I won! I won!

As you might learn from a gander at the Comments on my last post, I WON A SONY POCKET READER. And all I had to do to get it was post a favorite literary quote to the comments at Fussy. I chose the opening lines to Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow:

A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.

Apart from the fact that I never win anything, I'm very excited because I had been fantasizing about various e-readers, but the actual purchase of such a device seemed a long way off. I read quite a bit, mostly courtesy of the SF Public Library, and I occasionally travel for extended periods of time. The prospect of being able to tote around hundreds of titles, therefore, is very appealing.

I hope mine is navy blue.

Disgrace

I recently finished reading Disgrace, the book that won J.M. Coetzee his then-unprecedented second Booker Prize (Australian Peter Carey later matched it). I wept when I read the last page. It's been a while since a novel has made me cry.

Disgrace is the story of a man who loses everything: his youth, his reputation, his academic career, and ultimately, much more. His downfall begins with an ill advised affair. He gives in to his passion, and later is unable to criticize it (or censure himself) simply because he is past his prime. After he leaves the University, he goes to live with his beloved daughter, who has a farm in the Eastern Cape. There he suffers a worse abasement. He and his relationship with his daughter are forever changed.

It reminded me of another novel I read earlier this year, Philip Roth's The Human Stain. The main characters are aging academics who suffer public humiliation, to which they respond with indignation. There are official inquiries, and early retirement. Other shared themes include race, sex with younger women, and university politics.

Also common to the two novels is the writers' unflagging honesty. There is no shirking, for example, from the banal indignity of physical aging. Coetzee and Roth are master craftsmen at the top of their games.

Thanks, Lore.