels. No ‘modern versions’, reworkings, sequels or prequels.
Instead, every writer is to be issued with a sampler in coloured wools to hang over the fireplace. It reads: Knit Your Own Stuff.
Julian Barnes, Flaubert’s Parrot.
Instead, every writer is to be issued with a sampler in coloured wools to hang over the fireplace. It reads: Knit Your Own Stuff.
Julian Barnes, Flaubert’s Parrot.
February 11, 2022
Lucy Lurie, Lacuna's unreliable narrator, is outraged at John Coetzee's arrogation of her rape for the purpose of making a point about life in South Africa post-apartheid in his award winning book Disgrace. Coetzee not only used her experience but purportedly wrote fiction using her real name, reawakening her PTSD and igniting her determination to meet him face to face, demanding an apology. Fiona Snyckers has delivered a roundhouse punch of literary criticism in the form of a novel, taking liberty with facts and time sequences to make her own point. Perceptive, with flashes of humor (indirectly poking fun at Coetzee's renown vegan-ism), the twists encountered are jaw dropping and sometimes hilarious. Reading (or rereading) Disgrace affords a deeper understanding and appreciation.
January 24, 2022
“I am untrustworthy.” states Lucy Lurie, the first-person narrator of “Lacuna”, a highly unique, engrossing, and thought-provoking novel by Fiona Snyckers.
In this novel, Snyckers takes the character of Lucy from J. M. Coetzee’s prize post-Apartheid novel, “Disgrace”, and fills in the spaces (the lacuna) that Coetzee left out.
I read “Disgrace” when it came out over twenty years ago, and in preparation for reading “Lacuna”, I refreshed my memory of the novel, and I also re-watched the 2008 film starring John Malkovich. While I believe that activity enriched my enjoyment of “Lacuna”, it is not necessary to understanding and appreciating Snyckers’ masterful and unusual novel.
Make no mistake, this is a novel about rape. Where “Disgrace” used Lucy’s rape as a metaphor for South Africa, Lucy’s rape is THE main subject of “Lacuna”, though there are also other timely topics addressed, such as: “Who is allowed to write fiction about what topics?”
Snyckers has created a unique narrator in Lucy; she’s reliably unreliable – constantly keeping the reader uncertain about what is fact and what is fantasy. This shifting and off-balance point of view perfectly illustrates the confusion, contradictions, and often chaos, that surround the communication and politics of rape.
Lucy says: “When an unreliable narrator is your only window into a story, you have to take some of what he [she] says on trust.”
Snyckers’ propulsive prose and intersectional insights call into question Lucy’s experience as a white woman compared to others’ experiences of violence, oppression and injustice. I read this novel in two sittings and I will be thinking about it for a long time.
Thanks to Europa Editions for a review copy of this wonderful and important novel.
In this novel, Snyckers takes the character of Lucy from J. M. Coetzee’s prize post-Apartheid novel, “Disgrace”, and fills in the spaces (the lacuna) that Coetzee left out.
I read “Disgrace” when it came out over twenty years ago, and in preparation for reading “Lacuna”, I refreshed my memory of the novel, and I also re-watched the 2008 film starring John Malkovich. While I believe that activity enriched my enjoyment of “Lacuna”, it is not necessary to understanding and appreciating Snyckers’ masterful and unusual novel.
Make no mistake, this is a novel about rape. Where “Disgrace” used Lucy’s rape as a metaphor for South Africa, Lucy’s rape is THE main subject of “Lacuna”, though there are also other timely topics addressed, such as: “Who is allowed to write fiction about what topics?”
Snyckers has created a unique narrator in Lucy; she’s reliably unreliable – constantly keeping the reader uncertain about what is fact and what is fantasy. This shifting and off-balance point of view perfectly illustrates the confusion, contradictions, and often chaos, that surround the communication and politics of rape.
Lucy says: “When an unreliable narrator is your only window into a story, you have to take some of what he [she] says on trust.”
Snyckers’ propulsive prose and intersectional insights call into question Lucy’s experience as a white woman compared to others’ experiences of violence, oppression and injustice. I read this novel in two sittings and I will be thinking about it for a long time.
Thanks to Europa Editions for a review copy of this wonderful and important novel.
June 28, 2022
The most thought-provoking novel by the most unreliable narrator I read all year. It is told by Lucy Lurie, whose rape was fictionalised - without her consent - by a novelist called John Coetzee in his Booker-winning novel Disgrace. Lucy is not happy with the way her rape, by six black men, is used by Coetzee as a metaphor for the atonement by the white for their Apartheid sins.
She fantasises of meeting the elusive Coetzee and telling him how she feels, hoping he will answer:
“I see what you mean. (...) It is deeply misogynistic to use the rape of a woman as an analogy for the just and necessary punishment white people have to endure to atone for their sins. I see where I went wrong.” Of course he doesn't say this.
And this is just one of many fantasies or thought-experiments Lucy has throughout the novel. They often take the form of imaginary conversations and she will only tell you afterward whether they really happened or not (in the end she doesn't even bother doing that).
She is a great character as well: unflinching in the extreme, very sharp, extremely sarcastic. She makes you ask questions about what fiction is allowed to do (everything?), but it is also a critique on South Africa, media, etc.
I enjoyed it very much. The first quarter I was asking myself what was true and what not, whether the fictional Coetzee has anything in common with the real one, but then it became a complete page turner complete with unexpected twists and turns at the end.
4,5
She fantasises of meeting the elusive Coetzee and telling him how she feels, hoping he will answer:
“I see what you mean. (...) It is deeply misogynistic to use the rape of a woman as an analogy for the just and necessary punishment white people have to endure to atone for their sins. I see where I went wrong.” Of course he doesn't say this.
And this is just one of many fantasies or thought-experiments Lucy has throughout the novel. They often take the form of imaginary conversations and she will only tell you afterward whether they really happened or not (in the end she doesn't even bother doing that).
She is a great character as well: unflinching in the extreme, very sharp, extremely sarcastic. She makes you ask questions about what fiction is allowed to do (everything?), but it is also a critique on South Africa, media, etc.
I enjoyed it very much. The first quarter I was asking myself what was true and what not, whether the fictional Coetzee has anything in common with the real one, but then it became a complete page turner complete with unexpected twists and turns at the end.
4,5
November 1, 2022
Lucana by Fiona Snyckers is clever, humorous, thought provoking and deeply satisfying. Although it deals at length with narrator Lucy Lurie’s obsession with John Coetzee (whose celebrated novel, Disgrace centres on her gang rape at her father’s farmhouse), the novel is not about him. It’s Lucy’s story as she deals with PTSD, and tries to make sense of what happened and get her life back on track. It’s not easy and she’s the consummate unreliable narrator, which, together with an unexpected twist, kept me guessing throughout.
Fiona’s comments on literature, rape as a metaphor, patriarchy, feminism, race, academia, law and countless other matters are relevant, incisive and stimulating. She’s also funny, particularly around issues of veganism, online dating, sex and hipsters. While it adds to the experience to have read JM Coetzee’s Disgrace before picking up Lacuna, but I don’t think it’s essential. I do, on the other hand, absolutely urge Coetzee to read Lacuna. :)
Fiona’s comments on literature, rape as a metaphor, patriarchy, feminism, race, academia, law and countless other matters are relevant, incisive and stimulating. She’s also funny, particularly around issues of veganism, online dating, sex and hipsters. While it adds to the experience to have read JM Coetzee’s Disgrace before picking up Lacuna, but I don’t think it’s essential. I do, on the other hand, absolutely urge Coetzee to read Lacuna. :)
September 15, 2019
Head-scratching feminist 'take' on Disgrace is emasculated by its hyper-metatextuality: a fictionalised account of the (fictional) real-life inspiration for a famous (fictional) novel deemed to outline the prevaling 'reality' about gender and race in South Africa. Intentional fallacy, unreliable narration, New Criticism, post-colonialism, cultural (mis)appropriation are all meekly trotted out. Coetzee himself (John here) is perhaps the least believable element in a novel ostensibly about literary truth.
October 15, 2023
I loved the premise of this book: the “real” Lucy Lurie addresses the gap, lacuna, in JM Coetzee’s Disgrace, by telling her story. Animated by fury that Coetzee uses her rape as a metaphor for the reckoning white South Africa must undergo, and her fury/disbelief that anyone would accept their own rape in the way the Lucy of Disgrace does.
It started off a bit rocky for me. The rage towards Coetzee is so all-consuming that not one of his artistic choices is given the benefit of the doubt, and I also kept being distracted by wondering how this book didn’t lead to a lawsuit because the Coetzee character is so lightly fictionalised he may as well not be fictionalised at all (his book is still Disgrace, he moved to Australia, he won the Booker etc).
But then I settled in and ended up really enjoying the narrator, and the story. Her rage and misery and self-sabotage and mean-spiritedness all work, actually, in painting a painful picture of a rape survivor. The unreliability of her perspective allows for some amusing imagined conversations, and some important discussions around appropriation, the use of real lives in the creation of art, feminism and white privilege. The novel works better if you let go of it’s connection to Disgrace and appreciate it for what it is - and then the pain of the narrator feels real, rather than academic. There are even huge plot twists and some emotional healing in the book.
Devoured the whole thing over a weekend, so it must be very good!
It started off a bit rocky for me. The rage towards Coetzee is so all-consuming that not one of his artistic choices is given the benefit of the doubt, and I also kept being distracted by wondering how this book didn’t lead to a lawsuit because the Coetzee character is so lightly fictionalised he may as well not be fictionalised at all (his book is still Disgrace, he moved to Australia, he won the Booker etc).
But then I settled in and ended up really enjoying the narrator, and the story. Her rage and misery and self-sabotage and mean-spiritedness all work, actually, in painting a painful picture of a rape survivor. The unreliability of her perspective allows for some amusing imagined conversations, and some important discussions around appropriation, the use of real lives in the creation of art, feminism and white privilege. The novel works better if you let go of it’s connection to Disgrace and appreciate it for what it is - and then the pain of the narrator feels real, rather than academic. There are even huge plot twists and some emotional healing in the book.
Devoured the whole thing over a weekend, so it must be very good!
July 30, 2022
A challenging, thought-provoking and intriguing companion piece to J M Coetzee’s novel Disgrace. It’s perhaps not essential to read that novel first, but I would recommend so doing as it informs the thesis that Snyckers explores in her response to it. Her protagonist Lucy Lurie is brutally raped by six black men who break in to her father’s house and she subsequently becomes convinced that Coetzee, or rather Snyckers’ version of him, has appropriated her story and exploited her misfortune for his own ends, misrepresenting what actually occurred. According to Lucy in Snykers’ version, Lucy in Coetzee’s novel has no agency and the reader isn’t privy to her inner world, and she wants to redress that lacuna. There are so many issues and themes examined in this novel it’s difficult to list them all – race, white privilege, gender, sexual violence, the patriarchy, intertextuality, intersectionality, literary criticism and academia, society’s attitude to rape, victim-shaming – and so on and so on. Heady stuff, but surprisingly, in view of the importance and seriousness of these issues, there’s much humour in the book too and it’s often unexpectedly funny. Not least when having a go at veganism or pretentious literary theory. Perhaps the key question here is does an author have to right to tell someone else’s story and use real life as metaphor, as Coetzee (allegedly) does in his novel where he uses his Lucy’s rape as a metaphor for the rape of South Africa, and the child that results a symbol of reconciliation. Discuss. In fact discuss this whole book – there’s a lot to talk about, as there is in Disgrace. I found Snyckers’ response to it completely fascinating and absorbing and her Lucy, if not likeable or sympathetic, and extraordinarily unreliable as a narrator, a compelling figure indeed. Highly recommended.
January 28, 2022
Lacuna had me in a vortex with its constantly shifting self-perceptions of the protagonist, not unlike an M.C. Escher print. The author takes the protagonist of 'Disgrace', a novel by John Coetzee, and gives her another life in 'Lacuna'. Lucy Lurie is reborn, only this time she is not just a character in someone else's book. She is a self, whole and undiminished, furious at John Coetzee for using her life to write an iconic novel. She wants to take Coetzee down, use her rage to let him know that her life is not available for borrowing. It belongs solely to her.
The novel is serious with aspects of comedy thrown in. The author is well aware of the trauma Lucy has suffered from her rape and she is also aware of how important it is to talk about rape in a politically correct way in our woke culture. Lucy imagines that she can't talk about what happened to her as articulately as other rape victims/survivors. She feels like the rape stole her life and that Coetzee "used her rape as fodder for his novel".
Lucy attends regular sessions with her therapist, a woman lacking empathy and seemingly enjoying her ability to take Lucy to task. She constantly points out Lucy's obsession with Coetzee and minimizes the impact of the rape on Lucy. Their dialogue is probably a fiction of Lucy's mind but it is a long way from anything mirroring true therapy.
Is Lucy an unreliable narrator or is her character merely a metaphor for the "me too" and feminist movement? Does she even exist? Is Coetzee's rape narrative a metaphor for the emerging post-apartheid South Africa or does it belong singularly to Lucy? Lucy describes her trauma as "an infected boil I can't lance because its roots are too deep".
Throughout the narrative Lucy fights to keep herself separate from fiction-Lucy. She shares her foibles, moral ambiguity, and internal conflicts with the reader. Unreliable or not, she is not a figment of someone else's imagination. As Lucy states, "No woman's rape should be appropriated and used as a metaphor. It's completely unacceptable."
The novel is serious with aspects of comedy thrown in. The author is well aware of the trauma Lucy has suffered from her rape and she is also aware of how important it is to talk about rape in a politically correct way in our woke culture. Lucy imagines that she can't talk about what happened to her as articulately as other rape victims/survivors. She feels like the rape stole her life and that Coetzee "used her rape as fodder for his novel".
Lucy attends regular sessions with her therapist, a woman lacking empathy and seemingly enjoying her ability to take Lucy to task. She constantly points out Lucy's obsession with Coetzee and minimizes the impact of the rape on Lucy. Their dialogue is probably a fiction of Lucy's mind but it is a long way from anything mirroring true therapy.
Is Lucy an unreliable narrator or is her character merely a metaphor for the "me too" and feminist movement? Does she even exist? Is Coetzee's rape narrative a metaphor for the emerging post-apartheid South Africa or does it belong singularly to Lucy? Lucy describes her trauma as "an infected boil I can't lance because its roots are too deep".
Throughout the narrative Lucy fights to keep herself separate from fiction-Lucy. She shares her foibles, moral ambiguity, and internal conflicts with the reader. Unreliable or not, she is not a figment of someone else's imagination. As Lucy states, "No woman's rape should be appropriated and used as a metaphor. It's completely unacceptable."
August 16, 2019
If you ever want to meet a character more dislikeable than JM. Coetzee's David Lurie, enter Snyckers's Lucy Lurie. She is in need of a good shake to bring her to her senses more so than Coetzee's Lucy.
This novel starts off with such great promise. I love the unreliable narrator ploy - it reels you in, makes you cheer for the protagonist who finally develops something akin to gumption and then spits you out.
But after many such delusions the reader comes to recognise them and is left disappointed by this character. It feels as if it is a literary device used to extend the length of the novel. It could have been a successful short story.
The anachronisms are what bother me the most: Anni Dewani, Facebook, Instagram, Tinder (Cinder), 'Gone Girl', #MeToo, the LGBTQ terms. All are inconsistent with the era in which the plot is meant to play off.
I wanted to give up half way but read to the last page in anticipation of the twist to make the anachronisms plausible. But, alas, it did not arrive. I do, however, agree with the idea in the penultimate line that the book will be "incoherent".
This novel starts off with such great promise. I love the unreliable narrator ploy - it reels you in, makes you cheer for the protagonist who finally develops something akin to gumption and then spits you out.
But after many such delusions the reader comes to recognise them and is left disappointed by this character. It feels as if it is a literary device used to extend the length of the novel. It could have been a successful short story.
The anachronisms are what bother me the most: Anni Dewani, Facebook, Instagram, Tinder (Cinder), 'Gone Girl', #MeToo, the LGBTQ terms. All are inconsistent with the era in which the plot is meant to play off.
I wanted to give up half way but read to the last page in anticipation of the twist to make the anachronisms plausible. But, alas, it did not arrive. I do, however, agree with the idea in the penultimate line that the book will be "incoherent".
March 20, 2022
This one packed a punch. I truly enjoyed this, and I think a large part of that had to do with the fact that it kept me off balance and at odds with Lucy from start to finish. Overall, it was well written, thought-provoking, and at times humorous. At times, it seems scattered and convoluted, but I think that it is also a great representation of how trauma and grief pull folks in various directions at once. I have to admit I haven't read Disgrace and hadn't heard of it before reading this.
June 10, 2019
Who owns your story?
Brilliantly pertinent reflection of South African attitudes and divisions, and a sharp and shiningly intelligent response to J M Coetzee’s Disgrace. Lucy Lurie is angry, traumatised, and a fantasist, the ultimate unreliable narrator. She is very funny at times, unlikeable at others, but the reader never loses sight of the fact that her obsession with John Coetzee is born of her pain and rage at the fact of her rape, and the use made of it as a metaphor.
Impeccable writing, and one of the cleverest books I’ve read lately.
Brilliantly pertinent reflection of South African attitudes and divisions, and a sharp and shiningly intelligent response to J M Coetzee’s Disgrace. Lucy Lurie is angry, traumatised, and a fantasist, the ultimate unreliable narrator. She is very funny at times, unlikeable at others, but the reader never loses sight of the fact that her obsession with John Coetzee is born of her pain and rage at the fact of her rape, and the use made of it as a metaphor.
Impeccable writing, and one of the cleverest books I’ve read lately.
May 3, 2020
This is my first book of Fiona Snyckers. I have already bought another. I read Lacuna on Kindle, then I sat with it a few days and read it again. Mainly because I read too fast and wanted to re-absorb it. It is brilliant. I enjoyed it more than Disgrace, I was grateful for the perspective. It is humorous and clever and tragic in so many ways. I wanted it to continue, to be tied up with a happy, healed ending. But, of course, this kind of horror remains a mess forever.
November 6, 2024
L'autrice di Lacuna afferma preventivamente che questo romanzo non è né una riscrittura, né un sequel, né un adattamento di Vergogna di Coetzee, ma risulta difficile capire quindi quale sia il valore di questo testo senza il suo predecessore, perché come rovesciamento di punto di vista, di ambientazione e di temi fondanti può anche essere interessante, ma data la pretesa di dare una voce alla figlia del protagonista di Vergogna in un'accezione femminista probabilmente avrebbe potuto essere pensato e realizzato diversamente.
La Lucy Lurie di Snyckers non ha quasi nulla in comune con la Lucy coetziana - è eterosessuale, orfana di madre, vive in città, lavora all'università - tranne lo stupro di che entrambe subiscono. A questo proposito viene già da chiedersi cosa avesse in testa l'autrice quando ha scelto di rendere la violenza ad opera non di tre, ma di sei uomini: rende l'evento più traumatico? Più valido? Più scioccante? Non so, sono rimasta piuttosto perplessa.
L'intero romanzo gira intorno ai deliri e alle allucinazioni di Lucy, che tentando di riprendersi dal proprio disturbo da stress post-traumatico si vede costantemente immersa in scenari fittizi, sia positivi sia negativi (sogna di sposare un uomo buono e trasferirsi in periferia, immagina di essere accusata da persone casuali di aver mentito sull'abuso, immagina di trovare Coetzee - perché sì, J.M. Coetzee è un personaggio in questo romanzo - e ottenere delle scuse per aver strumentalizzato il suo stupro pubblicando il romanzo della sua storia, pensa di stare subendo gaslighting dalla psicologa, etc).
Avrebbe potuto essere una scelta stilistica interessante quella di rendere la narratrice protagonista completamente inaffidabile mostrando come le sue fantasie superino di gran lunga la realtà, ma la realizzazione non è stata delle migliori, sia perché ogni due pagine c'è un nuovo scenario fittizio che si conclude sempre con un sottoparagrafo del tipo "Non è mai successo. Non ho fatto questa cosa, non ne avrei mai avuto il coraggio" oppure "So che questa situazione non si può presentare per questo motivo, e infatti non si è mai posta l'occasione", e alle lunghe diventa ripetitivo, sia perché nella dichiarazione d'intenti prima del primo capitolo l'autrice stessa avverte che molte scene avvengono nell'immaginazione di Lucy, togliendo quindi un po' di interesse nella scoperta di cosa sia vero e cosa sia falso (spoiler: è sempre tutto falso, a un certo punto non vale neanche più la pena di provarci).
Bene che si affrontino temi pressanti come le shitstorm mediatiche, i panel di discussione sociale politically correct, la difficoltà di superare la violenza, l'importanza di avere una rete di supporto, l'aborto e le pressioni dall'esterno subite per una scelta o per l'altra, la chiusura dell'ambiente accademico, la gestione del rapporto tra comunità bianca e nera e i vari conflitti ne derivano, il white feminism e l'intersezionalità, ma complessivamente questo romanzo risulta superficiale e forzatamente woke, togliendo interesse a una vicenda che avrebbe potuto essere davvero stimolante a favore di svariati esperimenti stilistici e di trama che purtroppo non nascondono l'inesperienza dell'autrice.
(Il libro non è mai stato tradotto, esiste solo in lingua inglese)
La Lucy Lurie di Snyckers non ha quasi nulla in comune con la Lucy coetziana - è eterosessuale, orfana di madre, vive in città, lavora all'università - tranne lo stupro di che entrambe subiscono. A questo proposito viene già da chiedersi cosa avesse in testa l'autrice quando ha scelto di rendere la violenza ad opera non di tre, ma di sei uomini: rende l'evento più traumatico? Più valido? Più scioccante? Non so, sono rimasta piuttosto perplessa.
L'intero romanzo gira intorno ai deliri e alle allucinazioni di Lucy, che tentando di riprendersi dal proprio disturbo da stress post-traumatico si vede costantemente immersa in scenari fittizi, sia positivi sia negativi (sogna di sposare un uomo buono e trasferirsi in periferia, immagina di essere accusata da persone casuali di aver mentito sull'abuso, immagina di trovare Coetzee - perché sì, J.M. Coetzee è un personaggio in questo romanzo - e ottenere delle scuse per aver strumentalizzato il suo stupro pubblicando il romanzo della sua storia, pensa di stare subendo gaslighting dalla psicologa, etc).
Avrebbe potuto essere una scelta stilistica interessante quella di rendere la narratrice protagonista completamente inaffidabile mostrando come le sue fantasie superino di gran lunga la realtà, ma la realizzazione non è stata delle migliori, sia perché ogni due pagine c'è un nuovo scenario fittizio che si conclude sempre con un sottoparagrafo del tipo "Non è mai successo. Non ho fatto questa cosa, non ne avrei mai avuto il coraggio" oppure "So che questa situazione non si può presentare per questo motivo, e infatti non si è mai posta l'occasione", e alle lunghe diventa ripetitivo, sia perché nella dichiarazione d'intenti prima del primo capitolo l'autrice stessa avverte che molte scene avvengono nell'immaginazione di Lucy, togliendo quindi un po' di interesse nella scoperta di cosa sia vero e cosa sia falso (spoiler: è sempre tutto falso, a un certo punto non vale neanche più la pena di provarci).
Bene che si affrontino temi pressanti come le shitstorm mediatiche, i panel di discussione sociale politically correct, la difficoltà di superare la violenza, l'importanza di avere una rete di supporto, l'aborto e le pressioni dall'esterno subite per una scelta o per l'altra, la chiusura dell'ambiente accademico, la gestione del rapporto tra comunità bianca e nera e i vari conflitti ne derivano, il white feminism e l'intersezionalità, ma complessivamente questo romanzo risulta superficiale e forzatamente woke, togliendo interesse a una vicenda che avrebbe potuto essere davvero stimolante a favore di svariati esperimenti stilistici e di trama che purtroppo non nascondono l'inesperienza dell'autrice.
(Il libro non è mai stato tradotto, esiste solo in lingua inglese)
December 29, 2021
This book takes the victim of the rape in Disgrace and makes her a character in her own right during the #metoo movement.
I was very "in my head" when I started this book. Would it make me hate Disgrace? How did a rape happen, a book get publish and a Booker prize get awarded all in 2 years? Did this or that really happen in Disgrace? (I'd read it so long ago.)
So before I pushed through I re-read Disgrace. Phew. Didn't hate it. And then I recognized what I was reading --- a WHAT IF? What if Disgrace had come out during the #metoo movement? And I got out of my head and enjoyed the ride.
This was a really interesting look at all the topics associated with #metoo, plus moral dilemmas like, who's story is it to tell? Can a male author truly understand what it is to be raped? And do two wrongs make it right? (Of course not.)
The end was genius. There were some truly funny passages, and I'd like to believe that despite some important messages, perhaps a little bit of fun was being poked at the extremes people go to in their quests for "wokeness."
I was very "in my head" when I started this book. Would it make me hate Disgrace? How did a rape happen, a book get publish and a Booker prize get awarded all in 2 years? Did this or that really happen in Disgrace? (I'd read it so long ago.)
So before I pushed through I re-read Disgrace. Phew. Didn't hate it. And then I recognized what I was reading --- a WHAT IF? What if Disgrace had come out during the #metoo movement? And I got out of my head and enjoyed the ride.
This was a really interesting look at all the topics associated with #metoo, plus moral dilemmas like, who's story is it to tell? Can a male author truly understand what it is to be raped? And do two wrongs make it right? (Of course not.)
The end was genius. There were some truly funny passages, and I'd like to believe that despite some important messages, perhaps a little bit of fun was being poked at the extremes people go to in their quests for "wokeness."
May 18, 2022
This is a complex and, at times, claustrophobic book, and seemingly delights in wrongfooting you.
Using Coetzee's 'Disgrace' as a starting point, this book constantly plays with the reliability of the narrator, either directly with the character telling you as such, or through the slow realisation that some scenarios in the book don't make sense (a therapist who goes wildly off-script). There is even a factual error on the first page that it took me a long time to realise might have been intentional (suggesting that Coetzee only won any prizes after he released Disgrace, that being his second Booker win).
Coetzee takes on the role of our narrator's nemesis or perpetual foe, almost the thing she fixates on to try to process some of the incredible trauma she has been through. Her unreliability then starts to take on a new tone, where we realise that not only is she dangerous, but also in danger, and it starts to puncture holes in some of the expectations we have of women to tell 'perfect' and 'logical' stories about their own assault whilst they are still dealing with the after-effects of it.
I received an advanced copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
Using Coetzee's 'Disgrace' as a starting point, this book constantly plays with the reliability of the narrator, either directly with the character telling you as such, or through the slow realisation that some scenarios in the book don't make sense (a therapist who goes wildly off-script). There is even a factual error on the first page that it took me a long time to realise might have been intentional (suggesting that Coetzee only won any prizes after he released Disgrace, that being his second Booker win).
Coetzee takes on the role of our narrator's nemesis or perpetual foe, almost the thing she fixates on to try to process some of the incredible trauma she has been through. Her unreliability then starts to take on a new tone, where we realise that not only is she dangerous, but also in danger, and it starts to puncture holes in some of the expectations we have of women to tell 'perfect' and 'logical' stories about their own assault whilst they are still dealing with the after-effects of it.
I received an advanced copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
November 17, 2024
I had no idea what I was getting into when I picked up this book from the library because the cover and reviews piqued my interest. Once I started, I couldn’t set it down. Disjointed often, an “unreliable narrator,” but she spoke to me in many ways, both in her “reality” and in her fiction.
May 5, 2019
I really didn't want to reread Disgrace, but I really did want to read Lacuna. I have read Fiona Snyckers' Now Following You and Spire, and marvelled at her ability to insert herself wholly into an unfamiliar terrain and make it seem absolutely real (especially in Spire, which takes place on a science research station in the Antarctic). But still... a rape story re-told from the survivor's point of view seemed like it wasn't going to be an easy read. I read the first few chapters and I knew I was hooked. Snyckers has a gift for merging the deadly serious and the dead funny. She's refreshing and interesting and even when writing literary fiction she does so accessibly. I knew I had to go reread Disgrace, and I did, quickly, because I had read it before (and because David Lurie is just The Worst fictional character and I found him maddening the first time around). Obviously, rereading it I had to admit Coetzee is an amazing writer, which always rankles a little because he is so UNinvested in being liked (crossing the lines of author/narrator here but hey). It must at least have been brave to put down some of the things he allows his characters to think and say, knowing how they would likely be received, and that for one thing is a lesson for other writers.
But back to Lacuna. You can enjoy the playing, the jokes, the alternative versions of events being presented, the story as it unfolds to its horrible conclusion... everything about this was accomplished and a worthy, independent reply to Disgrace. I cannot recommend this highly enough.
But back to Lacuna. You can enjoy the playing, the jokes, the alternative versions of events being presented, the story as it unfolds to its horrible conclusion... everything about this was accomplished and a worthy, independent reply to Disgrace. I cannot recommend this highly enough.
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April 29, 2019~One of the most discussed aspects of John Coetzee's novel has been the complete absence of the raped woman's voice in the narrative...Critics have called this a deliberate 'lacuna' in the novel - a gap more powerful in its absence than it would have been in its presence.
My name is Lucy Lurie, and I am that lacuna.~
~My worst fear is not that I will be raped again one night when I am alone in my flat. My worst fear is that I will not be believed.~
~There aren't hierarchies of oppression. Patriarchy isn't better or worse than racism.~
~You can't declare the country free and ready to move on from apartheid on the back of a woman who has been raped.~
~When an unreliable narrator is your only window into a story, you have to take some of what he says on trust.~
~'Why would The New York Times be interested in anything I have to say?'
'Because you have a tale to tell that piggybacks on the tale of a famous man. The stories of unknown women become interesting when they are linked to the stories of well-known men. No one cares if you were sexually harassed. They only care if you were sexually harassed by a famous Hollywood producer.'~
~That's why the doctrine of self-help, self-care and so on, is so dangerous. It places the burden of care of mental health on the individual, instead of on the system - where it belongs.~
My name is Lucy Lurie, and I am that lacuna.~
~My worst fear is not that I will be raped again one night when I am alone in my flat. My worst fear is that I will not be believed.~
~There aren't hierarchies of oppression. Patriarchy isn't better or worse than racism.~
~You can't declare the country free and ready to move on from apartheid on the back of a woman who has been raped.~
~When an unreliable narrator is your only window into a story, you have to take some of what he says on trust.~
~'Why would The New York Times be interested in anything I have to say?'
'Because you have a tale to tell that piggybacks on the tale of a famous man. The stories of unknown women become interesting when they are linked to the stories of well-known men. No one cares if you were sexually harassed. They only care if you were sexually harassed by a famous Hollywood producer.'~
~That's why the doctrine of self-help, self-care and so on, is so dangerous. It places the burden of care of mental health on the individual, instead of on the system - where it belongs.~
June 28, 2022
There have been a gazillion reviews on Coetzee's Man Book Prize awarded book, Disgrace, (academic and otherwise), and the meanings of what Lucy Lurie's rape means. I am not going to get into rehashing or putting my own take on Mr. Coetzee's book, as I see this book, Lacuna (the gap in Lucy's reactions, her emotions — the things Mr. Coetzee didn't add) as the answer to all things that were again — missing in his book. I am glad Ms. Snycker wrote this fictional response to a book so lacking emotion. Emotions are messy in the face of happiness, sadness, and trauma. What happens to emotions when you've been raped and then a book makes that rape world-famous though only part of the story is honest and true to what happened to you?
This is what Lacuna is all about. Lucy Lurie was raped at her father's farmhouse and author John Coetzee put her story (or the crux of her story) into his award-winning book, Disgrace. Lucy was already traumatized by 6 black men, did she really need another man to traumatize her more and then get a huge payoff from her trauma? In Lacuna, Lucy is a mess, I mean, when you think a person has hit rock bottom, Lucy has plunged to the depths of that canyon full of rocks, or so she thought she had fallen as far as she could. No one could imagine she could fall even further beneath the rocks until it happens.
Lucy's friend Moira tries to help Lucy to move forward, it's been two years since her rape. Two years since Coetzee released that darn book of his, shouldn't she be able to reconcile her life against the fictional telling of a woman who became the symbol of getting rid of apartheid through the putting of a White woman in her place by her Black neighbor? Lucy doesn't think so. She compares her victimhood to other rape survivors, not calling it survivorship as the masses want her to. She doesn't feel as if she is surviving.
Throughout the book, Ms. Snykers has Lucy going to a therapist and imagining things the therapist says to her. Things that help Lucy feel validated by her victimhood. This happens a lot throughout the book, scenes that a writer would place in her own book, scenes of success, rising above the victim mentality, becoming empowered by her strength, and coming face to face with author John Coetzee and having him apologize to her. We all daydream about different scenarios, don't we?
As someone who has never been raped, I am not sure that the "success" imaginings and then the inaction of Lucy's real life would help or hamper a rape victim if they read this book. I can only imagine that this is how a victim would really feel, but is it? I am curious to know... I don't want to assume anything when it comes to that kind of trauma.
There is a time in the story where Lucy contemplates, as a writer herself, whether a writer has the right to use reality in their fiction, she comes to the realization that without having the ability to use reality a writer would never be able to write any stories.
"It is part of the social contract that everything is fair game when it comes to fiction. If real life wheren't allowed to be the inspiration for fiction, we wouldn't have the works of Shakespeare, Austen, Adichie, Naipaul, or Didion. It is not just important for authors to be able to write without fear or favour: it is vital."
Then Lucy realizes that she has been so upset over the "Coetzee Overnight Success Story" that she has given her whole life over the last two years to this man and his fictional character. She has allowed him to be there for too long. She needed to take back her life, not let him have his story override what should be hers to mold into what she wants to become. This to me is when Lucy actually starts writing her success even in the midst of all her mess, that is until a bigger mess comes along and changes the whole narrative that Lucy believes is her life after the rape.
I don't find much fault with the feminist answering to a famous novel written in the 70s especially when the author, John Coetzee gives no rational voice to the victim as he did his fictional Lucy. I know it is a metaphor for the future of South Africa, the babe that is the product of a violent fate that Blacks have lived only to have Whites find out how violent Black's lives really have been through Lucy's rape. However, the one thing I can't get around in this book is the need to point a finger at the familial and turn another man into yet again the twist of trauma in Lucy's life. Hasn't she been through enough? Do we really need to go from being raped by 6 men, to another man traumatizing Lucy through his novel to the most important man in her life becoming the most traumatizing person overall? I just don't get the twist at the end of the book. It seems just another feminist move to blame all men for everything during a time when there were enough men already to hold accountable. Metaphor or not, it didn't need to be.
If, and this is a big IF it is to address Mr. Coetzee's narrative of poor young Melanie being abused by Lucy's father, David Lurie while as a professor, then fine, however, this is never even addressed in Lacuna and so, I feel it shouldn't even be anywhere in Lucy's story.
The fluctuation between imagery during Lucy's story and reality can sometimes be hard to handle. I would be reading along and then all of a sudden thinking, "there you go Lucy grab your life back" then wham — oh, sorry, that was just Lucy's musings again,
and back to the mess we go.
Vegan Eugene. I would really love to hear some opinions on him from others. What do you think??? Do you love him, hate him, or wish he had never entered the story? Let me know in the comments.
This is what Lacuna is all about. Lucy Lurie was raped at her father's farmhouse and author John Coetzee put her story (or the crux of her story) into his award-winning book, Disgrace. Lucy was already traumatized by 6 black men, did she really need another man to traumatize her more and then get a huge payoff from her trauma? In Lacuna, Lucy is a mess, I mean, when you think a person has hit rock bottom, Lucy has plunged to the depths of that canyon full of rocks, or so she thought she had fallen as far as she could. No one could imagine she could fall even further beneath the rocks until it happens.
Lucy's friend Moira tries to help Lucy to move forward, it's been two years since her rape. Two years since Coetzee released that darn book of his, shouldn't she be able to reconcile her life against the fictional telling of a woman who became the symbol of getting rid of apartheid through the putting of a White woman in her place by her Black neighbor? Lucy doesn't think so. She compares her victimhood to other rape survivors, not calling it survivorship as the masses want her to. She doesn't feel as if she is surviving.
Throughout the book, Ms. Snykers has Lucy going to a therapist and imagining things the therapist says to her. Things that help Lucy feel validated by her victimhood. This happens a lot throughout the book, scenes that a writer would place in her own book, scenes of success, rising above the victim mentality, becoming empowered by her strength, and coming face to face with author John Coetzee and having him apologize to her. We all daydream about different scenarios, don't we?
As someone who has never been raped, I am not sure that the "success" imaginings and then the inaction of Lucy's real life would help or hamper a rape victim if they read this book. I can only imagine that this is how a victim would really feel, but is it? I am curious to know... I don't want to assume anything when it comes to that kind of trauma.
There is a time in the story where Lucy contemplates, as a writer herself, whether a writer has the right to use reality in their fiction, she comes to the realization that without having the ability to use reality a writer would never be able to write any stories.
"It is part of the social contract that everything is fair game when it comes to fiction. If real life wheren't allowed to be the inspiration for fiction, we wouldn't have the works of Shakespeare, Austen, Adichie, Naipaul, or Didion. It is not just important for authors to be able to write without fear or favour: it is vital."
Then Lucy realizes that she has been so upset over the "Coetzee Overnight Success Story" that she has given her whole life over the last two years to this man and his fictional character. She has allowed him to be there for too long. She needed to take back her life, not let him have his story override what should be hers to mold into what she wants to become. This to me is when Lucy actually starts writing her success even in the midst of all her mess, that is until a bigger mess comes along and changes the whole narrative that Lucy believes is her life after the rape.
I don't find much fault with the feminist answering to a famous novel written in the 70s especially when the author, John Coetzee gives no rational voice to the victim as he did his fictional Lucy. I know it is a metaphor for the future of South Africa, the babe that is the product of a violent fate that Blacks have lived only to have Whites find out how violent Black's lives really have been through Lucy's rape. However, the one thing I can't get around in this book is the need to point a finger at the familial and turn another man into yet again the twist of trauma in Lucy's life. Hasn't she been through enough? Do we really need to go from being raped by 6 men, to another man traumatizing Lucy through his novel to the most important man in her life becoming the most traumatizing person overall? I just don't get the twist at the end of the book. It seems just another feminist move to blame all men for everything during a time when there were enough men already to hold accountable. Metaphor or not, it didn't need to be.
If, and this is a big IF it is to address Mr. Coetzee's narrative of poor young Melanie being abused by Lucy's father, David Lurie while as a professor, then fine, however, this is never even addressed in Lacuna and so, I feel it shouldn't even be anywhere in Lucy's story.
The fluctuation between imagery during Lucy's story and reality can sometimes be hard to handle. I would be reading along and then all of a sudden thinking, "there you go Lucy grab your life back" then wham — oh, sorry, that was just Lucy's musings again,
and back to the mess we go.
Vegan Eugene. I would really love to hear some opinions on him from others. What do you think??? Do you love him, hate him, or wish he had never entered the story? Let me know in the comments.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
December 27, 2024
I am absolutely reeling over this book. Will definitely be one of my favorites of the whole year. I can’t believe I’ve let it rot on my shelf since January!! I should prob ruminate on things before I write a review but I’d rather capture my absolute excitement than a good synopsis or analysis on what I just read.
It’s a satirical look at race and gender relations in South Africa told through the eyes of someone who’s been sexually assaulted. It’s also framed as a textual response to both a real and fictional author and book which makes it so much more interesting. Throw in the fact that the narrator is unlikable, obsessed, and kinda losing her mind? Couldn’t put it down.
It’s a satirical look at race and gender relations in South Africa told through the eyes of someone who’s been sexually assaulted. It’s also framed as a textual response to both a real and fictional author and book which makes it so much more interesting. Throw in the fact that the narrator is unlikable, obsessed, and kinda losing her mind? Couldn’t put it down.
February 10, 2022
Fiona Snyckers somehow found a way to make literary criticism palatable. I've never read John Coetzee's Disgrace before, but I'm definitely interested in it now for sake of cross-examining the themes. There's too much going on in this book to rant about it here, but suffice it to say that I really, deeply enjoyed it.
November 21, 2019
I found this book to be quite odd.
February 23, 2020
Uncomfortable and hard-hitting, Snyckers raises sensitive issues and offers thought-provoking perspectives. I have a lot to think through after this.
August 16, 2022
Interesting book. I did enjoy it more than Disgrace, which I found so depressing and just not likely so her account was more realistic.
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