[One] cannot help admiring the technical artistry of J. M. Coetzee's lyrical puzzle, In the Heart of the Country…. Patricide, rape, incest and miscegenation are not exactly unexplored themes in South African writing, though rarely have they been treated as hauntingly as in Coetzee's novel. The unnamed heroine's "monologue of the self" (as she refers to her tale) recapitulates her violent murder of her white father out of jealousy for his affair with his African workman's wife. Then after the burial of her father, the daughter begins an affair with the husband of her father's African mistress—thus duplicating the relationship she had previously abhorred. When the African couple begin to fear that they will be held responsible for their white employer's death, they run away, and the daughter is left alone on her decaying and isolated farm on the veld. At the end of the narrative the...