SOURCE: Lenta, Margaret. “An Analysis of In the Heart of the Country, by J. M. Coetzee.” In Contemporary Literary Criticism, vol. 162, edited by Tom Burns and Jeffrey W. Hunter. Farmington Hills, Mich.: The Gale Group, 2002.

In the following essay, Lenta examines In the Heart of the Country on a number of levels, assessing the plot, characters, evolution of the work, the novel's historical significance, and how the work has been studied since its publication

About in the Heart of the Country

The English edition of In the Heart of the Country of 1977 and subsequent Penguin editions differ from that which appeared in South Africa in 1978 in that all the editions published outside South Africa are written entirely in English, whereas the South African version contains a considerable amount of dialogue in Afrikaans. Afrikaans is the language of the Cape Dutch (nowadays known as Afrikaners) and of the “colored...