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Waiting for the Barbarians: A Novel, by J. M. Coetzee
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Review
"A real literary event" —Irving Howe, The New York Times Book Review (front-page review)"I have known few authors who can evoke such a wilderness in the heart of a man.... Mr. Coetzee knows the elusive terror of Kafka." —Bernard Levin, The Sunday Times (London)
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About the Author
Born in Cape Town, South Africa, on February 9, 1940, John Michael Coetzee studied first at Cape Town and later at the University of Texas at Austin, where he earned a Ph.D. degree in literature. In 1972 he returned to South Africa and joined the faculty of the University of Cape Town. His works of fiction include Dusklands, Waiting for the Barbarians, which won South Africa’s highest literary honor, the Central News Agency Literary Award, and the Life and Times of Michael K., for which Coetzee was awarded his first Booker Prize in 1983. He has also published a memoir, Boyhood: Scenes From a Provincial Life, and several essays collections. He has won many other literary prizes including the Lannan Award for Fiction, the Jerusalem Prize and The Irish Times International Fiction Prize. In 1999 he again won Britain’s prestigious Booker Prize for Disgrace, becoming the first author to win the award twice in its 31-year history. In 2003, Coetzee was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
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Product details
Paperback: 156 pages
Publisher: Penguin Books; Revised ed. edition (April 29, 1982)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 014006110X
ISBN-13: 978-0140061109
Product Dimensions:
5.1 x 0.5 x 7.7 inches
Shipping Weight: 4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review:
4.3 out of 5 stars
172 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#244,869 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Waiting for the Barbarians is not simply an indictment of imperialism, and it’s not a political book. It’s time and setting are indeterminate and the major characters are not named. In this generic setting we are given character studies, or even a morality play. The author, J. M. Coetzee, shows us how people, not unlike ourselves, cope with the good, boring, bad, and evil in an imperial outpost. And in his showing us the lives and problems of his characters in this harsh place, he avers what is delusional, what is real, and what is just unknown.The story is told by the aging civil magistrate of an unnamed imperial outpost of an unnamed empire. The magistrate copes with life by following distractions of womanizing, excavating the nearby ruins, and by deciphering the writings he finds in those ruins. When a detachment of the imperial army brings barbarian prisoners into town, the magistrate is attracted to a young woman among the captives. She is near-blind and crippled from the tortures she has suffered at the hands of an army officer, Colonel Joll.The magistrate’s obsession with the woman echoes his obsession with understanding the barbarians, the empire, his own desires, why people behave as they do, and basically everything. As he works out his relationship with the woman, it is easy to identify with his introspection and boundless curiosity. His inquisitiveness wins out even over attentiveness to his job, and he comes to pay a stiff price for it.There’s a picture here that resonates. Empires demand total allegiance and are harsh with those that give less. The magistrate lapses in his duties like many of us lapse on our jobs. Our cost is economic hardship—the threat of starvation, actually—only a degree or two away from the magistrate’s punishment.Metaphors like that make this a quote-worthy book. There’s also the magistrate’s introspections. The story is told completely from his viewpoint and we get his observations almost as if he were journaling. It’s well-done, however, and does not intefere with following the story. His insights often arise from emotional reactions to what he’s relating, such as when he feels some regret for not “lightening up†when he observes some playful good humor among his soldiers:"Truly, the world ought to belong to the singers and dancers! Futile bitterness, idle melancholy, empty regrets!"Or when he realizes he is not immune from the empire’s evil:"Why should it be inconceivable that the behemoth that trampled them will trample me too? I truly believe I am not afraid of death. What I shrink from, I believe, is the shame of dying as stupid and befuddled as I am."We see his fear of ignorance here, though it’s more often expressed as his burning desire to understand everything.Another big theme is the ever-present possibility for a person’s status to change, usually for the worse. It happens to several characters and we observe how they cope. It speaks to how we deny the possibility for calamity:"No one truly believes, despite the hysteria in the streets, that the world of tranquil certainties we were born into is about to be extinguished."Their fear of a coming attack by the “barbarians†motivates most conversations among the outpost’s population. It becomes the baseline of their existence. Even so, they go about their lives as before, though with their numbers reduced by desertion.Waiting for the Barbarians is not an action story, though it does involve soldiers in a fort, antagonisms, and struggles. Most of the story movement is character driven but it held my interest. The characters were interesting and identifiable. The themes were universal and accessible, leaving a haunting finish.The book was first published in 1980. Threads in it, however, strike me as being very relevant to this present time, especially in the US where the machinations of empire have become prominent. There is an anticipation of disaster in the air that mirrors waiting for barbarians (indeed, we are bombarded with “news†and commentary about the barbarian horde said to be murderously envious of our “freedomsâ€). The magistrate’s warning about the fragility of our tranquil certainties rings true, and the sound is a funeral bell’s hollow peal.
Took me a while to work my way through, but overall a very interesting account of a year in the life of a magistrate posted at the frontier of the Empire. He narrates the whole book, so not much dialogue (which is the reason it took me quite a while to finish this), but what dialogue there is is significant and telling of the characters you encounter through this man's eyes. Definitely not the style of writing I enjoy (as this was read for class), but a good book in its own right. The story still manages to feel like it does move, with vivid details weaved throughout, making you feel more a part of the setting, but it's a very passive voice throughout and not much excitement takes place. Again, I come back to this same word to describe this book: interesting.
The first person narrator is an old magistrate of a colony whose life changes after picking up a lantern one day to see what was going on and through subsequent incidents and circumstances, he becomes the examining/questioning voice over the human depravity as well as self examination. "But as for me, sustained by the toil of others, lacking civilized vices with which to fill my leisure, I pamper my melancholy and try to find in the vacuousness of the desert a special historical poignancy." to "..there was no way, once I had picked up the lantern, for me to put it down again. the knot loops in upon itself; I cannot find the end." Through motifs of lantern, sun glasses and blindness, and the dream sequences, the author wakes up the awareness of human conscience, depravity, frailties, hypocrisies, and the horror of pointless and inconsequential pursuit, "the image of a face masked by two black glassy insect eyes from which there comes no reciprocal gaze but only my doubled image cast back at me" The protagonist is a rather antihero type, a real human, complex and ambivalent with conscience, lust, fear and doubts, often faltering and needy, but genuinely interested in knowledge and his mind and his (sub)consciousness active all the time. He is transformed beyond his "great indifference to annihilation"
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