In Disgrace Coetzee makes the pastoral rape real and modern.  This time narrated through the voice of the colonizing male by a romantic literature professor, David Lurie, who, after a disastrous affair with a student, leaves his job and visit his daughter, Lucy, on her little land holding in the Eastern Cape.  Lucy originally settled as “a member of a commune… had fallen in love with the place”, bought some land and built “a house full of the smell of baking… a solid countrywoman, a boervrou.”  In contrast to In the Heart of the Country Lucy’s land is a positive, fruitful place, where optimistic Lucy attempts to foster a post-apartheid pastoral ideal replete with racial equality as she helps her farmhand buy and build on an adjacent piece of land.  One day, returning from a walk, Lucy and Lurie find three strange men on her land who proceed to steal everything, shoot the stray dogs she tends, rape her, and set Lurie on fire with methylated spirits.  Petrus, the neighbor who is meant to keep her safe (provide a strong male presence in a country of crimes against women) is mysteriously absent and returns unconcerned.  Lucy refuses to press charges, to discuss the rape.  She loses her passion for the farm, but refuses to leave.  When Petrus has a party and one of her rapists attends Lucy makes no scene, asks no questions, only leaves.  Afterwards, when the furious Lurie confronts Petrus about the presence of the rapist at his party, about Lucy’s safety, Petrus calmly suggests that Lucy will be safe because he will look after her, because she can be his wife.  Lucy is unfazed by Petrus’ logic, even considers it, and tells Lurie that she is pregnant from the rape and intends to keep the child.  Most disturbing of all, Lucy explains her decision as inevitable, as “the price [she] has to pay for staying on.” Lurie, like most readers, is shocked by Lucy’s listless resignation.  Rape as redemption, white woman as post-colonial martyr, hardly presents any sort of satisfying, new South African solution.  Like Magda, he wonders about “a woman’s burden, a woman’s preserve” in a lonely African land