In the Heart of the Country: A Novel

Magda is a lonely and embittered spinster who lives on a sheep farm in the heart of South Africa. Her mother died in childbirth, the cause of which Magda attributes to her father's "relentless sexual demands". Her bitterness comes from the fact that she feels that she has been an absence all her life to her father. They have always fronted each other in silence and so Magda became an unhappy peasant, "a miserable black virgin, "the mad hag" she is destined to be, having grown up with the servants' children. Deprived of human intercourse, Magda realises that she overvalues the imagination. That is why when her father brings home a new bride, she fantacises of killing them both with an axe. The lonely farm is the place where she is "devoured by boredom", engulfed in the "monologue of the self" like a maze of words out of which she can't escape and she feels doomed to expire there "in the heart of the country", "in the middle of nowhere", a place she considers "was never intended that people should live here". Magda's father's sexual relationship with Hendrik's wife, the black servant, only adds to her dismay. It thus doesn't come as a surprise, given Magda's psychological disposition, that she often dreams of burning everything down and that she is actually about to murder the one person she considers responsible for her despair. After that, what is left for her but an inexorable descent into madness? As André Brink stated about this novel: "It says something about loneliness, about craving for love, about the relation between master and slave and between white and black, and about a man's earthly anguish and longing for salvation - in a way you do not easily escape from once it has gripped you".

This book is dark, fierce, unpredictable, dream-like, and intelligent. Very symbolic and brings up many issues concerning whites in south africa. i like the format/structure very much. The main character, Magda, is a very captivating storyteller. Very intriguing psyche.

In the Heart of the Country tells the story of Magda, an old spinster who lives à huis clos with her father, her step-mother and the servants Henrik and Klein Anna, on a far-flung farm in the middle of the veld. The novel is set at an unspecified time, the present tense heightens this sense of timelessness. Madga's dis-aster starts at her birth since she is not the male heir that the baas has long wished for and who will keep the lineage alive. Therefore, Magda's only way of making a show of resistance to this despotic patriarch is to write her story and make her voice heard so as not to be "one of the forgotten ones of history" (3). The novel is structured in fragments numbered from 1 to 266 to convey a seeming sense of linearity and thus give the reader a precarious fil conducteur to hold on to. But, by and by, the reading becomes somewhat disorienting and dis-astrous. Indeed, the boundary between reality and imagination is often blurred to our detriment since we vacillate endlessly between the two. Magda's narrative is riddled with adverbs of uncertainty, repetitions and at times contradictions. Yet, she has managed to accomplish an ingenious feat : captivate the reader's attention until the last page of the novel only to realize that s/he comes out of it none the wiser because all the contradictions that permeate the novel remain baffling. Coetzee's novel achieves a double goal. First, to give voice to the voiceless Other, Magda, allowing her to dissolve the totalising linearity of the patriarchal discourse. Second, to condemn Apartheid as an authoritarian regime and portend its demise, and in both endeavours Coetzee's In the Heart of the Country has succeeded masterfully.

This novel is Coetzee's descent into madness essay, but it is more of a plane crach into madness. His most openly philosophical work except perhaps Master of Petersburg.It is ruthless, graphic, horrific, magnificent, brilliant and unfathomably profound.

It is not a question of loving Coetzee, but of loving great literature. This is great literature. Disregard poor reviews. This work is so well written, so moving and finely wrought. It stands beside not only the best of Coetzee's work, but also the best work of the 20th Century. It is fiction and meta-fiction. A pastoral novel and a novel about the pastoral novel. An acheivement of the hightest order!