The First Thing The Reader Of In the Heart of the Country notices is that every paragraph is numbered. This simple device announces from the outset that we are not to suspend disbelief as we read, that our encounter with human lives, thoughts, and feelings is to take place against the background of a constant awareness of their mediation by language, generic and other conventions, and artistic decisions. It is testimony to the power of fictional narration that it is not difficult to forget the numbering as we read; after all, the division of virtually all novels into chapters or sections is not something that interferes with the illusion of immediacy, and in every one of his novels Coetzee’s intense prose can produce a readerly involvement that overrides all markers of fictionality. It is, however, always possible to shift our attention to the numbering and to its antirealist implications. The device also encourages the reader to treat each paragraph as having more self-sufficiency than is usually the case with fictional prose: each one a little mininarrative or speculation or diary entry, something like the stanzas of a long poem.

The novel exists in two forms, the 1977 British and American version (differing only in the title — the American publisher preferred From the Heart of the Country) and the 1978 South African version. The latter presents the reader with another defamiliarizing surprise: the dialogue is in Afrikaans. For most South African readers, the shift into Afrikaans would not hinder comprehension — there is nothing very complex in the utterances — but to encounter the juxtaposition between the two languages is to be made aware of the main narrative’s mediation via English, and via the European fictional tradition. This mediation becomes particularly evident when Magda on two occasions (paras. 203 and 226) addresses one of the servants in what are effectively soliloquies, and provides both English and Afrikaans equivalents for many of her phrases — usually the English first, as if this were the language that comes naturally to Magda, then the Afrikaans, as if for the benefit of her ostensible addressee. Thus, to give a short example: “But that is not the worst, dit is nie die ergste gewees nie.