NOVEL THOUGHTS
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RANDOM HOUSE (UK), 1999
(available in paperback from Penguin, 2000)
PROFESSOR DAVID LURIE, the central character in Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, winner of the 1999 Booker Prize, is a middle-aged, twice-divorced academic at a Cape Town, South Africa, college. Lurie leads a comfortable, contented, if uninspired, life. When his manipulative seduction of a young student leads to his dismissal from the college, and social disgrace, he lands on the doorstep of his daughter, Lucy, who is living a hardscrabble life on a small landholding in the country, where she farms and operates a small animal refuge.
At first, Lurie seems to regain his emotional balance in the country. He helps care for the animals, brings produce to a nearby market, and thinks about embarking on a scholarly work about Byron. But when Lucy and David are victimized in a brutal attack at the hands of two black neighbors, David becomes determined, against Lucy’s wishes, to seek justice. The attack brings to the fore all the fault lines in their relationship and in postapartheid South Africa as well, where the balance of power between white and black is rapidly changing.
Coetzee’s protagonist, David Lurie, has a sophisticated palate. David’s idea of a simple dinner is anchovies on tagliatelle with a mushroom sauce, a dish he prepares for Melanie, the student he seduces. After visiting with his daughter, Lucy, on her farm, David makes an impromptu visit to Melanie’s parents, who invite him to dinner. The dinner, “chicken in a bubbling tomato stew that gives off aromas of ginger and cumin, rice, an array of salads and pickles,” is the “kind of food he most missed, living with Lucy.” But there is one dish David enjoys at Lucy’s: sweet potatoes.
Meals at Lucy’s are usually simple affairs: bread, soup, and, sometimes, a sweet-potato dish that David especially enjoys. Usually David doesn’t care for sweet potatoes, but “Lucy does something with lemon peel and butter and allspice that makes them palatable, more than palatable.”
Beth Preiss recommended Disgrace to her Vegetarian Society of Washington, D.C., book club, after hearing Coetzee, who is vegetarian, read from the book at an animal rights conference. “What happens to people and animals in the book is disturbing, and we see the connection between the two,” says Preiss.
We thought a vegetarian recipe for sweet potatoes would be appropriate to pair with Disgrace.
6 large sweet potatoes, peeled and cut into 2-inch cubes 2 tablespoons vegetable oil 1 cup brown sugar, packed |
4 tablespoons butter 1 tablespoon freshly grated lemon peel 3 tablespoons lemon juice ½ teaspoon ground allspice |
Preheat oven to 375°F. Place the cubed potatoes in a roasting pan. Drizzle with oil and toss to coat the pieces evenly. Bake until almost done, about 30 minutes.
While the potatoes are roasting, heat the brown sugar, butter, lemon peel, lemon juice, and allspice in a small saucepan until the butter is melted and the sugar is completely dissolved. Remove potatoes from oven and toss with the butter-sugar mixture. Return to the oven and continue cooking for 10 minutes, until the potatoes are cooked through.
Yield: 6 to 8 servings
NOVEL THOUGHTS
“We all suffer from food snobbery to some extent, so it’s important that our members can cook well, or at least order well,” says Sarah Wortman of her Chicago-area book club. Her club’s meetings are the perfect place to combine members’ enthusiasm for cooking and literature, and the host often matches their brunch, lunch, or dinner menu to the monthly literary theme.
According to Lisa von Drehle, the books everyone likes often lead to the “lamest” discussions in her group and it’s the difficult or disliked books that lead to very meaty discussions. Disgrace was an anomaly—a book everyone admired, but one that spawned a lively, invigorating discussion. “Disgrace was poetic in the simplicity of the writing but visceral in subject matter,” says von Drehle. Wortman agrees: “Disgrace was a rich, dense novel, and it tackled many complex issues, including race, class, sexuality, sexual harassment, the academic establishment, and the transition from apartheid to an integrated society and government in South Africa.”
The group was especially interested in Coetzee’s treatment of sexual harassment. “We wondered whether or not the student, Melanie, would have brought sexual harassment charges against her instructor, Professor Lurie, had it not been for pressure from her boyfriend and father,” says Wortman. “Why Professor Lurie chose to respond defiantly to charges of sexual harassment prompted a lot of lively discussion.”
Members were also interested in the challenges Lucy, David’s daughter, faced as she tried to maintain her farm. “She’s alone on a farm and lives under the supposed protection of her closest neighbors, among whose circle lived her attackers,” says Wortman. “The complexities of the situation in South Africa, the difficulties of assimilating a new set of values and cultural codes, and the ways people play out their history in a newly reconstructed present were all part of Lucy’s life and our discussion.”
More Food for Thought
For their discussion of Disgrace, Lisa von Drehle prepared a Serbian meal for her Chicago book club. Her husband is a Serb, and she had been learning about his native cuisine. “The idea was to serve cuisine from a tough, embattled part of the world,” she says. “These are two parts of the world that have been torn apart by civil war and strife.” Her menu included grilled čevapčiči (a Serbian sausage), shopska (salad with tomatoes, cucumbers, and feta), and what she calls “the Serbian national starch,” bread.