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Waiting for the Barbarians Penguin Great Books of the 20th Century J M Coetzee Books

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Waiting for the Barbarians Penguin Great Books of the 20th Century J M Coetzee Books

I just reread "Waiting for the Barbarians" and found it less like Kafka than I did the first time and more like Coetzee's "Disgrace", which overall I rate higher.

Numerous themes are explored in this well-laid-out novel. The protagonist, the magistrate of an outpost of Empire, wants to lead a life of sameness, in which historical conflicts and violence are avoided. His desires are sympathetic and his actions are sometimes laudable. Intruding into the sleepy life he and his outpost lead, police and army officers come, bringing with them violence, torture, but also possible a more realistic view of what is happening in the outside world. I won't be spoiling the novel by saying that the tension between these two views is not resolved at the end.

A fine, fine book. I highly recommend it. Coetzee is both a very skilled novelist and also very interested in ideas.


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Waiting for the Barbarians Penguin Great Books of the 20th Century J M Coetzee Books Reviews

The first person narrator is an old magistrate of a colony whose life changes after picking up a lantern one day to see what was going on and through subsequent incidents and circumstances, he becomes the examining/questioning voice over the human depravity as well as self examination. "But as for me, sustained by the toil of others, lacking civilized vices with which to fill my leisure, I pamper my melancholy and try to find in the vacuousness of the desert a special historical poignancy." to "..there was no way, once I had picked up the lantern, for me to put it down again. the knot loops in upon itself; I cannot find the end." Through motifs of lantern, sun glasses and blindness, and the dream sequences, the author wakes up the awareness of human conscience, depravity, frailties, hypocrisies, and the horror of pointless and inconsequential pursuit, "the image of a face masked by two black glassy insect eyes from which there comes no reciprocal gaze but only my doubled image cast back at me" The protagonist is a rather antihero type, a real human, complex and ambivalent with conscience, lust, fear and doubts, often faltering and needy, but genuinely interested in knowledge and his mind and his (sub)consciousness active all the time. He is transformed beyond his "great indifference to annihilation"
Took me a while to work my way through, but overall a very interesting account of a year in the life of a magistrate posted at the frontier of the Empire. He narrates the whole book, so not much dialogue (which is the reason it took me quite a while to finish this), but what dialogue there is is significant and telling of the characters you encounter through this man's eyes. Definitely not the style of writing I enjoy (as this was read for class), but a good book in its own right. The story still manages to feel like it does move, with vivid details weaved throughout, making you feel more a part of the setting, but it's a very passive voice throughout and not much excitement takes place. Again, I come back to this same word to describe this book interesting.
Waiting for the Barbarians is not simply an indictment of imperialism, and it’s not a political book. It’s time and setting are indeterminate and the major characters are not named. In this generic setting we are given character studies, or even a morality play. The author, J. M. Coetzee, shows us how people, not unlike ourselves, cope with the good, boring, bad, and evil in an imperial outpost. And in his showing us the lives and problems of his characters in this harsh place, he avers what is delusional, what is real, and what is just unknown.

The story is told by the aging civil magistrate of an unnamed imperial outpost of an unnamed empire. The magistrate copes with life by following distractions of womanizing, excavating the nearby ruins, and by deciphering the writings he finds in those ruins. When a detachment of the imperial army brings barbarian prisoners into town, the magistrate is attracted to a young woman among the captives. She is near-blind and crippled from the tortures she has suffered at the hands of an army officer, Colonel Joll.

The magistrate’s obsession with the woman echoes his obsession with understanding the barbarians, the empire, his own desires, why people behave as they do, and basically everything. As he works out his relationship with the woman, it is easy to identify with his introspection and boundless curiosity. His inquisitiveness wins out even over attentiveness to his job, and he comes to pay a stiff price for it.

There’s a picture here that resonates. Empires demand total allegiance and are harsh with those that give less. The magistrate lapses in his duties like many of us lapse on our jobs. Our cost is economic hardship—the threat of starvation, actually—only a degree or two away from the magistrate’s punishment.

Metaphors like that make this a quote-worthy book. There’s also the magistrate’s introspections. The story is told completely from his viewpoint and we get his observations almost as if he were journaling. It’s well-done, however, and does not intefere with following the story. His insights often arise from emotional reactions to what he’s relating, such as when he feels some regret for not “lightening up” when he observes some playful good humor among his soldiers

"Truly, the world ought to belong to the singers and dancers! Futile bitterness, idle melancholy, empty regrets!"

Or when he realizes he is not immune from the empire’s evil

"Why should it be inconceivable that the behemoth that trampled them will trample me too? I truly believe I am not afraid of death. What I shrink from, I believe, is the shame of dying as stupid and befuddled as I am."

We see his fear of ignorance here, though it’s more often expressed as his burning desire to understand everything.

Another big theme is the ever-present possibility for a person’s status to change, usually for the worse. It happens to several characters and we observe how they cope. It speaks to how we deny the possibility for calamity

"No one truly believes, despite the hysteria in the streets, that the world of tranquil certainties we were born into is about to be extinguished."

Their fear of a coming attack by the “barbarians” motivates most conversations among the outpost’s population. It becomes the baseline of their existence. Even so, they go about their lives as before, though with their numbers reduced by desertion.

Waiting for the Barbarians is not an action story, though it does involve soldiers in a fort, antagonisms, and struggles. Most of the story movement is character driven but it held my interest. The characters were interesting and identifiable. The themes were universal and accessible, leaving a haunting finish.

The book was first published in 1980. Threads in it, however, strike me as being very relevant to this present time, especially in the US where the machinations of empire have become prominent. There is an anticipation of disaster in the air that mirrors waiting for barbarians (indeed, we are bombarded with “news” and commentary about the barbarian horde said to be murderously envious of our “freedoms”). The magistrate’s warning about the fragility of our tranquil certainties rings true, and the sound is a funeral bell’s hollow peal.
I just reread "Waiting for the Barbarians" and found it less like Kafka than I did the first time and more like Coetzee's "Disgrace", which overall I rate higher.

Numerous themes are explored in this well-laid-out novel. The protagonist, the magistrate of an outpost of Empire, wants to lead a life of sameness, in which historical conflicts and violence are avoided. His desires are sympathetic and his actions are sometimes laudable. Intruding into the sleepy life he and his outpost lead, police and army officers come, bringing with them violence, torture, but also possible a more realistic view of what is happening in the outside world. I won't be spoiling the novel by saying that the tension between these two views is not resolved at the end.

A fine, fine book. I highly recommend it. Coetzee is both a very skilled novelist and also very interested in ideas.