Waiting for the Barbarians

Rating:
Summary: the age of empire
Review: Waiting for the Barbarians came up in a discussion we were having around the dinner table; I'm not sure why. And my father mentioned that he had read it more than ten years ago, and certain scenes were still sharp in his mind, like he had lived through them himself. The writing made everything snap to life.

Memorability isn't the best measure of the quality of a work (by the end of Anna Karenina, I had forgotten a lot of what I'd read, but still remember the palpable sensation that I had just read the greatest thing ever written) but a book that achieves lasting vividness is at least doing something right.

So I was actually reading this book when Coetzee received the Nobel prize. It wasn't surprising; he's an original but accesible writer who frequently addresses questions of race in a country torn by strife and only recently ruled by a semi-authoritarian government: if that's not a lock, I don't know what is.

I read a quote on the back that compared Coetzee to Kafka; the comparison is apt but also brings out some of the weaknesses of this book. The first major difference is that Kafka has a sense of humor - his two major novels are, essentially, bureaucratic farces. Nothing in this book will so much as raise a smile. This isn't necessarily an aesthetic flaw. It just means that I enjoy rereading Kafka and probably won't pick up this book again.

The second difference is that Kafka's entire world is of a piece. Nothing feels like phony symbolism or some sort of extended allegory that's been inserted into an essentially realistic story: you're immediately thrown into a bizarre dream world that makes a certain kind of sense, and you stay there for the entire length of the novel. This is not true of Waiting for the Barbarians. It reads something like a parable, since the country and the ethnicity of the people are never identified, but it has a plausible plot that could take place in any number of countries with only small alterations.

But this largely realistic story is constantly interrupted by events that cannot be taken at face value. The magistrate's bathing of the barbarian woman didn't make psychological sense to me: it feel too obviously symbolic. The same with Coetzee's use of one of fiction's oldest devices: the inexplicable dream. The girl in the snow without a face - I suppose it connects with the barbarian girl's blindness, and his inability to remember her features, and his desire to smooth out the wounds on her body. That's all great. But I didn't read this book to write a thesis, and all of these parts felt clumsy and outside the reality of the actual events.

The parts of the book that were startling and original, I thought, dealt with the impact of pain and humiliation on the human psyche. Coetzee is best when exploring human cruelty, and the position of people driven to the limits of tolerable existence: the Magistrate hanging from the tree in women's clothes, begging for scraps, starving in his room. All of it told in prose that is unobtrusively elegant, that describes the most horrific acts without ellipses or euphemisms, and with simple and concrete physical detail. For example, a boy has been tortured, and the magistrate wants to know how he got the scabs and bruises on his belly and groins. Here's what the guard says to him:

"A knife," he whispers back. "Just a little knife, like this." He spreads his thumb and forefinger. Gripping his little knife of air he makes a curt thrust into the sleeping boy's body and turns the knife delicately, like a key, first left, then right. Then he withdraws it, his hand returns to his side, he stands waiting.

This is good writing: honest and direct without being pointlessly lurid. The book's main flaws are in structure, not prose - after the barbarian woman leaves, one of the poles of the book is gone, and the remainder feels shapeless and disconnected from the first half. The point of view also caused some problems. The first person present tense gives the action a feeling of immediacy, but it also gives the magistrate's thoughts a certain false quality: while I was reading it, I kept thinking, he's having this complex epiphany on the spot? Although he's clearly a smart guy, the book suffers from his extended disquisitions on various subjects; they feel more like essays. But some of them are good essays. Here's one, that I think is the book's most profound thesis:

The children never doubt that the great old trees in whose shade they play will stand forever, that one day they will grow to be strong like their fathers, fertile like their mothers, that they will live and prosper and raise their own children and grow old in the place where they were born. What has made it impossible for us to live in time like fish in water, like birds in air, like children? It is the fault of Empire! Empire has created the time of history. Empire has located its existence not in the smooth recurrent spinning time of the cycle of the seasons but in the jagged time of rise and fall, of beginning and end, of catastrophe. One thought alone preoccupies the submerged mind of Empire: how not to end, how not to die, how to prolong its era.

Rating:
Summary: Coatzee's Masterpiece
Review: "Waiting for the Barbarians" placement as one of the top 100 novels of the twentieth century by the Modern Library is well deserved. Coatzee's novel of a nameless frontier administrator of a nameless empire is a moral parable of the last century.

Coatzee evokes the shadowy fear of barbarians who never really appear to elicit responses from his characters, whether the main protagonist, villagers or the imperial representatives, who seem more an enemy themselves. Through a long series of moral choices the magistrate finds himself at the bottom socially and financially with redemptive powers he never knew he possessed. The early relationship with a barbarian peasant is loaded with meaning but Coatzee is such an excellent writer that his passages flow with an ease that escapes other authors saying a lot less.

I highly recommend "Waiting for the Barbarians". This is a writer at his best and serious readers won't be disappointed.

Rating:
Summary: A philosophical indictment of imperialism
Review: The novel takes place in a fictionalized setting, where the narrator is the magistrate of a remote province and wishes for nothing more than to have sex with a lot of natives and live out his life with a minimal amount of conflict (Sound familiar? Hint: read Orwell's Burmese Days, for example). He eventually he takes a stand against the Empire by trying to return a captured "barbarian" woman to her people. When he returns to his post, he finds it has been overrun by an arrogant Colonel Joll, who assumes the narrator must have been consorting with the enemy and imprisons him for treason. The narrator becomes the subject of the cruelty and torture he allowed to take place under his administration and lives out his life as a broken man. After some time, he is set free, but realizes he has nowhere to go and remains at the colony as a beggar. When the post is abandoned by the military, the poor inhabitants are left to fend for themselves against an anticipated barbarian attack.

Rating:
Summary: Short and Thought Provoking.
Review: Like Coetzee's other books, he provides a sense of depressing reality in a transformed land. As a man I wonder about his depiction of the "female" emptiness that his heroine feels, but it seems very convincing. I also wonder, as an American, what the impact of these books is on South Africans themselves. Is life this unsettled down there? The sense of despair and loneliness in this book just clings to you, and makes you appreciate your own life. Ultimately though it is life affirming.

Rating:
Summary: Utterly brilliant.
Review: Coetzee is South Africa's most compelling writer. His prose is hard and precise and his stories crafted with a sharpness that cuts to the quick.
"Waiting for the Barbarians" is profound and powerful. Bleak and desolate at times, but sparkling often with rare luminosity.
The magistrate is a character that embodies a particular dillema during Apartheid, or any period of opression. What to do? What to risk? What is our moral responsibility? It's an uncomfortable question flung at a world often so enamored with comfort it refuses to act against injustice. Unless it suits them politically.
As a writer and South African, Coetzee remains for me a constant inspiration on how to address the troubled past. There is redemption and bleakness, despair and small joys.
Coetzee knows the complexities and doesn't stoop to easy answers. If truth be told he is the South African most worthy of the Nobel Prize.

Rating:
Summary: Its meanings will captivate you!!!!!!!!!!!!
Review: The book 'Waiting For The Barbarians' by J. M. Coetzee is an interesting book but I feel that it is a hard book to read. Coetzee portrays humanity at its worst, showing how innocent and good people can be corrupted and show ill will towards his or her brethren. It shows us how a person or a group of people that hold power can dictate what is considered to be right and wrong and how people can just follow the crowd and do what everyone else is doing so that they wouldn't have the chance to be ridiculed for what they believe in.
When Colonel Joll and his troops arrived they said that they were there in order to bring peace to the town, but this is ironic because there wasn't any problems there in the first place. Colonel Joll convinced the people that the 'Barbarians' were planning an attack on the town n that they were going to try to get their land back. Everyone followed them even though people knew for years that the 'Barbarians' were gentle, harmless people.
The only one who thought to stand up for his beliefs was the 'Magistrate'. He knew just like the rest of the town that the 'Barbarians' wasn't going to attack the town now and never attacked the 'Empire' before because that wasn't their style. The 'Magistrate' in this book undergoes embarrassment and torture for about a year for his belief that the 'Barbarians' were gentle people who wished for nothing more than peace, and that the 'Empire' were a bunch of heartless and ruthless people whose only concern was expanding and growing by any means possible.
Besides from this show of humanity at its worst it also raises questions. 'Is it worth it for one to stand up and fight for what one believes in?' and 'How hard will one work; or how much will one sacrifice for what one believes in?' When you read it you will ask yourself: 'Could you be like the 'Magistrate' and suffer a year of embarrassment and torture for your beliefs?' 'Could you give up three good meals an day and a nice warm bed to sleep in?' 'Could you go without contact with other people and not go crazy?' 'Could you do any of these thing and come out a survivor'
Even though it is a hard book to read, depending on how one interprets it one can learn more about one's self from this book and its powerful underlying meanings. It is compelling and riveting and will surely catch your attention and leave you wanting more every time you put the book down. This was my first Coetzee book that I read but I think I will be trying to read more of his writing in the future.

Rating:
Summary: A well written novel with an intense plot
Review: J. M. Coetzee's "Waiting for the Barbarians" is a novel different than most I have read because the reader does not know exactly where it takes place. It is understandable if people think the setting is in South Africa, because the manner in which the barbarians are treated is how Black people were treated during Apartheid. But the thing is, the reader not know if the barbarians are Black, White, Yellow or Red, and neither do we know the skin color of the people living in the Empire. You might finish the novel wondering exactly why this is so. Coetzee wants the readers to focus on something else other than when and where his story takes place.
There are very few names in this novel. The main character is simply known as the Magistrate. His duty is to supervise a piece of territory that belongs to the Empire. Throughout the story he seems to be miserable because of his old age. This behavior of his leads him to write notes on the Empire so that when he soon dies, he feels like he has at least put his life to some use by leaving behind a history for future generations to read.
From the beginning of the novel, readers are introduced to Colonel Joll, whose duty is to find barbarians and question them to find out the truth - if they raided farms or plundered houses. He accomplishes this by torture. To him, pain is truth.
When the Magistrate finds out what Colonel Joll does to the barbarians, he is astonished and cannot believe what he sees one day when he finds the body of an old man in one of the questioning rooms. Seeing the eyes gouged out, teeth broken in, and beard drenched with blood, the Magistrate is introduced to what exactly happens in the Empire. He is disgusted, and he gradually grows a hatred toward Colonel Joll, as well as the Empire.
When the Magistrate meets and is attracted to the half blind girl (one of the tortured barbarians left behind when her people left) who begs for money in the town, he takes her in, and his life is changed. He bathes her, sleeps with her, and takes care of her. It is from this woman that the Magistrate wonders why there is such hatred toward the barbarians. To him they are a reserved people who are trying to defend themselves and stay alive. He says that it is the Empire that has come on their land and taken it away from them. It is those in the Empire who are the real barbarians.
After spending many months with the girl, the Magistrate decides he should take her back to her people. He notifies the capital that he will embark on a journey to find the barbarians and restore goodwill. He does so, and after almost two weeks of surviving in the desert with its sand storms and rough weather, and having succeeded in giving back the girl to her people, the Magistrate returns to his town only to find that his position has been taken over by a Warrant Officer, Mandel, and that there are many more soldiers guarding the town than there were before. This only means one thing: The campaign against the barbarians has begun.
He is taken prisoner in his own town, stripped of all authority he had, and is humiliated by civilians and officials. He is treated as a barbarian because of his kind heart towards the barbarians. He is hanged until he cannot breathe ( but he is not killed ), and then after he is hanged by the arms until the muscles around his shoulder area are torn apart. His humiliation includes walking around town with beggars clothes, craving for food since he is not fed properly ( and regularly ) by the soldiers.
By the end of the novel, the reader is challenged to ask questions such as "Would I be willing to stand up for what I believe in even if it means humiliation?" or "What is freedom? What is justice?"
This is definitely one of the most challenging books I have read. Through use of graphic detail, Coetzee is not afraid to let readers know the extremes of the cruelty of man. This is what makes the novel compelling.
If you are in the mood of a story that is deep and at the same time though provoking, I would recommend "Waiting for the Barbarians".

Rating:
Summary: Untitled
Review: A compelling story of realization, truth, and revolution was Waiting for the Barbarians, by J. M Coetzee. The author utilized images and symbols in order to better define a meaning, and understanding, that we readers attempt to comprehend. This short novel though, stretches far from light reading. Coetzee describes the various realizations through figurative language, yet the Magistrate himself seems to have difficulty being decisive, so it all relates. He feels as if he is searching for something, trying to find an explanation that is directly in front of him, yet he may die still trying to find it. "There has been something staring me in the face, and still I do not see it," (p. 155).
Past histories of Empires often remain repetitive and continuous throughout time. There have always been the rulers, and then their followers, their slaves, whom they can control, beat, even torture if it suits them. However, this short novel presents a man whom is not content with the dealings of an overbearing Empire and the lesser Barbarians. He is one of the few that sees the vicious treatment as immoral, and cruel, and so he spends much of the story attempting to glance deeper into the meaning of an Empire and those whom live outside of it. He struggles to withhold his position due to his outrageous beliefs. It is justice that he seeks though. A fairness between the Empire and the Barbarians. He difficulty however, lies in his search to find justice.
"Justice; once that word is uttered, where will it end? Easier to shout No! Easier to beaten and made a martyr. Easier to lay my head on a block than to defend the cause of justice for the barbarians," (p. 108) One realization perhaps, that the Magistrate comes to, is that shouting No, going against the Empire is more difficult than a person perceives. No matter how wrong he assumes the Empire to be, how utterly repulsive the treatment is, he realizes that one man cannot change an entire history or future. He cannot change tradition; he cannot make this enormous transformation, for he is simply incapable.
Within the story, the Magistrate spends much of his time with women, but it was one woman in particular that aided in his changing of views on society. This woman was a Barbarian, but for some reason he held an emotional attachment to her. He pitied the woman, and was angry at the way that the Empire tortured her. They blinded her, left her with permanent scars. Perhaps this is when the Magistrate truly came to the realization that the Empire's treatment towards the Barbarians was unethical.
What the Magistrate is so desperately seeking is an answer to his questions. What is it that he should do? It is easier for him to just go against the Empire, and to be killed, than to actually work at changing the torturous traditions of the past. Although the first couple of chapters move fairly slowly, the story picks up with the Magistrate's search to find the truth in both the Empire and in himself. However, the ending leaves us craving what he will do with the new realizations that are brought upon him.
Waiting for the Barbarians is a difficult little novel, but a forceful, gripping story as well. The author opens our eyes to a world that we may never truly understand. A world, whose own inhabitants, never truly comprehend the complexity of life under rule.
The Barbarians are tired of fighting for what is rightfully theirs, and so they take back what they lost with pride. They leave those whom used to profit, in the same conditions to which they have been living for generations.
Four stars suit this novel entirely well. It is a moving story, which really gets its reader thinking, but doesn't excite them so much. However it would seem impossible for one to get excited over a book, that includes pages of torturing and suffering. Still the story grabs ones attention, and makes us look deeper into a life that we may possibly never understand. A life that perhaps the author himself doesn't even comprehend. Maybe he is looking to the story to provide him with a solid answer. Perhaps like the Magistrate, he will never find it.

Rating:
Summary: Nothing like a slow paced novel to put you to sleep at night
Review: Coetzee has written a very long and tedious novel to try to explain something that could easily be explained in a short essay with real facts. This is a book that is a wonderful read for anyone who enjoys trying to find the many meanings of a confusing book, but for people like me, who merely read for the enjoyment it is a nightmare. The book is slow moving, confusing, and doesn't flow well. This is the type of book that though you are reading it, you do not actually comprehend what you are reading because your mind wanders away from the endless droning of the story. While reading this story I found that not only was it boring, but it took forever to read even though it was very short. It takes a longer time to read this then it does to read a good book that is a lot longer. The main reason though that this book is not worth the time is it is too confusing, the book is not worth reading unless you are going to analyze it. Throughout the novel, there are many strange dreams, and other random occurrences that just disrupt the flow of the story. "There are other dreams in which the figure that I call the girl changes shape, sex, size." This is an ongoing part of the book. He constantly has dreams of "the girl" and, though these dreams add to the meaning of the story, they just interrupt the reading. Then a later dream, "A fork, bent and tarnished. A dead bird, a parrot: I hold it up by the tail, its bedraggled feathers hang down, its soggy wings droop, its eye sockets are empty. When I release it, it falls through the surface without a splash. 'Poisoned water' I think." If you have been reading into the book before this, you understand it perfectly, but if you have been reading for enjoyments sake this is just a disturbing image of a dead parrot. All the strange random occurrences are there to support whatever meaning you try to get out of it, whether that's the Empire actually being the true Barbarians, The Magistrate just having been a blind, mindless tool of the Empire, or that a hierarchical society like the Empire will eventually destroy itself through its own fear of nothing. Each has many parts to support these meanings but you have to dig deep to find them. It is important that these separate meanings are added, however, while trying to support these points Coetzee seems to lose track of what was actually happening in the story. He gets so caught up in trying to convince the reader that he stops writing a story and starts solely trying to teach them his lessons. He completely ignores the beginning of the book, which is about The Magistrate, the girl, and the barbarians that are first captured. Later it becomes a mere shell for Coetzee's ideas, while it gets more and more abstract. This book is only worth your time if along with reading it you are willing to analyze it until you get sick, pass out, or have a mental breakdown.

Rating:
Summary: Time consuming, thought provoking, slow
Review: Though the story managed to touch on many key themes and problems in our society, the way it was delivered lacked any sense of interest on the part of the reader. J .M Coetzee uses the characters and places in the story to further his many points and ideas. This, however, very much takes away from the overall novel, because we never really get a sense for our main character. The man is suffering and struggling through the story for an undefined purpose that we have to analyze. Whether you analyze this story as a novel about freedom and liberty, social inequality, or brutality underlining power, you will still leave with questions. Why would endless detail and pages upon pages of rambling be worth the many hours it takes to read this book? Or why must we wait for our main character to have his change of heart when in the end we feel that we have found our way back to the beginning?
It seems unfair that when we are struggling through the many torture scenes and brutal beatings, we find our way to an un-satisfactory conclusion. Our main character "The Magistrate," ever since the beginning has tormented himself with endless questions about who he is. He feels that the un-fair treatment of the "barbarians" is both brutal and unjust; however, he fears the wrath of the tyrannical Empire. This discovery is followed by endless self-doubt and self-realization that drags on throughout the entire book. By the end the reader is craving an answer to this man's suffering, but again we are let down. There is no answer, rather the magistrate finds himself in more doubt and denial.
The only part of the story that is enjoying is the analytical aspect of it. To some this is an achievement of literature. But to most of the readers this hinders there liking of the book. I would be hesitant to recommend this book to many, however if you have the time and the patience to read this complicated novel then it could be worth the twelve dollars.