Little shivers of cold run through her. . . . “All she does is avert herself: avert her lips, avert her eyes. . . . But “nothing will stop him,” and Lurie carries Melanie to her bedroom. But he is in the grip of something.” He shows up at her apartment, uninvited, and Melanie is “too surprised to resist the intruder who thrusts himself upon her.” Her limbs crumple, and she struggles, tells him no. She will not know how to deal with him he ought to let her go. When he calls Melanie on the phone, he hears in her voice “all her uncertainty. Lurie is unashamed of what he’s done-there is an icy near-clarity to the way he experiences the act of overpowering her. He is in retreat, having been fired from a university, where he taught Romantic poetry, over what he regards as a lusty affair with a student, and what that student, named Melanie, regards as coercion, perhaps rape. Prurience is respectable, prurience and sentiment.” Lurie is speaking with his daughter at her small landholding in eastern South Africa, which is serving as his temporary escape from Cape Town. Coetzee’s novel “ Disgrace,” from 1999, tells his daughter, Lucy. “These are puritanical times,” David Lurie, the protagonist of J.
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