The appearance of Disgrace (1999) solidified the already ample prestige of J. M. Coetzee, garnering him a rare second Booker Prize and providing the final piece of evidence for his Nobel Prize. The awards and the critical acclaim were not unexpected, since Coetzee’s seven previous novels (notably Waiting for the Barbarians and Life & Times of Michael K) had by then secured their author a prodigious international reputation and made him the subject of intense scholarly attention and discussion. The surprise of Disgrace was its popular success.
While Coetzee’s career had previously been defined mainly by succès d’estime, Disgrace was a publisher’s dream come true: a novel by a high-prestige author that appealed to a large audience. That appeal could be attributed equally to its lurid content (faculty-student sex and an interracial gang rape) and its method (lucid style, taut compression, deft pace), as well as its privileged access to a distant world and its feel of raw history in the making. But the X-factor of Disgrace , the quality that above all accounted for its becoming Coetzee’s most widely read novel, then and now, was its conventional fictional strategy: in a word, its realism.
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