Disgrace

The novel's reckoning happens in the Eastern Cape. A disgraced Cape Town academic retreats to his daughter's smallholding on the dry veld near Salem, between the old settler town of Grahamstown, now Makhanda, and the coast. The map anchors that country of hills, farm plots and a small-town animal clinic; the Cape Town scenes of his fall sit far to the west and are marked as excursions.

David Lurie

The technical university, Cape Town

Part One

A middle-aged professor of communications teaches poetry to indifferent students at a downsized technical university. An affair with one of them collapses into a disciplinary hearing that he refuses to answer with the contrition demanded, and he loses his post. This is the disgrace of the title, and it sits far to the west of the rest of the story.

Part One, chapters 1-4

inspired by Coetzee names only a Cape Town technical university, never a real campus; the description matches the former Cape Technikon, now the Cape Peninsula University of Technology's District Six campus, so this marks that site.

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David Lurie

Lurie's flat, Green Point

Part One

Before his fall the professor keeps an ordered bachelor life in an Atlantic Seaboard suburb of Cape Town, with Thursday visits to a paid companion and a settled routine. Green Point, named in the book, is where that self-contained world comes apart when the scandal breaks.

Part One

explicit The novel names Green Point as the professor's neighbourhood but gives no street address, so this marks the centre of the Atlantic Seaboard suburb.

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