Waiting for the Barbarians

Rating:
Summary: A Review by the Mirage Book Club
Review: Friday 25 February 2005
A Review by the Mirage Book Club Members:
The Mirage Book Club meeting of January was on Tuesday 22 February where we reviewed the "Waiting for the Barbarians," by J.M. Coetzee.
The moderated the meeting started the discussion. "Reading this well-written novel saturated with rich vocabulary was an uncommon experience for me," said he, "and I was in awe of the brutal descriptions not from the physical or psychological tortures scenes, but from the manipulative lies and claims of the Empire's clan against the illusive enemy in the campestral scenery surrounding the outpost; here he found the Empire's jingoism harshly inhuman and reminiscent of Nazism, the Inquisition, and of the Babylonian treatment of innocent minorities." For the second member after reading the first ten pages, the depth of pain of human suffering was overwhelming, thus he was unable to continue. "I have seen the cry of the captives first hand," the second member said, "and the harsh treatment of American POWs during the Vietnam War." The third member found the simple sentences strongly constructed conveying devastating sufferings of the subjects. The fourth member talked about the Magistrate, an aging and imperfect man who switched from being an Empire's agent to the Barbarian sympathizer. "Who were the Barbarians?" Asked he. And for The fifth member, a south African doctor, the book was true to its cause and most powerful tool against the terror of governments who commit crimes against their opposing masses. "The people in Washington D.C. should read this book," said he.
"Though reflecting the brutality of governing forces is not pleasant, the blindness of the world towards their unjust actions as has been addressed in the very first page of the book was shocking," said the sixth member who is a doctor in literature, "The writing style was very effective and reminded me of Mann," added she. The seventh member said that she didn't read the book yet she wanted to come to the meeting and hear the discussions. "When we undergo a severely unpleasant experience, we use distancing tool," said she, "It makes intolerable experiences less damaging to our souls. And in order to survive in the heat of disastrous calamity with an active imagination fully operational, the subjects suspend disbelief but distance themselves from the psychological side-effects of the action," she explained, "a sine qua non, that is the reader or the Magistrate in the story goes beyond the simple physical pain and avoids being overwhelmed and destroyed by a severely brutal event albeit political, social, or natural."
The eighth member, a female anesthesiologist, began an in depth analysis of the book: "It has been written in late 1970s when the Apartheid (racial segregation and the supremacy of whites that had been traditionally accepted in South Africa prior to 1948, but in the general election of that year, Malan officially included the policy of apartheid in the Afrikaner Nationalist party platform, bringing his party to power for the first time) was ruling the twenty-five non-white South Africans to the hilt," said she, "when the whites were giving their vote to the racist leaders to subdue and tame the other races." And she added, "The book was published in 1980 in London by Secker & Warburg and produced an international uproar, for it addressed the black uprising against Apartheid. The anesthesiologist read a poem by Steve Biko who was one of the foremost figures in South Africa's struggle for liberation, and who was murdered by the State (Empire) police when he was only 30.
The ninth member, a German-American, read a message from a couple who were missing the meeting, "This book describes in moving yet clear and concise language that governments will always lie to maintain and expand their power. It happened at the golf of Tonkin, it happened in Iraq, and it will happen again elsewhere." And she said that the book reminded her of the Mengele's diary about the concentration camps where he described in a non-emotional and blatant way the pain and the suffering of Jews going through their hellish moments during cruel Nazis experiments. The tenth member, a psychologist, spoke of human virtues and vices, "You find these human characteristics in both oppressed and oppressors." The eleventh member, a professor of law, presented the final words: "The book is written decades ago but reading it now is very appropriate and timely." Said he, "It's applicable to what we have done in Iraq and other places; and the most powerful point of the book is about the gloomy fate of the torturers and those who are tortured; the inhuman act destroys both," concluded he, "It is the ill-minded man who turns into torturers." Reading this, he quoted a bard, "I don't shed / what others call tears. / My pain is greater / than the small, visible / signs of weeping."
Moderator and reporter of the Club, Mo H. Saidi, MD


Rating:
Summary: Existential ponderings over an imaginary empire
Review: Contrary to what might come to expect, this novel is not about politics. Granted, Colonel Joll, whom delivers the mandate from the empire to conquer the barbarians to our protagonist the Magistrate, is political. He after all is the one who tortures the barbarians from the outskirts of the empire to justify the battle that eventually proves futile. However the Magistrate, an aging man looking forward to retiring from his post, is not political. A man of doubt, he has little conviction in his own thoughts. It may even be argued that him going against Colonel Joll (and ultimately against the decision of the empire) had been the product of his impulsiveness rather than an assertion of his conscientious and just nature. In brief, the Magistrate is quintessentially existential.

By providing no clue to the time nor the location of the empire, the story intends to be an allegory, thus to appeal to the universal. If the focal point of the novel were in revealing the fleeting nature of human beings (a man can be reasonable but may also inflict pain upon others -- the barbarians -- without second thoughts, depending on the circumstance he is in), it could no doubt be said that the story portends universality. But then what can we make of, for instance, the dense references to the Magistrate's fascination with the barbarian girl's body? The Magistrate himself to the end did not understand this fascination. What of his recurring dreams of the little girl in snow? The weight the author put on the particular (the Magistrate's personal ponderings) looked distinctively contradicting universality.

I personally favor Coetzee writing in the third person's voice. A richly empathetic quality paradoxically emerges when he writes in that seemingly detached, matter-of-factedly tone.

Rating:
Summary: Well written
Review: A well written book with echoes and a tone that is timeless and placeless that speak to what is going on around us concerning terror alerts and the war on terror...it is ironic how the people react to so called barbarians and how US reacts to so called terrorists-the same! It is revealing and smart. I highly recommend this book.

Rating:
Summary: Profoundly distrubing
Review: An old magistrate waiting to retire is serving out his last days on a lazy frontier in South Africa. He has jurisdiction over the garrison. But with the arrival of Colonel Joll from the Third Bureau - the most important division of the Civil Guard - the peaceful life is about to end for the magistrate. The arrival of Joll and his troops is justified by the fact that in the capital there is some concern about the barbarian tribes of the north uniting with those of the west, which may lead to unrest. Joll's methods of interrogation are brutal, his evidence against the native prisoners based on thin air. "Prisoners are prisoners" is enough of an accusation to lead a man or a woman to death.
When the magistrate decides to take a twenty year old girl with whom he had a relationship back to her tribe of barbarians, he is accused of having treasonously conspired with the enemy and the treatment inflicted on him thereafter is no less inhuman than that endured by the barbarians themselves. This is the price the magistrate has to pay for giving up his "alliance with the guardians of the Empire" and setting himself into opposition, thus becoming an enemy of the state.
Mr Coetzee's book shows all the suffering that the apartheid regime used to inflict on native South Africans. Furthermore, it shows that this regime was capable of committing the same atrocities against people of their own kin.

Rating:
Summary: "Says a lot without using too many words"
Review: One of our favorite authors. It is a short read about a magistrate working for a corrupt colonial empire isolated at the edge of civilization. It is Orwellian at times-a real Man vs. Society thing-and really a case of an author saying a lot without using too many words. The subject is dour but it has been named by Penguin Books as one of the top 100 novels of the 20th century. The political undertones are more than pertinent today.


Rating:
Summary: Phylosophy in a Novel
Review: The structure, the plot and the end of this novel is almost classical and well defined. Therefore I would recommend it to more rational readers. Here we can't find much of the imaginative divergencies so typical for other Coetzze's writings. Nevertheless we can still feel Coetzee: seemingly cold and distant, and of a truth an author with an exceptional emotional and intellectual deepness.
Reading about the decline of an outpost we follow the decline of a people and of an individual. Coetzee is another author who remindes us of the perpetual truths about human wars: what are the causes of wars, how wars are initiated, who perish, and what kind of men profit. The novel is temporally and geographically almost undefined, but I couldn't stop thinking of the wars in ex-Yugoslavia, in Afganistan and in Iraq. The Empire wages war against the Barbarians, that is its way of existence and functioning, and one day of its ending. The history it creates is ever repeating.
However, the novel is primarly about individuals. Once more Coetzee demonstrates his art of identifying with the main character of the book. The Magistrate spent all his life in the Outpost, organizing a comfortable life of his own and the life of the Outpost in peacfule coexitence with the Barbarians. But the history disrupts tranquillity bringing terror, chaos and uncertainity.
Portraying the Magistrete Coetzee reflects on man's doubts concerning good and evil; whether to contend and sacriface oneself for justice (as the moral of a rational being requires) or turn a blind eye to injustice and survive (as the life instinc of an animal being demands). A lot of philosophical questions arisen and psychological themes dealt with and many answers that Quetzee gives us, althought his hero is left without them. The paradox of human existance is that man spends his life in searching for fixed postulates, but he can only creat fluid ones for himself.
This is Coetzee's novel and one of contemporary novels that I like most, and one of the most teriblle. It is so concrete that , rather then an allegory, I would call it an instance of reality.