The most devastating thing in Coetzee’s brilliant and bleak novel Disgrace is the daughter storyline.
For those who haven’t read it yet, and everyone should, in Disgrace an aging South African academic David Lurie is forced to leave his job due to a predatory affair with a much younger student. (Coetzee never specifies the race of any of his characters, but writes in such a way that you can easily tell who’s what ethnic background, and the protagonist is clearly of European, “colonizer” background in the context of South Africa.) He moves to a farm run by his daughter Lucy, with (hired) help from the neighbouring farm owner Petrus, a black African. Their day of seasonal work and volunteering at a dog kennel are interrupted by an attack by three men who break into the farm and rape Lucy, having previously almost killed David by setting him on fire. Police don’t do much and Lucy, to David’s astonishment, decides not to prosecute. She is almost fatalistic about the whole event, and just wants to move on. Well, we are colonizers here so these things are to be expected in the grand evening-out of things, is her vibe. She becomes depressed and agoraphobic, but none of that affects her resolve.