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In the Heart of the Country: A Novel (Paperback)

by J. M. Coetzee (Author) "1. Today my father brought home his new bride..." (more)
Key Phrases: stone desert, Miss Magda

4.2 out of 5 stars See all reviews (9 customer reviews)

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Waiting for the Barbarians (Penguin Great Books of the 20th Century) by J. M. Coetzee
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Editorial Reviews

Product Description
A novel set in colonial South Africa, where a lonely sheepfarmer makes a bid for private salvation in the arms of a black concubine, while his daughter dreams of and executes a bloody revenge. From the author of DUSKLANDS and WAITING FOR THE BARBARIANS. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

Paperback: 144 pages
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics) (October 28, 1982)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0140062289
ISBN-13: 978-0140062281
Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 5.1 x 0.5 inches
Shipping Weight: 4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)

Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars See all reviews (9 customer reviews)

Amazon.com Sales Rank: #204,073 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)
Popular in these categories: (What's this?)
#16 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Authors, A-Z > ( C ) > Coetzee, J.M.
#36 in Books > Literature & Fiction > World Literature > African > Central & South African

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Front Cover | First Pages | Back Cover | Surprise Me!

Inside This Book (learn more)

First Sentence:
1. Today my father brought home his new bride. Read the first page

Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
stone desert

Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Miss Magda

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Citations (learn more)

This book cites 3 books:

Waiting for the Barbarians (Penguin Great Books of the 20th Century) by J. M. Coetzee in Front Matter
The Master of Petersburg: A Novel by J. M. Coetzee in Front Matter
Age of Iron by J. M. Coetzee in Front Matter

46 books cite this book:

The Writings of J.M. Coetzee (The South Atlantic Quarterly, Winter 1994, Vol 93, No 1) by Michael Valdez Moses on 37 pages
Writing 'Out of All the Camps': J.M. Coetzee's Narratives of Displacement (Studies in Major Literary Authors) by Laura Wright on 18 pages
J. M. Coetzee (Cambridge Studies in African and Caribbean Literature) by Dominic Head on 17 pages
J.M. Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing (Perspectives on Southern Africa, Vol 48) by David Attwell on 6 pages
DECOLONIZING TRADITION: New Views of Twentieth-Century "British" Literary Canons by Karen R. Lawrence on 5 pages

See all 46 books citing this book

What Do Customers Ultimately Buy After Viewing This Item?

	63% buy the item featured on this page: In the Heart of the Country: A Novel 4.2 out of 5 stars (9) $10.40
	12% buy Waiting for the Barbarians (Penguin Great Books of the 20th Century) 4.1 out of 5 stars (79) $10.20
	11% buy Disgrace: A Novel 4.0 out of 5 stars (346) $9.75
	8% buy Life and Times of Michael K: A Novel 3.9 out of 5 stars (47) $9.89

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Customer Reviews

9 Reviews

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
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4.2 out of 5 stars (9 customer reviews)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An interesting look at craziness and colonialism, January 3, 2005

By	Stacey M Jones (Conway, Ark.) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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!

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9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars 5 stars are not enough, October 19, 2001

By	"ettore22" - See all my reviews

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!

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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The stifling torpor of colonial South Africa, February 9, 2006

By	Philippe Horak (Zug, Switzerland) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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 Andr� 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".

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Most Recent Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent.
This book is dark, fierce, unpredictable, dream-like, and intelligent. Very symbolic and brings up many issues concerning whites in south africa. Read more

Published on October 19, 2004 by Rosie

5.0 out of 5 stars second in a row
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... Read more

Published on July 8, 2004 by M. Vladanovi�

5.0 out of 5 stars The Writing of her Dis-aster
In the Heart of the Country tells the story of Magda, an old spinster who lives � huis clos with her father, her step-mother and the servants Henrik and Klein Anna, on a far-flung... Read more

Published on September 13, 2002 by Hicham Adiouani

5.0 out of 5 stars The first novel, the most ferocious pain...
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. Read more

Published on April 9, 2002

3.0 out of 5 stars Disagree
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... Read more

Published on January 25, 2001 by EriKa

1.0 out of 5 stars Contrived and Melodramatic.
Coetzee is without a doubt a good writer and he has written many fine novels, unfortunatly In the Heart of the Country is not one of them. Read more

Published on June 8, 2000

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