marți, 22 iunie 2010

In the Heart of the Country

J. M. Coetzee's novel is a captivating description of desolation, of dreams which belong to a maiden wanting only love an acceptance, but which can never be fulfilled.

The way in which sane thoughts are mixed with delusion made a strong impression for me. The mixed feelings about the world in which the main character lives(Magda) are only resolved in the end, when we see clearly that she loved the way in which day pass languorously on the farm, and not much seems to happen.

Only by creating a chaos, an event to change her life does she fully acknowledge the fact that she loved her ways of life because they were the only ones known to her. The idea of patricide appears in the book in the form of a delirium, but after her father, the master of a farm, in the middle of a vast territory barely populated, commits adultery with the wife(Anna) of his worker( Hendrik- they are both brown) the idea takes form. In a gesture of protest to what was happening around her she takes the riffle and without aiming she fires in the house and she badly injures him.
Afterwards the chaos begins.

In a few days her father dies, she must bury him, and Anna and Hendrik, their only remained workers take control aver the house, Magda living in humiliations of all sorts. When the neighbors get alarmed that the master of the farm does not appear the two workers flee and Magda remains by herself, losing the grip of reality and entering a world of delirium and short moments of clarity.

A book which has a hard subject, making one think that it is better to have people around,if only to maintain a grip on reality, than to remain lonely and captive of your desires of love and being understood.