Misfortune – A novel that narrates painful social changes

If you have a deep love for extra-beautiful literature, and if you have enough space to read a novel twice, at least, then JM Coetzee has plenty to offer. The 2003 Nobel Prize winner for literature, JM Coetzee is a man of his own kind, an engineer with his own set of tools. His novels are full of human miseries and the real world. He based his writings on the events that occurred around him. He did at least up to the date when he had written his very famous novel ‘Disgrace’. He had tried a novel technique of mixing fact and fiction in his upcoming novel Slow Man.

By writing ‘Disgrace’, an allegorical novel, he became the first novelist to win the Man Booker Prize twice. In ‘Disgrace’ he tries to paint the landscape of a country, South Africa. It is the story of the time when the apartheid trade regime has just closed its doors and people have not yet adapted to climate change. They are free in many ways; they have wings of changed perception of themselves. They have a multitude of newly formed rules to follow.

Holding the contemporary South African setting before his eyes, JM Coetzee writes symbolically about the altered atmosphere. To create a visual metaphor for what Coetzee perceives, he uses the story of David Lurie. The protagonist is a literature professor and his daughter Lucy has become a peasant. He superbly narrates how this peasant girl responds to the new challenges of her life in a distorted atmosphere.

The country is virtually lawless in the rural areas where David and his daughter reside. They face a period of legal vacuum that is harrowing; especially for a man like David. Coetzee narrates David as: ‘His temperament is not going to change; he is too old for that. In David’s South Africa, there is massive violation of laws. Under such circumstances, one would find the future dark.

His daughter is made of different soils. After going through a life as a vagabond and leaving behind the company of a lesbian friend, Lucy tries to settle in the new environment. The change of scenery in the country has put before her a strange situation. She devises a novel solution to survive in the new world. She breeds dogs for sale; she produces vegetables and flowers on her Eastern Cape farm.