Lacuna

by Fiona Snyckers

Overview

Winner of the Sala Novel Award
Winner of the Humanities and Social Sciences Award for the Novel

A cry for reparations for Lucy Lurie. She is the victim of an act of terrible sexual violence that devastes her life. Afterwards, she becomes obsessed with the author John Coetzee, the man who wrote the scene of violence in which she was attacked. Withdrawn and fearful of crowds, Lucy nonetheless makes occasional forays into the world of men in her search for Coetzee himself.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.

This riveting, feminist reply to the book considered to be Coetzee’s masterwork is also a moving story of one woman trying to put her life back together after trauma.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781609457259
Publisher:	Europa Editions, Incorporated
Publication date:	01/11/2022
Pages:	256
Sales rank:	1,069,789
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Fiona Snyckers has written eight novels across various genres. In 2020, Lacuna won the South African Literary Award for best novel and the NIHSS Humanities Award for best novel. Snyckers has been nominated five times for the Sunday Times Fiction Prize. She was educated at Rhodes Universityand at the University of the Witwatersrand. She lives in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Editorial Reviews

11/22/2021

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. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

★ “A novel that questions the right of an author to appropriate stories as it defends the right of the character to live them.”—Kirkus Reviews (Starred)

“Snyckers brings Lucy to life, warts and all, in a novel that is at turns exasperating, poignant, and unexpectedly funny. Fans of Disgrace will enjoy reading this clever and wry response.”—Jane Voster, Drum Magazine

“Readers will find much to chew on in the questions Snyckers poses about storytelling, power, and agency.”—Publishers Weekly

“Lacuna explores trauma, identity, and the ethics of storytelling, questioning who has the right to tell someone else’s story and how such narratives impact the lives of those involved.”—Early Bird Books

From the Publisher

★ 2021-10-13
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.

Kirkus Reviews