Waiting for the Barbarians (Penguin Ink)

by J. M. Coetzee, C. C. Askew (Illustrator)

Overview

A modern classic by Nobel Laureate J. M. Coetzee, now a major motion picture starring Robert Pattinson and Johnny Depp

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. When interrogation experts arrive, however, he finds himself jolted into sympathy with their victims—until their barbarous treatment of prisoners of war finally pushes him into a quixotic act of rebellion, and thus into imprisonment as an enemy of the state.
 
Waiting for the Barbarians, J. M. Coetzee’s third novel, which won the James Tate Black Memorial Prize, is an allegory of the war between oppressor 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 elevate their own survival above justice and decency.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780143116929
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	06/29/2010
Series:	Penguin Ink
Pages:	192
Sales rank:	195,470
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.70(h) x 0.60(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

J. M. Coetzee won the Nobel prize for Literature in 2003 and is the author of twenty-three books, which have been translated into many languages. He was the first author to be awarded the Booker Prize twice, first for Life & Times of Michael K and then for Disgrace. A native of South Africa, he now lives in Adelaide, Australia.

Hometown:

Adelaide, Australia

Date of Birth:

February 9, 1940

Place of Birth:

Cape Town, South Africa

Education:

B.A., University of Cape Town, 1960; M.A., 1963; Ph.D. in Literature, University of Texas, Austin, 1969

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"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)

Editorial Reviews

Praise for Waiting for the Barbarians:

“J.M. Coetzee’s vison goes to the nerve-center of being. What he finds there is more than most people will ever know about themselves, and he conveys it with a brilliant writer’s mastery of tension and elegance.” —Nadine Gordimer
 
“A remarkable and original book.” —Graham Greene
 
“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

“A real literary event.” —Irving Howe, The New York Times Book Review

“I have known few authors who can evoke such a wilderness in the heart of a man . . . Coetzee knows the elusive terror of Kafka.” —Bernard Levin, The Sunday Times (London)

From the Publisher

'Waiting for the Barbarians is a distinguished piece of fiction, and what Mr. Coetzee has gained from his strategy of creating an imaginary Empire is clear. But are there perhaps losses too? One possible loss is the bite and pain, the urgency that a specified historical place and time may provide. To create a ''universalized'' Empire is to court the risk - especially among sophisticated readers for whom the credos of modernism have become dull axioms -that a narrative with strong political and social references will be ''elevated'' into sterile ruminations about the human condition....I cannot believe this was Mr. Coetzee's intention or, perhaps more important, that it is warranted by his novel itself. True, the Empire is abstract, timeless, placeless; but through the scrim of Empire, 'Waiting for the Barbarians renders a moment in our politics, a style of our injustice. Precisely this power of historical immediacy gives the novel its thrust, its larger and, if you wish, ''universal'' value. -- Irving Howe

The New York Times

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.
—The Sunday Times (London)

Bernard Levin

....A power of historical immediacy gives this novel its thrust, its larger and, if you wish, universal value. -- The New York Times Books of the Century

Charles McGrath