In The Heart of the Country by J.M. Coetzee (1977) 139 p.
For a 139-page novella this was a hell of a slog. I’ve always found Coetzee, for a Nobel Prize winner and a man very clearly smarter than the rest of us, to be a surprisingly accessible writer: his prose is crisp, clear and concise. In The Heart of the Country, his second novel, this is unfortunately not so. It tales place on an isolated farmstead on the South African veldt, the narrator a young woman whose father is having an affair with the wife of his black farmhand. The novel’s style has a dreamy, unreal aspect to it, often bordering on stream of consciousness, and it can be difficult to tell what’s real and what’s a daydream or a fantasy. I hugely admire Coetzee as a writer, but as I said, this one was a slog.
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March 8, 2016 at 5:51 am
sunrise089
Not sure if there’s any way to check, but this may be the shortest standard Grub Street review.
“The novel’s style has a dreamy, unreal aspect to it, often bordering on stream of consciousness” – Ugh. Check out the dust jacket blurb too. Though admittedly 50 Shades of Grey could probably use the same blurb, and it sold like 10M copies :)
March 8, 2016 at 10:51 am
Mitch
It probably is. Not easy to review a book I don’t have much to say about, but I have this weird compulsive thing where I have to review every book I’ve read.