But his new life in the country offers scarce refuge. Here David hopes to cleanse himself with time-honored toil. He immediately shoves off for Salem in the Eastern Cape where his daughter, Lucy, manages a dog kennel and works her smallholding, harvesting a modest crop. This not uncommon outrage earns him a dismissal and censure from the university committee he refuses to cooperate with in hopes of saving his job. All she does is avert herself""), he believes her to represent the final object of his desire, his last act of lush, Romantic desperation. He is, even at his best, a man of ""moderated bliss."" So when he seduces Melanie Isaacs, a lithe student from his poetry elective (""She does not resist. Spooked by the flicker of twilight in his life trajectory, he sees himself as an aged Lothario soon to be ""shuddered over"" by the pretty girls he has so often wooed he is disappointed in and unengaged by the academy he now serves by rote and he cannot locate the notes for his opera, Byron in Italy, in which he has placed so much reluctant hope. An uninspired teacher and twice divorced, David Lurie is a 52-year-old poetry scholar-cum-""adjunct professor of communications"" at Cape Technical University. This latest book, his first novel in five years, is a searing evocation of post-apartheid South Africa it earned him an unprecedented second Booker Prize. As a writer, Coetzee is a literary cascade, with a steady output of fiction and criticism (literary and social) over the last two decades.
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