November 22, 2021
South African writer Snyckers makes her adult literary debut (after the YA Cat’s Paws Cozy Mystery series) with an engaging postmodern work based on Lucy Lurie, the character who is gang-raped in J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace. Set in Cape Town, this begins two years after six Black strangers raped the white Lucy, now 28, after breaking into her father’s home. Lucy is dubbed Cape Town’s Number One Rape Victim, both due to the severity of the crime and because her colleague, Professor John Coetzee, wrote a Booker Prize–winning novel about the rape. Coetzee did not include Lucy’s point of view; his “lacuna” is celebrated by critics but bemoaned by Lucy, who resolves to tell what happened in her own words, but first she must work through her trauma. She’s convinced that in order to recover, she must find the now-retired author and make him understand he had no right to turn her rape into a postapartheid metaphor. Snyckers’s Lucy is a vivid narrator who coyly takes liberties with her own accounts of her search for Coetzee and her relationships with her therapist, her burgeoning love interest, and her distant father. Readers will find much to chew on in the questions Snyckers poses about storytelling, power, and agency.
Starred review from November 1, 2021
Lucy Lurie, the character at the heart of J.M. Coetzee's acclaimed novel Disgrace, is reimagined as a real person struggling with the aftermath of both her rape and the use of her trauma as a symbol for the ostensibly larger ordeals of a post-apartheid South Africa. Two years ago, Lucy Lurie was raped. Her attack was particularly brutal--there were multiple assailants, all of whom were strangers--and was widely reported upon by the South African media. Lucy, who is a junior lecturer at the fictional University of Constantia in Cape Town, recovers physically from her assault, but she struggles with severe PTSD, which leaves her with debilitating anxiety and agoraphobia. Prevented from working by her psychological condition, Lucy becomes more and more isolated, her social circle eventually reduced to the company of her therapist; her friend Moira, a self-proclaimed "literary star-fucker"; and her father, who witnessed her rape but seems to have moved on. Lucy's ongoing trauma is further complicated by the fact that the formidable John Coetzee, a former senior colleague of hers at the university, has written a literary blockbuster based on her experience. And here's where Snyckers' book gets tricky. Because, of course, J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace does center the violent rape of the fictional character Lucy Lurie by a group of black African farm laborers as the lacuna that shapes the book's overarching narrative metaphor. Snyckers' Lucy Lurie, in the tradition of Antoinette Cosway in Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea, insists on both the reclamation of her personal experience and the recognition of her erasure. However, unlike Rhys' Antoinette, who lives fully enmeshed in the systemic oppressions enacted upon her, Snyckers' Lucy is a sharp, analytical thinker well versed in the post-structuralist theory that makes her argument both trenchant and assailable. Snyckers' Lucy takes issue with her fictional counterpart's placid acceptance of her role as "the vessel through which the new world order will be born, in the person of her brown child." Snyckers' Lucy would like Synckers' Coetzee--a figure akin to the real-life author but also understood as a fiction in his own right--to acknowledge the ways in which his appropriation of her narrative was a secondary reenactment of her trauma. Her quest for that reckoning becomes the central hinge upon which this surprising, subtle, and deeply challenging book swings. A novel that questions the right of an author to appropriate stories as it defends the right of the character to live them.
COPYRIGHT(2021) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.