A unsettling look at male desire and the post-apartheid South African whites’ issue.
Coetzee skillfully depicts the multiple levels of David Lurie’s character. In the beginning of the storey, I despised his meek devotion to fleshly desires - with no regard for the consequences of a relationship between a teacher and a student that is widely viewed as unethical.
Lurie, on the other hand, is revealed to be increasingly human as the novel goes, with his reverence for Wordsworth and Byron on the one hand and his objectification of women on the other.
He is incapable of fully comprehending women. He has been divorced twice. He has been left in the dark by a series of events. His relationship with Lucy, his daughter, is strained.