Upon the completion of pages 47-105 I found that I was happy about David Lurie going to stay with his daughter. Although his superficial ways arose when he first got there, here is the first time we see Lurie as human. Lucy appears relatively accepting of her father’s affair with a student and offers him “refuge”. However, when Lurie first sees his daughter, the first think he notices is that she has gained weight and makes a living from selling produce and flowers. We also learn that Lucy has a girlfriend (Helen) which David fixates on for about a paragraph (once again forever lost in his superficial thoughts). Although they exhibit many differences it seems that they are able to live harmoniously. However, when both Lucy and Lurie experience an intrusion, the differences become crystal clear. The incident that has occurred seems to hold a sort of power. The nature of each incident (or better yet crime) that they have suffered separates them in that Lucy (having been raped) does not want to tell the cops about it–”David, when people ask, would you mind keeping to your own story, to what happened to you? You tell what happened to you, I tell what happened to me….” This suggests that they aren’t on the same side as each other, therefore dividing them. However, Lucy’s decision to not report the rape is crazy (to me) but pertinent in that she understands the judicial system (like David) and knows that the men will not be persecuted for their crime. This seems familiar to me in the case of David’s “situation” in that he could never produce an adequate confession to the vice rector. Here is where Lucy is similar to her father in that they both possess knowledge of the judicial system . However, under the system where Lucy lives, the exposure to this system is very different in nature: Lurie is the rapist and Lucy is a rape victim. This crime placed Lurie in a heroic position, but also allowed him to focus on the situation at hand instead of filtering it through his head in how it should have happened. Given the brutality of the crime, I don’t even think it was possible for Lurie to transform it.
It is the reality that he needed to take him out of his fanatical filtered world!
I am LOVING this novel 
So real. So authentic.
