In the Heart of the Country: A Novel [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

I just finished the seventh book I've read by the Nobel-prize-winning J.M. Coetzee, In the Heart of the Country, which was published in 1977 and is his second novel (Dusklands was the first).

The 138-page book is presented as numbered entries (in a journal?) written by the main character, whose name we learn only once more than half the book has gone by. It is Magda. She is the intelligent, bitter, unattractive, spinster daughter of a sheep farmer in an isolated, nearly barren region of South Africa. A lead man on the farm, a black man named Hendrik, has gone home and brought back a wife, Anna, whom Magda's father takes as his mistress. Magda seems to snap and fantasizes violent reprisals against one or both of them, until the reader begins to wonder if some or any of it is real.

We only have Magda's apparently corrupted point of view to go by. There is no other point of reference in the work. Coeztee, who was educated as a computer scientist and a linguist, presents and represents incidents in the journal in different ways, disorienting the reader, but perhaps orienting one more to the world of perception that Magda inhabits. Coetzee will take a common point in time, and have Magda represent it a couple of different ways, with different outcomes, one of which may become part of her mythology/reality. For example, she seems to say she's an only child, but she might have had a brother and other siblings. By the end of the book, the other siblings are reality for her.

And by the end of the book, Magda has completely cracked up, if you ask me. One line I read about this book is that it is a feminine narrative a la Beckett. Coetzee, who seems to be influenced by Kafka, does present an existential image of life as a colonial presence in South Africa. The perception of Magda is her reality (as it is for all of us), she exists in a constant state of suffering and seems to have very little power over her world. The world in which she lives is cold to her, and she seems to snap a little when she sees that she cannot make the South African landscape and its culture/people yield to her will. Her (apparent) act of killing her father, hiding his body, and then, ultimately, staying on at the farm alone seems to be her wild and desperate attempt to enforce her meager power on the world. At one point, living in the house with the black servants (who previously had lived in their own small house on the grounds), Magda writes, "I cannot say whether Hendrik and Anna are guests or invaders or prisoners" (p. 112). One could say the same for her and her existence in Africa at all.

The last section of the book is the most difficult to get through, as Magda imagines that the planes that fly overhead are dropping language down to her, words in Spanish, her interpretations of those words and her responses. She says that the "words are Spanish, but they are tied to universal meanings" (p. 126). Again, we only have her retellings of these incidents to go by, and it's difficult to decipher what "really happened."

And that takes us to the issue that the book seems to be working on, how much really happens, and how much does language play a part in shaping our perceptions of what happened, what we tell ourselves about the world around us, and our role in it. How does language shape our reality? She writes, "I have also tried to ignore the nightly messages. One cannot pursue a hopeless infatuation. ... It is a world of words that creates a world of things. Pah!" (p. 134). (The italicized phrase represents what Magda thinks the people on the planes are saying to her.)

One single entry from this part of the novel reads simply, "How can I be deluded when I think so clearly?" (p. 126). I imagine any of us could ask ourselves that. Coetzee's linkage of linguistics, colonialism, literary devices and representation is a powerful, sometimes overwhelming and frustrating reading experience, but I recommend it. I certainly would love to know what others think of this odd, somewhat unsatisfying, but deeply provocative book!

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".

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!