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In the Heart of the Country: A Novel Kindle Edition

by J. M. Coetzee (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
3.8 3.8 out of 5 stars 98 ratings
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A story told in prose as feverishly rich as William Faulkner's, In the Heart of the Country is a work of irresistable power. 

J.M. Coetzee's latest novel, The Schooldays of Jesus, is now available from Viking. Late Essays: 2006-2016 will be available January 2018. 

On a remote farm in South Africa, the protagonist of J. M. Coetzee's fierce and passionate novel watches the life from which she has been excluded. Ignored by her callous father, scorned and feared by his servants, she is a bitterly intelligent woman whose outward meekness disguises a desperate resolve not to become "one of the forgotten ones of history." When her father takes an African mistress, that resolve precipitates an act of vengeance that suggests a chemical reaction between the colonizer and the colonized—and between European yearnings and the vastness and solitude of Africa. With vast assurance and an unerring eye, J. M. Coetzee has turned the family romance into a mirror of the colonial experience.



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  1. Print length
    156 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Sticky notes
    On Kindle Scribe
  4. Publisher
    Penguin Books
  5. Publication date
    May 30, 2017
  6. Reading age
    18 years and up
  7. File size
    2089 KB
  8. Page Flip
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  9. Word Wise
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"A realistic fable, at once stark, exciting, and economical." —The New York Times Book Review

 

From the Inside Flap

Stifled by the torpor of colonial South Africa, and trapped in a web of reciprocal oppression, a lonely sheep farmer seeks comfort in the arms of a black concubine. But when his embittered spinster daughter Magda feels shamed, this lurch across the racial divide marks the end of a tenuous feudal peace. As she dreams madly of bloody revenge, Magda's consciousnes sstarts to drift and the line between fact and the workings of her excited imagination becomes blurred. What follows is the fable of a woman's passionate, obsessed and violent response to an Africa that will not heed her.

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B01M7X4GSD
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Penguin Books; Reprint edition (May 30, 2017)
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ May 30, 2017
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 2089 KB
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 156 pages
  • Customer Reviews:
    3.8 3.8 out of 5 stars 98 ratings

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J. M. Coetzee

J. M. Coetzee

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J.M. Coetzee's work includes Waiting For the Barbarians, Life & Times of Michael K, Boyhood, Youth, Disgrace and Diary of a Bad Year. He was the first author to win the Booker Prize twice and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003.

Customer reviews

3.8 out of 5 stars
3.8 out of 5
98 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Mark Hughes
5.0 out of 5 stars like saving the whales or compelling the world to a ...
Reviewed in the United States on August 23, 2014
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There is a reason Coetzee won the Nobel Prize. His take on post-apartheid South Africa should be required reading for all sanctimonious liberals who feel called to promote politically correct values in a vacuum. Coetzee captures the horror unleashed upon South Africans of all races after the shrill college protesters have gone on to other causes, you know, like saving the whales or compelling the world to a vegan diet. He is no apologist for apartheid, but he does demonstrate that the moral universe of simple polarities that has ;produced the South Africa of today is a deeply defective solipsism.
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Jay Ruud
4.0 out of 5 stars An interesting look at craziness and colonialism
Reviewed in the United States on January 3, 2005
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!
23 people found this helpful
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T. A. Long
3.0 out of 5 stars Strange Landscape
Reviewed in the United States on November 20, 2009
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This was a book club choice and it certainly instigated a rousing discussion among our members. The general concensus was that it was well written but with an obscure thread of purpose. It touches on madness, lonliness, aparteid, domination and subjegation. Personally, I would rather have taken a course in any of these subjects than to have tried to pick out the pieces from this book. One thing of interest (though I can't say I saw the reason for it) is that it is the only book I have ever read where each paragraph is numbered.
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Tom H
5.0 out of 5 stars J. M. Coetzee In The Heart of The Country
Reviewed in the United States on November 4, 2009
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A fantastic book at a great price. The book arrived promptly and in great condition. I would buy from this seller again. It is definatly a used book, with some writing and underlining, but they are relavant
to the story. Overall, I do not regret this purchase.
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Susan Murdock
2.0 out of 5 stars Disappointing
Reviewed in the United States on June 30, 2022
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Guess they can't all be winners😬
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lauren Vogelman
5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant
Reviewed in the United States on April 20, 2016
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A magnificent read . Disturbing and shocking I could not put this book down
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Eric Maroney
4.0 out of 5 stars Coetzee's Titus Andonicus
Reviewed in the United States on August 30, 2011
In the Heart of the Country can be considered Afrikaans Gothic. This is Coetzee's Titus Andonicus, full of blood, fear and violence. Coetzee goes all out to present a grim and mannerist vision of life in the South African heartland. The novel is narrated through the voice of a single unmarried woman, and her interactions with her domineering father, her house servants, all of them colored (i.e. of mixed African and White ancestry). Coetzee does not pull any stops. It is all here: miscegenation, madness, rape, murder, colonial excesses, abuse of corpses, to name but a few.

While not as subtle as Coetzee's later works, In the Heart of the Country is an excellent primer for what he would do later with a lighter but no less effective touch.
2 people found this helpful
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Writer and Editor
3.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful story wonderfully told
Reviewed in the United States on December 10, 2011
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I am in the minority of people who read this and had a hard time getting through it, I know. It was a brutally difficult story for me to work through, but others in my class embraced it and loved the protagonist. I enjoyed the writing, which is suburb and the landscape - both physical and emotional. It is a tour de force.
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Dr.Mithilesh Haldar
5.0 out of 5 stars The Story of A Quirk Insane of Fate of A Woman
Reviewed in India on February 13, 2019
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Reading J.M. Coetzee is not new to me. To my rating, he is the best among all living existentialist writers. This book tells a story of an extremely lonely spinster inside a deserted and desolate farmhouse in South African veld. Her life goes through many gruesome experiences and it becomes very difficult for her to survive. The story abruptly ends. Written in first person narrative makes it more live. If you have a passion for literature, please don't miss.
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Luc REYNAERT
5.0 out of 5 stars A lost life in a lost land
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 5, 2010
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The main character in this naturalistic novel is a young woman, despised by her father, who never forgave his wife for failing to bear him a son: `Wooed when we were little by our masterful fathers, we are bitter vestals, spoiled for life. The childhood rape'.

While her father is a pure example of `the psychology of masters', she symbolizes `the heart of the country', `this bare land where people live naked beneath each other's hawkeyes, but live so under protest. Our resentment of each other, though buried in our breasts, sometimes rises to choke us.'
The hearth of the country is `a forsaken land full of melancholic spinsters lost to history.'
The young woman dreams of redemption by marriage to another lost soul, `though it would not astonish me if I were barren.'

When her father chooses a new black wife, she becomes `a black widow spider and engulfs whoever passes in her venom.' Even the black servants have to leave her, for everybody lives in this part of the world outside the law, therefore live only by the law they recognize in themselves. `This part of the world is naked in every direction to the eye of the hunter; he who cannot burrow is lost.'
But, `why do I not run away from the farm and die in civilization?' Because `I am corrupted to the bone with the beauty of this forsaken world. It takes generations of life to drive that nostalgia for country ways from the heart.'

In this raw picture of `a district outside the law' with its violent outer and inner confrontations between father and daughter, black and white, master and slave, virginity and longing for sexual intercourse, hate and melancholy, city and countryside, lawlessness and civilization, freedom and boredom and ultimately life and death, J.M. Coetzee portrayed a doomed land dominated by people who were obsessed only by the past.

Highly recommended to all lovers of world literature.
2 people found this helpful
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Praween Kumar Gupta
5.0 out of 5 stars Buy it.
Reviewed in India on July 18, 2019
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Perfect
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xinyi ZHENG
4.0 out of 5 stars Achat satisfait
Reviewed in France on January 28, 2013
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Un très bon achat, j'ai remarqué que ce livre faisait partie d'une université de UK, bref,le contenu du livre est assez abstrait par contre,
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Amazon Customer
1.0 out of 5 stars Need a dictionary to read
Reviewed in India on September 29, 2022
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Can’t read without the help of a dictionary
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