Description
Waiting for Barbarian is a novel by the South African Nobel Laureate J. M. Coetzee, who won Booker Prize twice. This modern classic was first published in 1980, it was chosen by Penguin for its series Great Books of 20th Century and won both the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and Geoffery Faber Memorial Prize. Coetzee took the title from the poem "Waiting for the Barbarians" by the Greek poet Constantine P. Cavafy, it was deeply influenced by Italian writer Dino Buzzati's novel The Tartar Steppe.
The story lingers around the time of war and it is narrated in the first person by an unnamed magistrate. 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.
Coetzee's prize-winning novel is a startling allegory of the war between oppressors and oppressed. 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.
"Coetzee, with laconic brilliance, articulates one of the basic problems of our time--how to understand the mentality behind brutality and injustice."--Anthony Burgess, New York
Adaptation
- American composer Philip Glass has also written an opera of the same name based on the book which premiered in September 2005 at Theater Erfurt, Germany.
- Mark Rylance (Wolf Hall, Bridge of Spies), Ciro Guerra, and producer Michael Fitzgerald are teaming up to bring J. M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians to the big screen.
About the Author
John Maxwell Coetzee was born in Cape Town, South Africa, on February 9, 1940. Being a native of South Africa, he has done his basic education in 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.
Coetzee is the author of twenty-three books, which have been translated into many languages. He had been an awardee of the Nobel prize for literature in 2003. He was the first author to be awarded the Booker Prize twice-first for Life and Times of Michael K and then for Disgrace. His other works of fiction include--Dusklands, Waiting for the Barbarians which won South Africa's highest literary honor, and the Central News Agency Literary Award. He has also published a memoir called Boyhood: Scenes From a Provincial Life, and several essay collections. He has won many other literary prizes including the Lannan Award for fiction, the Jerusalem Prize, and Irish Times International Fiction Prize.
Currently, he lives in Adelaide, Australia.
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| J. M. Coetzee |
Rating: 4.4/5
Author: John Michael Coetzee
Publisher: Penguin Books
Publishing Date: April 29, 1982 (Revised edition)
Edition Language: English
Genre: African, Literature, Historical British & Irish Literature, Military Historical Fiction
ISBN-10: 014006110X
ISBN-13: 978-0140061109
Pages: 192 (Paperback)
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