No cover

J. M. Coetzee: Waiting for the barbarians (1999, Penguin Books)

152 pages

English language

Published Jan. 8, 1999 by Penguin Books.

View on OpenLibrary

5 stars (2 reviews)

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.

21 editions

A powerful novella

5 stars

Having been so impressed by Disgrace a few weeks ago, I eagerly snapped up a copy of J M Coetzee's Waiting For The Barbarians when I saw it in a Cheam charity shop.

Set in a remote outpost of an unnamed Empire, this powerful novella could be describing events in any Empires throughout hundreds of years of human history or, as I mentioned in yesterday's Gulag 101 review, it could even be an allegorical representation of the whipped up paranoia in Britain right now. The themes of us against them, social exclusion and assumed racial superiority are frighteningly relevant despite Waiting For The Barbarians having been written nearly four decades ago.

Our narrator is the Magistrate, an anonymous older man who has spent his life on his Empire's fringes maintaining and administering the official idea of order, but mostly without infringing too deeply on the lives of the indigenous peoples, …

avatar for maryaed

rated it

5 stars

Subjects

  • Colonial administrators -- Fiction.
  • Africa -- Fiction.