Status Updates From Disgrace

’I thought you would save him for another week,’ says Bev Shaw. ‘Are you giving him up?’
‘Yes, I am giving him up.’

That last bit is devastating. To let go, because after all, what is one more week?

Here’s to a worthy end. For the novel also…

…how one can enter what seems to be an ordinary room and never come out again. Something happens in this room, something unmentionable: here the soul is yanked out of the body; briefly it hangs about in the air, twisting and contorting; then it is sucked away and is gone. It will be beyond him, this room that is not a room but a hole where one leaks out of existence.

23. The boy. Back to the clinic.

22. Protection

21. No rest, even in the dark of the theatre

The marriage of Cronus and Harmony, unnatural . Cronus instead of Cadmus, that’s pretty dark of Lurie, and no mistake by Coetzee, I’m sure… (p190)

20. Back in the Capetown house, burgled and plundered, university and old neighbourhood, Lurie wears a grim burlap cloth of atonement. And then seemingly out of nowhere, the Byron opera finally happens when he switches focus to an older ‘dumpy’ Teresa on a banjo, with Byron appearing ghostly from the underworld. Scenes and language equally beautiful…

On those pine-needles Byron had his Teresa — ‘timid as a gazelle,’ he called her — rumpling her clothes, getting sand into her underwear (the horses standing by all the while, incurious), and from the occasion a passion was born that kept Teresa howling to the moon for the rest of her natural life in a fever that has set him howling too, after his manner .

A woman in love, wallowing in love; a cat on a roof, howling; complex proportions swirling in the blood, distending the sexual organs, making the palms sweat and voice thicken as the soul hurls its longings to the skies. That is what Sorays and the others are for: to suck the complex proteins out of his blood like snake venom, leaving him clear-headed and dry. (p185)