Read February 12th, 2021

Beautifully written. An excellent example of spare yet striking prose.

• The book is about a professor, David Lurie, who has an affair with a student of his and leaves his city life in South Africa to go to live with his daughter in the countryside. Some men break into the farm, rape Lucy and set David on fire. The second half of the novel deals with the aftermath.

• [[On fostering passion]]

  • “Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires” - from Blake’s [[Proverbs of Hell]]
  • “Why do you quote that to me?” (his daughter)
  • “Unacted desires can turn as ugly in the old as in the young… [e]very woman I have been close to has tught me something about myself. To that extent they have made me a better person”
  • “I hope you are not claiming the reverse as well. That knowing you has turned your women into better people.”
  • I like how Lucy punctures David’s spiritual-hedonist philosophy. Blake’s words are beautiful, but it seems so reckless and selfish to do what he suggests. A form of egotism. How your actions effect the world do not weight into your decisions because you simply must act on your desires.

• After David Lurie, once suave but whose charm has faded in his old age and burns after the break-in, chooses to sleep with the homely old pet-undertaker he has been working with.

  • “Never before did he dream he would sleep with a Bev. She is lying under the blanket with only her head sticking out. Even in the dimness there is nothing charming in sight. Slipping off his underpants, he gets in beside her, runs his hands down her body. She has no breasts to speak of. Sturdy, almost waistless, like a squat little tub.
  • Out of their congress he can at least say that he does his duty. Without passion but without distaste either. So that in the end Bev Shaw can feel pleased with herself. All she intended has been accomplished. He, David Lurie, has been succoured, as a man is succoured by a woman; her friend Lucy Lurie has been helped with a difficult visit…
  • Let her gaze fill on her Romeo, he thinks, on his bowed shoulders and skinny shanks. It is indeed late. One the horizon lies a last crimson glow; the moon looms overhead; smoke hangs in the air; across a strip of waste land, from the first rows of shacks, comes a hubbub of voices. At the door Bev presses herself against him a last time, rests her head on his chest… His thoughts go to Emma Bovary strutting before a mirror after her first big afternoon. I have a lover! I have a lover! since Emma herself. Well, let poor Bev Shaw go home and do some singing too. And let him stop calling her old Bev. If she is poor, he is bankrupt.”

• David trying to talk to Lucy moving homes after the rape. [[Private Residue]]

  • David: “I know you would like to stay, but shouldn’t you at least consider the other route? Can’t the two of us talk about it rationally?”
  • “I can’t talk anymore, David, I just can’t… I know I am not being clear. I wish I could explain. But I can’t. Because of who you are and who I am, I can’t. I’m sorry…”
  • She then offers a brief explanation on what she thinks she should do: “I don’t know. But whatever I decide I want to decide by myself, without being pushed. There are things you just don’t understand.”

• As David meets the family of the girl he had a relationship with.

  • “He meets the mother’s eyes, then the daughter’s, and again the current leaps, the current of desire.”
  • As for her, she cannot hide from him what is passing through her mind: So this is the man my sister has been naked with! So this is the man she has done it with! This old man!

• Later, David secretly watches Melanie’s play and reflects on the women he has been with.

  • “Enriched: that was the word the newspapers picked on to jeer at. A stupid word to let slip, under the circumstances, yet now, at this moment, he would stand by it… by each of [Melanie, Soraya, Rosalind, Bev] 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.
  • Where do moments like this come from? Hypnagogic, no doubt, but what does that explain? If he is being led, then what god is doing the leading?”
  • I like the gratitude he feels at each experience. It disarms the pain of previous failures.

• After he has been told by Melanie’s boyfriend that she would spit in David’s eye were she to see him.

  • “He drives back slowly along the Main Road in Green Point. Spit in your eye: he had not expected that. His hand on the steering wheel is trembling. The shocks of existence: he must learn to take them more lightly”