2.5 Stars. A dark, brutal story about the daughter of a South African farmer during colonial times. Magda, a spinster, has only ever had contact with her cruel Father and the African workers on their farm. Over time she being to lose her mind. I found it hard to distinguish between reality and fantasy in this story and found it really depressing. Thanks to Text Publishing for my paperback copy.

Books like this make me realize that I'm far too trusting of unreliable narrators. Why did I believe what she was saying?

A great book; hidden in the interpersonal relationships in this small country farm, are revealed the gender and racial dynamics of South African life.

I have read some crazy books in my lifetime, and this will easily fall in the top five list.

The book follows our female protagonist in rural South Africa who is lonely and craves for attention. However, it's her father who takes a black mistress causing her to go into a jealous frenzy.

The lines of reality and imagination are blurred in the narration and it's a classic case of an unreliable, diabolical narrator.

If you like crazy books, especially the old Booker type, this one is for you.

3.5/5*

J. M. Coetzee burst onto the literary scene in 1974, with his novella Dusklands. That work, which told two unconnected stories: the first was about a US government agency worker, Eugene Dawn, losing grip on reality due to the psychological toll of his work – he has been responsible for deaths in the Vietnam War – and stabbing his son. The second, and to me more interesting one, told the narrative of Jacobus Coetzee, and his interactions and conflicts with Namaqua tribe in eighteenth century South Africa. Both pieces, however, revealed a preoccupation with lives lived on the periphery, where psychological instability becomes a norm.

Coetzee’s second novel, In the Heart of the Country, published in 1976, continues this preoccupation. Magda is a young white woman who lives on an isolated farmstead with her father, and their two servants, Hendrik and Anna. The novel, a solipsistic narrative, probes the depths of Magda’s unravelling psychology with insight, depth, and a language of rich poetry. Despite it’s brevity, the Vintage edition I read clocked in at just 151 pages, In the Heart of the Country contains so much it feels a novel twice its length.

It is a difficult novel to discuss without spoiling much of what makes it so powerful – so let us just say that there is a tragedy and that the consequences of it causes the three remaining lives to free-fall. The relationship between master and slave is tested, and ultimately broken, as personal, physical and sexual boundaries are crossed, or shattered in with brutal force. The natural world, which has impinged upon the sanctuary, consumes them all, and Magda is left howling at the desert wind, lost and alone.

This is a novel in which every word seems carefully considered and placed. There is not a wasted word. It is precise, razor sharp in its execution. Its heady atmosphere completely overwhelms you; it is a novel that threatens to destroy you. For a second novel this is very good indeed, and further proof, is it were needed, that J.M. Coetzee was one of the most interesting novelist in the western world. He still is.

Romance, narrado em pequenos textos, numerados de 1 a 266, por uma mulher infeliz e solitária. Vive numa fazenda, na África do Sul, com o pai e nas suas loucas fantasias imagina assassiná-lo.
Não gostei. Achei maçudo e confuso.


_____________
Prémio Nobel da Literatura 2003
John Maxwell Coetzee nasceu na África do Sul em 9 de julho de 1940.

Violence and revenge--real or imagined--on an isolated South African farm. One of those books narrated by a character so disturbed that you don't know what's real and what's fantasy.

This book was a weird toss-up between a 4 and a 5 star read. The writing itself warranted a 5 star. This was my first Coetzee book and his talent cannot be denied. Each sentence was so intricate and full of euphemisms. I think I may just be a sucker for that kind of beautiful language but it really blew me away. However, the reading of the book was not actually enjoyable so I bumped it down to 4 stars. People who read these reviews to get a sense of the book they are about to read should know that this is a dark, depressing story that has no happy ending. Also it is not an easy read either. Some of the scenes are graphic, but it is the actual style of the story that makes it seem really long and dragged out. There were several times that I was reading and thought, "Wow, I've only read 4 pages? So much has happened."

A lot of these reviews say that Magda is unlikeable and unsympathetic. I do not know how that is possible to conclude. If anything, the sorrow I felt for her situation was unbearable. Her mental state is a direct result of her loneliness. A lot of her narrative and stream of consciousness states "I am I." as she ponders her existence. But I really question whether she would be "her" if her father showed her the love that she so desperately wanted. What Coetzee did with his characters was brilliant. The master/slave dichotomy in South Africa was portrayed so vividly, but then he broke down that dichotomy so that Magda felt like a prisoner in her own house. There are so many aspects of colonialism that are at work here and I'm sure any English major would have a field day with this book.

Also another point that I want to comment on: the status of women in the story is appalling. I'm not what you would call a huge new wave feminist. But the horrible treatment of women that was described here really made me flinch. Is it really like that in places outside the United States? I feel lucky being given the opportunities that I have.

I read somewhere that this is not a book to read for fun, but that is what I did. I'm glad I picked it up because it's rare to find such an accurate portrayal of sorrow in literature (not that I'm really looking for it... definitely need a happy read after this one). I'm very much looking forward to reading Coetzee's other works.

A short but powerful book. It is narrated by the grown daughter of a farmer living in the isolated outback of South Africa. Her mother died when the daughter was still a baby and her father, who never wanted a daughter, ignored her. The only time he acknowledged her was to have simple chores done for him like pulling off his boots. Her complete isolation led to mental instability and much of her life was spent in fantasizing which led to some extremely disturbing results. Coetzee's brilliant writing completely captured her mental state. An excellent read.

Las novelas de Coetzee no son pan comido. Es bastante común que en ellas, en un momento dado, se exija del lector un gran esfuerzo: que recorra un trecho particularmente árido dónde la acción queda inhibida dentro un ambiente introvertido y decadente. La declinación final de Elizabeth Costello. Michael K sólo y perdido en medio de Ciudad del Cabo. Este esfuerzo se asume confiando que Coetzee sabe como lograr que al cerrar el libro el lector experimente algo fuera de lo convencional. Alguna idea. Alguna escena. Alguna imagen. En esta ocasión el esfuerzo exigido resulta excesivo porque no creo que exista tal compensación. Después de finalizar con la última línea en ningún momento he encontrado nada que valga la pena recordar o que me haya sorprendido.

Y es que en buena parte del texto, Coetzee renuncia a la acción, a construir una trama y a los diálogos. Lo único que ofrece es recorrer el torbellino mental de la protagonista, una mujer que sufre algún tipo de trastorno mental. Todo muy Beckettiano y Kafkiano. Pero se trata de una enajenación muy particular, dado que se expresa mediante simbolismos y figuras poéticas, cosa que, ya de entrada, me suena a prosaico. No percibí el estar inmerso en los fondos de la locura, pues ningún momento suena verosímil, tan sólo el estar presenciando los esfuerzos de un escritor por resultar muy literario. Por más páginas que aguardes, lo máximo que encuentras son decenas y más decenas de metáforas acerca de complejos físicos y obsesiones varias. No pongo en duda que estudiado en una aula universitaria el texto tendrá su interés, pero no es lo que yo busco en un libro. Y, de cualquier forma, en resumidas cuentas, su abstrusa construcción, su desarrollo monótono y su tono depresivo me han provocado un hastío considerable. Y ya estoy demasiado viejo y cascarrabias como para aguantar.

Siendo lector asiduo de Coetzee, sé que es capaz de crear textos complejos (moral e intelectualmente) sin caer en ese tipo de jugadas, que me parecen más propias de poetas pedantes. Sólo le recomendaría esta lectura a quien guste de Rimbaud o Verlaine, quien en cambio desee probar con un Coetzee más accesible, le recomiendo cualquier otro libro, incluso los que todavía no he leído. Por mi parte, no sé, supongo que ahora podría continuar con "Diario de un mal año" que a juzgar por el título tiene pinta de ser también muy alegre.

In the Heart of the Country is a staggeringly goddamn powerful novel. An espresso: short and dark and intense. And it'll keep you awake once you've finished it.

I can't fault the quality of the writing. (Of course I can't: Coetzee is a brilliant writer.) But I would say: this is not his most ambitious novel. Why? Because it's all couched in the first person — in the (extreme, vibrant, crackling) voice of a character who is deeply troubled, mentally unstable. This has been done before (albeit not in this context, imbued with the racial tensions of colonial South Africa). And, as voices go, it is perhaps *slightly* easy. Because it is so extreme.

Subtlety is harder. Normality — mundane, humdrum normality — is harder. And what I *really* admire (and what Coetzee gives us, incidentally, in a novel like Disgrace) is literature that illuminates — and I really mean *illuminates*: literature that sets a halo around the stuff of everyday humanity. Without ever having to resort to extreme subject matter.

Because a great artist can make beauty and drama out of the most humble constituent parts.

That said, Coetzee inhabits his narrator's hysterical voice with outstanding skill. He is very convincing indeed.

Which means that this is an horrific novel — in its bleakness, its darkness. Sad, harrowing, terrifying.

4.5

Really exceptional. Language that feels bereft of time. It is as if the nineteenth century stylist merged with the modernist technician and birthed a gory but very much alive insane baby. Coetzee luxuriates in the mind of a colonial woman on the brink of madness. Magda is on the verge of a nervous breakdown but, unlike the Almodovar film, in a deeply uncomfortable and noncomic fashion. She imagines murder, imagines the barren landscape of the South African countryside as a hellish space of epiphanies and pillagings, truths and deceptions, to the point that she becomes the voice of the endlessly unstable reality of white South Africa in the 70s. How does a group respond its forefathers' frightening dominations? Murder them? Imagine them dead? Take care of them to their dying day? How do people growing up in the colonizer's homestead relate to black South Africans? Bring in some psychosexual dynamics, and the book attempts to complexify it all. Thrilling, intense stuff.

My only qualm is that there is a section during which Magda hears voices, and what they say to her are quotes from Robespierre, Simone Weil, Hegel, and Rousseau, but I really do not understand the necessity of such a section. It made Coetzee's pitch-perfect balance of abstract and concrete description tip more to the former side to a degree of opaqueness I could not begin to ascertain. I could understand the quotes, whether I had come across them before or not, but the meaning remains elusive.