Waiting for the Barbarians: A Novel (Paperback)

by J.M. Coetzee (Author) "I have never seen anything like it: two little discs of glass suspended in front of his eyes in loops of wire..." (more)
Key Phrases: barracks gate, barracks yard, Colonel Joll, Third Bureau

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
These deluxe editions are packaged with French flaps, acid-free paper, and rough front.

"A real literary event."--The New York Times Book Review

"A story of profound beauty, clarity and eloquence, which even at its most melodramatic holds to a biblical nobility."--Chicago Tribune Book World

Other Penguin Great Books of the 20th Century:

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
Swann's Way by Marcel Proust
My Antonia by Willa Cather
On the Road by Jack Kerouac
White Noise by Don DeLillo --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

About the Author
J. M. Coetzee was born in Cape Town, South Africa, in 1940. His many literary prizes include the Lannan Award for Fiction, the CNA Prize, the Booker Prize, the Jerusalem Prize, and The Irish Times International Fiction Prize. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 160 pages
• Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics) (April 29, 1982)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 014006110X
• ISBN-13: 978-0140061109
• Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 5 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars See all reviews (79 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #79,219 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

30 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Masterpiece, November 16, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Waiting for the Barbarians (Hardcover)

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.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Coetzee's themes well represented, July 30, 2005

By	Stacey M Jones (Conway, Ark.) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Waiting for the Barbarians (Penguin Great Books of the 20th Century) (Paperback)

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.

24 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars AN EMPIRE'S OUTPOST LIVING, March 30, 2006

By	Denis Benchimol Minev "Amazonia" (Manaus, Amazonas, Brazil) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Waiting for the Barbarians (Penguin Great Books of the 20th Century) (Paperback)

Coetzee is a master of putting very complex stories into simple packagings. This book is very deep, yet the story is simple: a magistrate of a wild outpost of an empire leads an easy life in peace until a colonel in the army comes by, which set off a number of events that ultimately put the magistrate against the empire.

Coetzee writes in a very unique manner. Aside from the colonel (Joll), no one has a name in the book, he just refers to everyone as "the girl" or "the magistrate". As soon as the colonel visits the city with an obsession about an impending barbarian invasion, the entire town becomes paranoid with these barbarians. The barbarians in fact are just simple nomads that live in the adjacent mountains, but the obsession grows so quickly that the magistrate, when he tries to reach out to barbarians and understand who they are, he gets misunderstood as a barbarian helper and so is put in jail.

Some of the best writing is the description of his time in prison and the abuse he underwent. Coetzee plays with metaphors relating to the body and its conditions in ways that leaving interesting impressions and provokes much thought. I am still grappling to get the right message out of the book, but conclude that there are many.

Overall, this is an enjoyable and very short book. It is true literature, so not a very light reading if you are looking for a passtime. I needed to stop a couple of times to reflect on it, and was highly impressed by Coetzee. He definitely deserved the Nobel Prize.