The title of South African author J.M. Coetzee's exceptional Booker Prize-winning novel, Disgrace, is the first cue to the spare, devastating economy of his prose. Over the course of the book, the word takes on new inflections and meanings, carrying with it a bleak and deftly metaphorical reading of life after apartheid. Though his attentions will inevitably turn to race relations, Coetzee spends the riveting opening section demolishing the Ivory Tower occupied by David Lurie, a middle-aged college professor with a weakness for attractive female students. His latest, and last, conquest is a demure young woman from his Romantic course who yields to his strenuous efforts to seduce her, but not fully. In a line that will prove to haunt Lurie later on, Coetzee describes their consummation as "not rape, not quite that, but undesired nonetheless, undesired to the core." When she reports his actions to the school board, he's cold and unrepentant, refusing to even feign contrition in order to keep his job. But the tables turn once he retreats from Cape Town to his daughter Lucy's isolated smallholding in a dangerous rural area. Though humbled enough by his peasant lifestyle, his spirits are broken one evening when three black intruders beat him near death, leaving him helpless to prevent them from raping his daughter. It's a horrifying turn of events, but what's most shocking to Lurie (and the reader) is her refusal to either report the men to the police or leave with him to a safer place. Coetzee is obviously playing with some incendiary racial politics here, but he's skillful about situating the entire story within the context of parable. In his eyes, Lucy's violation and suffering is also South Africa's, before and after apartheid. Its effects cannot be shaken or escaped, so the only sensible recourse is to grow accustomed to it and try to be a good person. That's about as much hope as Coetzee can bring himself to offer, but Disgrace unfolds with such hardened wisdom and assurance that its arid beauty sinks into your bones.