Lacuna
A Novel
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
The traumatized central character of J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace is provocatively reimagined in this “surprising, subtle, and deeply challenging” novel (Kirkus Reviews, starred review).
Two years ago, Lucy Lurie was the victim of an act of sexual violence that devastated her life. Afterwards, she becomes obsessed with the author John Coetzee, whose acclaimed novel turned her brutal assault into a literary metaphor. Withdrawn and fearful of crowds, Lucy nonetheless makes occasional forays into the world of men in her search for Coetzee himself. She means to confront him.
The Lucy in his novel, Disgrace, is passive and almost entirely lacking agency. Lucy means to right the record, for she is the lacuna that Coetzee left in his novel—the missing piece of the puzzle. Lucy plans to put herself back in the story, to assert her agency and identity. For Lucy Lurie will be no man’s lacuna. Lacuna is both a powerful feminist reply to the book considered to be Coetzee’s masterwork, and the moving story of one woman’s attempt to reclaim her identity after trauma.
Winner of the Sala Novel Award
Winner of the Humanities and Social Sciences Award for the Novel
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
