The Master of Petersburg by Coetzee

"Her tongue like a bird fluttering in her mouth: soft feathers, soft wing-beats."

"If we do not forget, they say, the world will soon be nothing but a huge library."

"It is from knowing that he is dead that he wants to protect his son. As long as I live, he thinks, let me be the one who knows! By whatever act of will it takes, let me be the thinking animal plunging through the air."

Thinking animal- I like that.

"In his fingers a needle is a curiosity, an arrow from Lilliput." 

"Forever I look back. Forever I am absorbed in your gaze. A field of crystal points, dancing, winking, and I one of them. Stars in the sky, and fires on the plain answering them. Two realms signalling to each other."

"Rather, he feels like a leaf or a seed in the grip of a headlong force, a winged seed drawn up into the highest windstream, carried dizzily above the oceans."

Marvelous. Coetzee connects the process of sex to reaching his dead son. 

"Nothing in the pressure of her body answers to him. Disgrace, he thinks: this is how one enters disgrace."

Maybe that is the secret to his other book.

"For that is surely what a woman wants: to be courted, wooed, persuaded, won! Even when she surrenders, she wants to give herself up not frankly but in a delicious haze of confusion, resisting yet unresisting. Falling, but never an irrevocable falling. No: to fall and then come back from the fall new, remade, virginal, ready to be wooed again and to fall again. A playing with death, a play of resurrection."

"'Why are we given old age, brothers? So that we can grow small again, small enough to crawl through the eye of a needle.'"

"A horse does not understand that it has been born into the world to pull carts. It thinks it is here to be beaten. It thinks of a cart as a huge object it is tied to so that it cannot run away while it is being beaten.'"

"Is such a woman marked by abandon, an abandon that does not care where it leads, to pleasure or to pain, that uses the sensual body only as a vehicle, and only because we cannot live disembodied?"

"Not the People's Vengeance but the Vengeance of the Sons: is that what underlies revolution – fathers envying their sons their women, sons scheming to rob their fathers' cashboxes?"

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He writes beautifully. I actually read this while living in St. Petersburg, Russia. He knows the city pretty well- I wonder if he lived here for awhile?
I like that he wrote about Dostoevsky. and from such an interesting angle.

Pub- pdf 

Disgraced by J.M. Coetzee

"Yet the old men whose company he seems to be on the point of joining, the tramps and drifters with their stained raincoats and cracked false teeth and hairy earholes - all of them were once upon a time children of God, with straight limbs and clear eyes. Can they be blamed for clinging to the last to their place at the sweet banquet of the senses?"

He doesn't see her for who she is because he doesn't have an interest in her but the idea of her and what she inspires in him.

3 different kinds of disgrace: his own resignation, his daughter's rape, and the dogs that are killed because no one wants them. He cares about the disgrace of others, he is very attentive to it. "But the dogs are dead; and what do dogs know of honour and dishonour anyway? For himself, then. For his idea of the world, a world in which men do not use shovels to beat corpses into a more convenient shape for processing." It gives him meaning in life, a purpose, to save the dogs' honor. He also compares his daughter to the dogs, him needing to be a guide in her life.

In a way it's unfair- what Bev thinks of David. Expecting him to "do his duty" just because he has heard things about him. Thinking a man will not say "no" which is true most of the time.

"He thinks of himself as obscure and growing obscurer. A figure from the margins of history."

"But I say to myself, we are all sorry when we are found out. Then we are very sorry. The question is not, are we sorry? The question is, what lesson have we learned? The question is, what are we going to do now that we are sorry?"

"[...] trying to accept disgrace as my state of being."

He asks himself whether he will be forgiven for betraying the dogs. From whom is he asking forgiveness?? Is it God? Is it himself?

"That is how it must be from here on: Teresa giving voice to her lover, and he, the man in the ransacked house, giving voice to Teresa. The halt helping the lame, for want of better."

Stepping over time.

"Teresa now sits staring out over the marshes toward the gates of hell, cradling the mandolin on which she accompanies herself in her lyric flights [...]" 

This would make a great painting.

"That is what Soraya and the others were for: to suck the complex proteins out of his blood like snake-venom, leaving him clear-headed and dry."

"By Melanie, by the girl in Touws River; by Rosalind, Bev Shaw, Soraya: by each of them he was enriched, and by the others too, even the least of them, even the failures. Like a flower blooming in his breast, his heart floods with thankfulness."

"'Yes, I agree, it is humiliating. But perhaps that is a good point to start from again. Perhaps that is what I must learn to accept. To start at ground level. With nothing. Not with nothing but. With nothing. No cards, no weapons, no property, no rights, no dignity.' 
'Like a dog.' 
'Yes, like a dog.''

Clever how he ties it back to the dog motif.

"How can he ever explain, to them, to their parents, to D Village, what Teresa and her lover have done to deserve being brought back to this world?"

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Dogs symbolize disgrace. He chose to give up his disgrace maybe, in the end.
I like this character, but he doesn't have much depth. He is very confused most of the time, but in an "obscure" way. That's right he is obscure- nothing really defined. I don't understand what he fought FOR exactly. He keeps saying that it was his "principle" to plead guilty but not grovel in front of his accusers and beg for his life back. Maybe it was pride, it certainly wasn't love. He just picked her up one day and had his way with her, and mostly without her consent. That's the creepy part. I guess it was probably her youth that got to him. He was losing himself, becoming older. He doesn't seem to have much meaning in life, doesn't like his job, and has occasional sex with whores.
Then why did he take it so hard? When he lost his job- one which he didn't like? When he became a laughing-stock? What was it exactly that he lost?
That's what's puzzling.
The fact is- I don't think he learned anything from this experience. He still experienced desire when he looked at her little sister, he still went to the theater to see her. If he wasn't chased away by the boyfriend, what would he have done? Gone after her to the dressing room? I wouldn't put it past him.
He likes to have things his own way, incapable of understanding the decisions of his daughter.
He has attachment issues, picking up women and then discarding them.
Yes obscure. For that- I like Coetzee because he showed this ambiguity perfectly. One can't put one's finger on what exactly this character is. Not maybe because he doesn't have depth, but it's not shown, because maybe the character himself doesn't even know.
His daughter was raped and decided to keep the child. That's the worst kind of disgrace, especially with the little boy living on the same land. And yet- she lived with it. She didn't give up, while David is complaining and moaning about his little affair. Mr. Isaac was right- he's sorry because he was found out. Actually he's sorry because she didn't return the same passion he had for her. She betrayed him in a way, and that is his disgrace. Doing the act itself, no regrets whatsoever, justifying it by saying it's a "passion". Anyway I don't think he did something wrong, good for him, good for her- although she wasn't that into it.

He is unwanted just like the dogs which are put down. No one wants him, not his daughter, not his lover, not the school. He is not needed by this world, and I guess that is a hard thing to live with. Which is why he goes back to the dead and finds comfort with them, with the concept of Immortality. Teresa was also discarded by Byron (not loved). He finds comfort in that.

Interesting book, too plot-based, not the style I usually read. But I like the way he doesn't really tie anything together, and how undefined it is.

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Pub- pdf (here)