Really interesting and thought-provoking read.

Thanks so much to NetGalley and the publishers for letting me access an advance copy in exchange for my honest feedback.

The most thought-provoking novel by the most unreliable narrator I read all year. It is told by Lucy Lurie, whose rape was fictionalised - without her consent - by a novelist called John Coetzee in his Booker-winning novel Disgrace. Lucy is not happy with the way her rape, by six black men, is used by Coetzee as a metaphor for the atonement by the white for their Apartheid sins.

She fantasises of meeting the elusive Coetzee and telling him how she feels, hoping he will answer:
“I see what you mean. (...) It is deeply misogynistic to use the rape of a woman as an analogy for the just and necessary punishment white people have to endure to atone for their sins. I see where I went wrong.” Of course he doesn't say this.

And this is one of many fantasies or thought-experiments Lucy has throughout the novel. They often take the form of imaginary conversations and she will only tell you afterward whether they really happened or not (in the end she doesn't even bother doing that).

She is a great character as well: unflinching in the extreme, very sharp, extremely sarcastic. She makes you ask questions about what fiction is allowed to do (everything?), but it is also a critique on South Africa, media, etc.

I enjoyed it very much. The first quarter I was asking myself what was true and what not, whether the fictional Coetzee has anything in common with the real one, but then it became a complete page turner complete with unexpected twists and turns at the end.

4,5

This book picks up a character from JM Coetzee's book disgrace and gives that character an unreliable voice and a narrative. You read the narrative and you're wildly doubtful of its honesty and at the end that come out to be lies. The uncomfortable intermingles with interest and you read it all. And I consider the book a success. I loved reading it and I will read it someday again. Thank you publisher for the e-arc.

Lacuna by Fiona Snyckers is a delicious and twisty novel. Told by Lucy, the survivor of a violent sexual assault, the narrative is close and personal, but also perilously unreliable, as Lucy tells both what is happening, and what she fear or wishes might happen.

An added complication to Lucy’s recovery is the fact that (a fictional version of) JM Coetzee co-opted her story and incorporated it into his novel Disgrace. Our Lucy is therefore dealing with the story becoming public fodder, the public’s reaction to aspects of her story – real or imagined, and frustration that she has lost control of what she reasonably believes should be her story.

Lucy dealing with all of this as an unreliable narrator really captivated me. While it’s sometimes easy to tell when Lucy’s narrative flies off into fantasy, the happenings are sometime so perilously believable that when she brings the reader back to reality it’s with a bit of disbelief. There is, ultimately, one “true,” easy to follow narrative, but the extra bits tell us so much about Lucy’s mind-set. While Lacuna-Lucy is tormented by the Disgrace-Lucy created by John Coetzee, it’s impossible to ignore that within Lacuna, John Coetzee is a fictional character existing almost entirely in Lucy’s mind.

"When you have an intense and vivid interaction with someone in your head, it is hard to believe that person remains untouched by it…"

Lacuna becomes a literary critique of JM Coetzee’s Disgrace, a book in which a woman is violently sexually assaulted “behind closed doors,” and deals with it almost ethereally. While I found the characters in Disgrace distant, Lacuna-Lucy was vivid. Certainly not a likable character, I found her none-the-less identifiable. She is consumed by something that happened to her, that she is both forced to confront and incapable of dealing with.

Lacuna is not just a deeply engaging criticism, it is also eloquent. Snyckers text is both concise, and at times beautiful; the golden alcohol, her fingers threading through the holes in a blanket, her beautiful and insufferable friends.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for an e-copy of this book in return for an honest review.

This is a complex and, at times, claustrophobic book, and seemingly delights in wrongfooting you.

Using Coetzee's 'Disgrace' as a starting point, this book constantly plays with the reliability of the narrator, either directly with the character telling you as such, or through the slow realisation that some scenarios in the book don't make sense (a therapist who goes wildly off-script). There is even a factual error on the first page that it took me a long time to realise might have been intentional (suggesting that Coetzee only won any prizes after he released Disgrace, that being his second Booker win).

Coetzee takes on the role of our narrator's nemesis or perpetual foe, almost the thing she fixates on to try to process some of the incredible trauma she has been through. Her unreliability then starts to take on a new tone, where we realise that not only is she dangerous, but also in danger, and it starts to puncture holes in some of the expectations we have of women to tell 'perfect' and 'logical' stories about their own assault whilst they are still dealing with the after-effects of it.

I received an advanced copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

This was the first book I have read by this author and after reading this I know I want to read more. This book was well written with an interesting story and a narrative which is unreliable at best and a complete lie at worst. I didnt know what to expect before and I still am not sure what I read but I enjoyed it.

What a dizzying, smart, rich and troubling book this is! Meta and postmodernist, it functions as a critical reading of Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee (and I love the shadowed link made by the cover art) while simultaneously opening up all kinds of lacunae and questions in the mind of the reader as fissures gape between JM Coetzee and the John Coetzee of the novel who has only written Disgrace two years ago in a contemporary present complete with Cinder (Tinder), social media and BLM.

I have to say here that I haven't read Disgrace - and am now part pushed to do so to see if Lucy's reading is one that I also see in the book. And that it might be, makes me also feel I don't want to read it. It is, of course, the case that primarily male authors have long used rape as sexualised metaphor for, especially, military action - just think of Shakespeare's Henry V, off the top of my head, where the language is all about penetration, submission, occupation and so on. So it is both literary tradition and also an innovation to use rape as a metaphor for the violent upheaval of apartheid in South Africa - but it's perhaps one that only a male author might have conceived. Indeed, one of the points this book makes is the well-known one of how the world looks different through gendered eyes.

What complicates this narrative in a dense and rich way is that Lucy is far from reliable and the narrative consists as much of her acknowledged fantasies as it does of any kind of literary 'reality', whatever that means in a piece of fiction. We're never quite sure if she really is the 'Lucy Lurie' upon whom the character in Disgrace was based or whether she's a rape victim or survivor (and the book interrogates those terms) suffering from PTSD, attaching herself to a piece of relevant fiction as a way of channeling her trauma, her voice, and her rage.

And to add another twist, Lucy finally gets called out by a Black sociologist who points out Lucy's white privilege in being able to afford a therapist, lock herself away in her house and talk about self-care:
I thought the world held no further terrors for me. I was wrong. It turns out that the prospect of losing one's privilege is the biggest terror of all [...] She is wrong. She must be wrong, because it is inconvenient for me if she is right. I force the impulse down. I make myself stop trying to raise objections, to exceptionalise myself, to legitimise my pain. I stop talking altogether, and listen. This is not something I am good at. I have spent so much time trying to make my voice heard that my ears are out of practice.

The wonderful irony is that Lucy who has been filling the lacuna in Coetzee's book, is also speaking over women whose racial or economic status is perceived to be (race) or is (economics) lesser than hers. It's a sobering moment and a challenging one for both the character and the reader, however much we are attentive to intersectionality.

Overall, then, a fascinating book for me which functions partly as literary criticism while also being an absolutely contemporary story of rape, trauma, mental health, privilege and a surprising dark humour at times. To end on a quotation, this is Lucy's response when the Black sociologist tells her to write a novel of her own:
'Oh, no, I couldn't do that. It would make people uncomfortable. No one would want to read it. Coetzee's story would stand head and shoulders above it. His story is a clean, coherent narrative. It is powerful and iconic. Mine is an uncontrolled emotion dump, lacking in structure and framework. If John Coetzee's story is a fountain pen on vellum, mine is menstrual blood on toilet paper.'

Bold, outspoken and yes, challenging at times - but isn't that what literature is for?

Possible spoilers

Its been so many years since I read Disgrace, that's its just a distant blur to me, but I remember it was very good.
This book is very clever.
It takes the character from Disgrace and gets her to voice her own story.
The unreliable narrator works well here, you begin to doubt most of her stories before she reveals them to be untrue.
There are a good few uncomfortable moments in the book, but that's to be expected.
An interesting book, the whole way through I wondered what Coetzee would make of it.