In this reply to J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace, the daughter of that book's main character tells her own story of trying to put her life back together after trauma.
The reader starts to feel that something else needs to happen, that this novel needs to somehow change our understanding of the original. When that move arrives, it manages to feel both organic and just right, providing a meaningful and necessary twist on the Coetzee text ... What some readers might identify as Lacuna’s flaws are exactly what others could praise as its strengths. Generally, you’re the kind of reader who either goes in for a feminist revision or you’re not. Though I think of myself as the former, I have to admit that I started reading Lacuna feeling suspicious of its project. I worried that Snyckers would oversimplify the complex morality of the Coetzee novel. Most of all, I think I was won over yet again by that tone of literary and moral authority I mentioned above, and how easy it is to mistake one for the other. Because after reading Lacuna, it seemed to me that Coetzee’s moral vision is ultimately more blinkered than complex. Snyckers calls for an entirely different vision, one that doesn’t resort to using rape as a metaphor for anything.
... audacious ... Snyckers’s undertaking is incredibly bold; she must have braced herself for comparisons. Yet she has produced an impressive piece of fiction in a voice that is resolutely her own.
