In the Heart of the Country

In the Heart of the Country (1977) by J.M. Coetzee is a first-person narrative broken into 226 numbered journal entries. Magda, a white spinster cloistered on her father's South African farm, tells tales of patricide, her uncaring father and the presumed balance of power. It won the Central News Agency Literary Award in 1977.

Magda writes that her father has taken a bride. She says that her mother was a victim of her father's sexual appetite, having died in childbirth. However, Magda, a fully-grown woman, has never had a sexual experience. She socializes with no one as her father ignores her and she can't seem to connect with the servants.

Magda describes life on the farm with her father as dull and flat; the monotony is clearly taking a toll on her psychologically. The new wife approaches Magda, telling her she understands why Magda is upset, but she tries to become her friend anyway. Magda does not reply. Soon after this encounter, Magda murders her father with an ax while he and his new wife are in bed together.



In entry 36, the narrative begins again. Magda's father is alive; he hasn't actually taken a bride. Instead, Hendrik, the farm's black servant, has returned with a young bride. Magda's father, having no companion other than his sullen daughter out in the middle of the desert, uses his position of power over Hendrik's wife, Klein-Anna, and the two begin an affair.

Magda is disgusted by her father's affair. When she hears the two in bed together, she takes her father's shotgun and shoots blindly into the room. Her father is badly injured. Magda describes a hole that she could fit a thumb into in her father's back. When he dies of his injuries, Magda and Hendrik bury her father in a makeshift tomb.

Without Magda's father, the farm becomes overrun, and food begins to run out. Hendrik demands the payment he is owed, and Magda gives him some of her father's things and whatever food she has left to pacify him.



Hendrik and Klein-Anna eventually move into the farmhouse and take over the farm. Hendrik and Magda have several altercations, one of which ends with Hendrik raping her. This recurs nightly. Eventually, white farmers from the area show up looking for Magda's father. Fearing they will be blamed for his murder, Hendrik and Klein-Anna abandon Magda on the farm.

Again, in another entry, Magda's father is alive. She cares for her father in his old age instead of killing him again. She begins to communicate with the planes that fly over the desert, claiming she hears Spanish voices emanating from them. The sounds are actually pieces from different literary works in multiple languages.

Magda is an unreliable narrator; her telling of events cannot be relied upon as fact. Whether this is because she has slowly gone insane in the desert and is hallucinating the happenings around her or if she is merely relating a fantasy world of her own making, the reader is never informed.



One theme critics often associate with the text is colonization. Magda symbolizes both the oppressed and the oppressor at different points of the novel. Her uncaring father oppresses her and she chooses to treat the only other woman in her life, Klein-Anna, poorly. She kills her father (real or imagined) multiple times, asserting dominion over the household, only to lose her power when Hendrik takes control of the farm and Magda's physical self. Telling Hendrik that she is not "simply one of the whites," Magda asks why she has to pay for other people's sins, implying that he is taking out his hatred of the colonizer on her. At the same time, this imbalance of power infuriates Magda, and she asks Hendrik how he can treat a white woman the way he does, positioning herself as both the victim and the master.

Coetzee also plays with themes of sexual repression. Magda refers to herself multiple times as the "virginal spinster," describing in great detail the sounds of her father copulating with his mistress. Magda also describes her father's privates in a curious, almost child-like way, as she and Hendrik move his dead body. The implication is that Magda, having never had any kind of romantic interaction of her own, is jealous of her father, and this is the reason she ultimately decides to kill him.

Coetzee's unique method of narration, inspired by films and photographs, gives the text a scenic quality. He says that the numbering of the paragraphs is more indicative of "what is not there between them.” Some critics have suggested that the numbers are part of Magda's attempt to bring order to her increasingly chaotic thoughts.