In the Heart of the Country

Rating:
Summary: second in a row
Review: After completing 'Dusklands', Coetzee's first (and worst) novel, I stunbled upon this narrative. Considering that only few years has passed between these books, I expected nothing, only disappointment. Well, I must confess, I was utterly wrong.
Narrative is set 'in the heart of the country' - in the middle of the Africe, showing us a father and daughter on a small, outback farm... nothing special so far... One day, father gets himself a new lover and that causes breakdown in a daughter who yearned for his love and couldn't stand some other woman to take her place... Nothing special so far either.
What makes it so special. When one reads Magda's thoughts one can not but think of all the lonely people out there, madneses that roam the wilderness, hidden and forbidden, dangerous... Presenting the portrait of every madman out there, mixing the reality and imagination, bloody and violent worlds that intermix each other... Coetzee finds his words exactly as they should be, there is no overwrighting, there is no endless narrative, only concise thoughts of not so concise mind. Brilliant book...!!

Rating:
Summary: An interesting look at craziness and colonialism
Review: 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!


Rating:
Summary: Disagree
Review: I wholeheartedly disagree with the reviews I have read of this book. I felt that it was an interesting character study and almost frightening at times in the madness and passion exhibited by the main character. While the book itself was thin on plot the details of the characters are fascinating.

Rating:
Summary: The Writing of her Dis-aster
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: The Writing of her Dis-aster
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: The first novel, the most ferocious pain...
Review: 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!

Rating:
Summary: Excellent.
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: The first novel, the most ferocious pain...
Review: 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.