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Waiting for the Barbarians: A Novel, by J.M. Coetzee
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For decades the Magistrate has been a loyal servant of the Empire, running the affairs of a tiny frontier settlement and ignoring the impending war with the barbarians. When interrogation experts arrive, however, he witnesses the Empire's cruel and unjust treatment of prisoners of war. Jolted into sympathy for their victims, he commits a quixotic act of rebellion that brands him an enemy of the state.
J. M. Coetzee's prize-winning novel is a startling allegory of the war between opressor and opressed. The Magistrate is not simply a man living through a crisis of conscience in an obscure place in remote times; his situation is that of all men living in unbearable complicity with regimes that ignore justice and decency.
- Sales Rank: #154605 in Books
- Published on: 1982-04-29
- Released on: 1982-04-29
- Ingredients: Example Ingredients
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 7.74" h x .40" w x 5.06" l,
- Binding: Paperback
- 156 pages
Features
- ISBN13: 9780140061109
- Condition: New
- Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!
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)
From the Inside Flap
For decades the Magistrate has run the affairs of a tiny frontier settlement, ignoring the impending war between the barbarians and the Empire, whose servant he is. But when the interrogation experts arrive, he is jolted into sympathy for the victims, and into a quixotic act of rebellion which lands him in prison.
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.
Most helpful customer reviews
105 of 116 people found the following review helpful.
A Masterpiece
By A Customer
From previous reviews on this page I'm convinced many readers did not read the same novel I did. As a South African I might have had priviledged access to a state of mind, but this novel soars above even such limitations. It is a masterpiece. It has haunted me with its power and subtlety for years. I first read it as a student, and have re-visited it twice since. Few books have affected me in quite the same way. Sometimes I open a chapter just to be inspired by the simplicity and elegance of the prose. Not a word wasted. To peel away the layers of meaning - civilization, barbarians, cruelty, love, impotence - seems unnecessary. I've always read it as a poem, thrilling at the powerful undertow of meaning.
35 of 36 people found the following review helpful.
The Barbarians Are Us
By Jon Linden
In his book "Waiting For The Barbarians" Coetzee gives us another timeless window into a soul. Here Coetzee depicts the frivolous and capricious nature of the continuing war machine in the backdrop of 1970's South Africa. The book, in its nature was very reminiscent of George Orwell, in such tales as "Shooting An Elephant" where the life of a civil servant and the attrocities he must perform and witness shape the personality and thought patterns of the man.
Here, Coetzee highlights the true cruelty that humanity can inflict upon other humans in its pursuit of whatever seems to be the right thing as determined by those in power at any particular point in time. It need not make sense, it need not be morally defensible, it only need be possible and performable, and it may be done. In the regime at the time, such was the situation, South Africa, like so many other places has been a war torn place for a very long time.
In making his point, Coetzee puts together one of the finest sentences I have ever seen on paper, when he says this as the protagonist walks away from a senseless torture scene, "Let it at least be said, if it ever comes to be said, if there is ever anyone in some remote future interested to know the way we lived, that in this farthest outpost of the Empire of light there existed one man who in his heart was not a barbarian." The poignancy of that statement is deeply moving especially in these times in America. The ability of Coetzee to capture so distinctively and so personally the despair that is illustrated and experienced, and truly suffered by one in the position that his protaganist is in, is the greatness of Coetzee. To be able to transmit that feeling to his readers, as is his style, is his mastery. All sensitive readers should spend the time to consume this mere 157 page book, which gives at least 600 pages of expressiveness. Another fine piece of literature from a modern day master.
57 of 64 people found the following review helpful.
Coetzee's themes well represented
By Stacey M Jones
WAITING FOR THE BARBARIANS by J.M. Coetzee, the Nobel Prize Winner in Literature, is a novel about a city magistrate in a frontier village of a nameless empire. The narrator, whose name we do not learn, becomes involved with a "barbarian" woman after a visiting soldier captures some tribespeople and brings them back to the camp for "interrogation." The woman is crippled (specifically, she is hobbled as well as blinded), and the magistrate begins a strange relationship with her.
During their brief romance, so to speak, the magistrate doesn't have sex with this object of his affection, but instead, he likes to wash her body, and fall asleep next to her (he does occasionally see a prostitute in the town, though). The woman has a job during the day in the kitchen. There is genuine affection between the magistrate and the barbarian, while in the town the soldiers from the empire are interrogating (torturing) native peoples and building fear in the town against the barbarians. The magistrate, however, believes that the barbarians are no threat to the Empire, that they have their own rhythm and lifestyle on the land. As the fervor from the Capital builds against the Barbarians, the magistrate finds himself questioning and challenging his own society, particularly after a trip he takes to find the barbarians. When he returns from the dangerous journey, he faces consequences that cause the reader to question authority, its right to power and its right to brutality.
This novel was one of my favorite Coetzee's, behind "Disgrace" and "Age of Iron," because it has a more cohesive storyline than, say, "Elizabeth Costello" or "In the Heart of the Country." But it was also, again, quinstessentially Coetzee, dealing with some of his consistent issues, such as linguistics and communication, power structures, colonialism, force and meaning, and the journey as process and perhaps a symbol of growth, insight or acceptance. I think we can see in Coetzee, in this earlier work, that these themes and images of the whole are present and pulsing.
The preoccupation with meaning, communication and language is present here. The magistrate collects little wooden slips that he has found in the ruins of a people long since disappeared from the border areas of the frontier town. The marks on the slips and their opaque meaning to the magistrate and his contemporaries illustrate how ephemeral written language can be.
But he also doesn't speak the language of his own people, in terms of understanding the values of the military types who come to represent the empire. And this is where we start to deal with the theme of power, control, the state and colonialism, and the clash of civilizations over legalisms (boundaries, prisoners, etc). The cultural clash comes to be not only between the Empire and the Barbarians, but between the frontier magistrate who sees the barbarians as people and his own aggressive, colonizing culture.
This clash leads to a changed situation for characters in the book. And the book provokes the reader to start working through the question of what does authority really mean? Is force equal to power, really? How does one square a reality in which one is suddenly at odds with the structure and culture that kept one safe for so long? The magistrate struggles with this, as well. It is as if learning this lessen makes him naive again, and blaming the Empire becomes a panacea for the magistrate, who is, I might add, not a very sympathetic character, but is all we have... We can see the beginning and end on the wooden slips the magistrate collects. The writers of these have gone away, past even memory, the language is meaningless, their words meaningless designs found in the sand.
And as always, with Coetzee, we must consider, what does language even mean? What does it do? Our magistrate loops his thoughts around what words mean, what his self-talk means, what all this has to do with reality and understanding.
This book expertly entwines these themes of colonizers and their language, what it means to them, what they believe, what they tell others, and what they cannot understand through a narrative that is engaging on a plot level as well as a thematic one.
I loved this book. It would, I think, be an effective introduction to the works of Coetzee and also serves as a way to further inform our understanding of his preoccupations, themes and questions.
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