Waiting for the Barbarians (Penguin Great Books of the 20th Century)

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.

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.

Although Coetzee is from South Africa and is probably referring to the empire/colonies as European (and although this story was written and published in 1999), much of story resonates with what is happening with the US in Iraq.

It is a testament to Coetzee's writing and narrative style/themes written that we can find allegories and comparisons universal from what had happened in the aparatheid to what is currently happening in Iraq/Middle East. I won't explain the plot in this review because the story of exploring racial and social tensions caused by the colonization of Africa has been done before (see Conrad's Heart of Darkness) and isn't what exactly important in Coetzee's work. What shines I think about Waiting for the Barbarians is the way Coetzee narrates and describes an individual's realization of both of what is going on around him and inside him, when his most basic beliefs are shaken to the core.

The narrator for the story is a rather old magistrate of a colony/fort that has for several decades been living a rather comfortable and unchallenged life. He has spent much of his time keeping things status quo. All of this changes when the empire decides to intervene and wipe out a rebellion. The real story starts from there as the magistrate, tragic hero, has to cope and deal with his conscience and morality of the situation.

Iraq: There was this part in the story that eerily reminded me of everything happening right now in Iraq. When the magistrate asks one of the few remainding soldiers that survives their "offensive attack" on what had happened. The soldier tells him that the barbarians had lured the army into the desert and how slowly, they picked off the horses and soldiers one by one. Their army of many became decimated with time. They found their anticipated quick offense become a quagmire.

Takeway: I really liked Disgrace, Coetzee's more recent novel, because of Coetzee's simple narration and themes and decided to read Waiting for the Barbarians. Disgrace was a quick read but also a deep story that really identifies with what I think he himself and other people in South Africa are currently going thru, post aparatheid. But I digress.

I believe as in Disgrace and in Waiting for the Barbarians, how important Coetzee's work is in context of both past and present. That is why I'm tempted to send a copy of Waiting for the Barbarians to the White House with a little note "Please Read."

JM Coetzee is one of my favorite writers. He has a knack for striking at the human heart. His work is rarely sentimental but stirs great emotion in me.

As far as Waiting for The Barbarians goes, I admire the structure and the intellect displayed in the writing but it didn't strike me the way most of Coetzee's work does.

It is an allegory that could apply to any armed conflict. In a frontier town of "The Empire", a magistrate has lived peacefully arbitrating for many years. He has reached a comfortable point in his life. "The Empire" has decided that some of the nomadic tribes, "The Barbarians" are a threat to them. A group from the capital arrive in the town and proceed to seek out and question ("torture") some of The Barbarians for information on the uprising. The Magistrate knows that these people are persecuting the helpless and that their mission is useless. At first he chooses to say nothing.

Later the Magistrate acts in ways unpleasing to The Empire in fraternizing with The Barbarians. He is stripped of his duties, becomes a pariah and an enemy of The Empire.

In his mind, The Magistrate, would like to stand up and lead the people against injustice but he is largely an ineffectual and ignored presence who's more an annoyance to the oppressors than anything else.

This novel is a good allegory for the stupidity of War and conquering forces. It also outlines the indifference of many to the concepts of justice.

It is frustrating to read at times. It has important and well thought out themes.

I didn't find it to be as striking and emotionally impactful as some of Coetzee's other work.

I'm on the fence about recommending it. It has some very good aspects but I don't feel that it is one of Coetzee's stronger works.

Waiting for the Barbarians is one of Coetzee's early works, bearing the characteristics of his early phases of literary evolution.

The hero is an employee of the Empire, a magistrate running a borderland settlement, fencing it from the natives, the barbarians. In the typical Coetzee style, the Empire symbolizes the colonial government of nineteenth century South Africa. The magistrate's feelings towards the natives take a dramatic turn when he falls for a native girl orphaned by the Empire. At first, his sympathies for the natives are mild but when he sees an interrogation of the natives by the Empire employees, things start to change. At last he turns against the Empire completely in a quixotic revolt against the racist injustice. He is imprisoned and persecuted by the Empire. The title is an irony over the racist situations. After the revolt of the hero, the Empire and its employees are called the barbarians.

The style of Coetzee improves dramatically in this work. We almost see the grace and ease of `Disgrace'. Waiting for the Barbarians is a pleasant though sad read. It flows smoothly. The use of present simple as narration makes it a little dreamlike. Though events and thoughts blend in but the reader can easily differentiate between thoughts and events.

Coetzee is still a fervent socialist and many dialogues in the novel hint at the Cold War situations.
It is a sympathetic narrative which touches one's heart, but it is clearly the imagination of a late-twentieth century white male with liberal commitments. The setting of the novel in early nineteenth century does not seem natural. While the colonialists were definitely cruel and racist, judging them according to the present standards seems a little harsh. As compared to a full-blooded support of the natives by a white man today, even a slight insubordination to the colonial authorities on the part of a nineteenth century colonialist employee was a far greater act of bravery. Nikita Khrushchev may remain a reviled Commie figure in the West, but if he had not given that famous secret speech of 1956, denouncing Stalin, then the path for many who later brought down the Communist regime would not have cleared. We have to see history in this evolutionary light. Waiting for the Barbarians is essentially a twentieth century novel with all the latest liberal inputs and we witness the grafting of a twentieth century intellect over a nineteenth century landscape.

Coetzee is still to disavow himself from the commitment to the political Left. This he would do in Life and Times of Michael K.

Coetzee writes with a clarity that few writers achieve. The only reason why I give this 4 stars instead of 5 is because Disgrace, another of his highly successful works was much better.

The voice of the "magistrate," the narrator of the novel blends the voice of an aging man coming to grips with his own sexuality and the life he has led with a man at a crossroads where cultures clash with one another. As the elder statesman of this bordertown, he has spent years working with those who have migrated to this region and those who have always called the place home. The title lends itself to interpretations of the real Barbarians actually being those soldiers from the Capital who desire to start a war and clear away the Barbarians who no one has ever really see, not even the magistrate, but I think that would do injustice to the complexitites of this novel. The savagery we see and the torture the magistrate endures takes center stage and the idea of cultures coming into contact with one another actually takes a back seat, or at least at the macroscopic level it loses its focus.

What most amazes me about this novel is not its depiction of globalization and the colonized and colonizer coming at odds (If you want to see that, try A Season of Migration to the North), but rather the way an old man who has dedicated his life to the law and to see justice done has to come to grips with whether or not what he has done was worthwhile. It reminds me most of Ishiguro's Remains of the Day and the way with which the narrator in that text must come to grips with his own contributions to a Nazi sympathizer.

Go out and read this book. There's a reason why Coetzee won the Nobel Prize.

The Nobel Prize committee has a history of honoring writers with a strong political or social message. WAITING FOR THE BARBARIANS (1980), Coetzee's short, approachable, but devastating fable about the abuse of power, must have played a major part in their decision to award him the prize in 2003. While all his books deal with moral issues, and many (such as [[ASIN:0143115286 DISGRACE]] of 1999) reflect his experience as a South African growing up in a divided society, this comparatively early book tackles the underlying issues straight on, by divorcing the story from an explicit place or time. The narrator, known only as the Magistrate, is the civil administrator of a colonial outpost of some great Empire. At the beginning of the story, a state security officer called Colonel Joll (one of only two proper names in the book) arrives for an expedition against the Barbarians. When he captures a few hapless natives and submits them to torture, the Magistrate becomes morally involved. His attempt to counteract Joll's brutality leads to his own downfall, even as the Empire discovers that it is dealing with forces that it can no longer control.

One of the problems of allegorical fiction is that by being set in an unreal place and time, it can deprive the reader of the familiar landmarks necessary to hold his interest. But Coetzee preserves the sense of actuality with great skill. The layout of the small border town quickly becomes familiar; we have often seen its like in books and movies. The time is not today, but it might well be yesterday: South Africa in the last years of Apartheid, the Roman Empire before its collapse, or anything in between. And by being timeless, the novel is also perennially timely. No one could read the opening chapter now without thinking of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, things that could not have been predicted by the author -- other than through his certainty that something of this kind will always occur when once-great power is threatened.

The 1904 poem by Constantine Cavafy which gave the book its title ends with the discovery that the barbarians have gone, and the question: "And now, what's going to happen to us without barbarians? | They were, those people, a kind of solution." The need for a weakening society to define itself by setting up straw-man aliens as objects of fear is certainly one of the themes of this book, but not the only one. An equally apposite punch line might have been something like: "Look in the mirror; the barbarians are us." For a while, the Magistrate appears to be the One Just Man who will stand up against barbarity. But in fact, the novel ends with the bleaker image of "a man who lost his way long ago, but presses on along a road that may lead nowhere." For, humiliated and reaching a painful self-understanding, the Magistrate realizes a truth: "I was not, as I liked to think, the indulgent pleasure-loving opposite of the cold rigid Colonel. I was the lie that Empire tells itself when times are easy, he the truth that Empire tells when harsh winds blow. Two sides of imperial rule, no more, no less." This is a brief, absorbing book, but one that will certainly make you think.

i read this book because it was on our book club list. to be honest, I wouldn't have bought it if it hadn't been for the book club and thought about not finishing it, as did others in the book club. The author told a story, but felt that he was trying to convey a message about whether "civilized nations" are better than "barbarions" and didn't enjoy the way he did it. Sorry, not my kind of book.

This book is terrific in its stark beauty. The way Coetzee goes about showing how the system rewards brutality and makes people into tools of the state is eye-opening and I loved it. The real barbarity is not where the government went looking for it, hiding on the outskirts and in the bushes, but on the tip of its own spear. A must read book for anyone interested in modern conceptions of terrorism, governmental abuse of power, and where people fall into their places and why they do it.

This is a well written book, but for me the story was not strong enough to carry the message. Sure, it offers some interesting insights into the nature of civilisation, power, and ambition, but the total abstraction of the setting robs it of sufficient human interest. The Empire is not set in any place or time, either fictional or historical, and virtually no-one in the book has even a name. The story feels far too much like a vehicle for a message, and even at times just the message itself.
I was also puzzled over the nature of the main character's supposed rebellion, since from the perspectives of both sides he didn't seem to have done anything of consequence. For a more gripping account of power, ambition, and empire, with plenty of human interest, I would recommend "I Claudius".