Disgrace

Last night, I finished reading - for the second time - J. M. Coetzee’s novel ‘Disgrace’. Set in post-apartheid South Africa, it charts the fall of a white academic following an affair with a student. Amongst the unexpected turns his life takes, the main character finds himself working for a small, under-resourced animal rescue organisation.

He has never been fond of animals; his volunteering is a penance. Yet working with them - especially in their last moments - brings some change in him: 

Of the dogs in the holding pens, there is one he has come to feel a particular fondness for. It is a young male with a withered left hindquarter which it drags behind it. [...] No visitor has shown an interest in adopting it. Its period of grace is almost over; soon it will have to submit to the needle. 

Will he save the dog? It is in his power to do so, but that would be an improbable ending to such a dark tale. Instead, he wonders how the dog might see things, how it might react to the (almost) inevitable fate awaiting him: 

What the dog will not be able to work out [...], what his nose will not tell him, is how one can enter what seems to be an ordinary room and never come out again. Something happens in this room, something unmentionable: here the soul is yanked out of the body; briefly it hangs about in the air, twisting and contorting; then it is sucked away and is gone. It will be beyond him, this room that is not a room but a hole where one leaks out of existence.

Powerful stuff ...