Harper and Row, 1977, 139 pages
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.
A story told in prose as feverishly rich as William Faulkner's, In the Heart of the Country is a work of irresistible power. With vast assurance and an unerring eye, J. M. Coetzee has turned the family romance into a mirror of the colonial experience.
"To my father I have been an absence all my life."
Verdict: For those who like prosey prose prosed to prolixity, this is the book for you, because it's also pretty short. Or maybe you like immersing yourself in words that suck you under like a layer of bubble bath covering a tub of shit. In the Heart of the Country is deliberately ugly because it's telling an ugly story that would probably be talked to death in a colonial literature or women's studies course, and I won't say there aren't people who might enjoy it, but reading the 5 star reviews of this book, the ones who loved it mostly seem fascinated in the way that I was baffled and repelled by its abstruseness and perversity and by its fascinating, unhinged, unreliable narrator. Does it deserve to be on the list of 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die? Well, I don't know if this is Coetzee's best work, but yeah, it's skillful and deep enough that it probably deserves its place, but I am unconvinced that Coetzee deserves ten slots on the list, implying that you need to read ten Coetzee novels before you die. Like some of the other Important Literary Dudes I've read, one was enough.
This was my tenth assignment for the
books1001 challenge.