Waiting for the Barbarians
Waiting for the Barbarians
Book for September 2017
Group 3

Waiting for the Barbarians was first published in 1980. An opera based on the book by American composer Philip Glass premiered at Theater Erfurt, Germany, in 2005.

The story is narrated by the unnamed magistrate of a small town on the border of "the Empire". The magistrate's peaceful existence ends when the capital sends an envoy, Colonel Joll, who has come on instructions that "the Barbarians" beyond the border are preparing an attack on the empire. While the magistrate has every reason to doubt that assumption he is powerless to prevent the Colonel from leading an incursion into Barbarian lands. Joll on his expedition captures a number of peaceful people, returns with his prisoners, tortures some of them to death and through coerced confessions provides "proof" for the agressive intentions of the Barbarians. Satisfied, he then returns to the capital, leaving the Magistate to deal with the victims. One of them, the daughter of a man murdered by Joll and herself crippled from the torture is now begging in the town. Motivated by a mixture of compassion and his duty to keep the streets 'clean', the magistrate takes her into his home. As he nurses the girl, he crosses the line to a sexual relationship which she neither encourages nor rejects. But eventually he takes her back to her own people. As he returns to the town soldiers from the capital arrest him for deserting his post and colluding with the enemy. As winter approaches the soldiers desert and most of the townspeople flee believing in an imminent attack from beyond the border. However, there is no sign of the Barbarians as the season's first snow falls.

About the Author
J.M. Coetzee

John Maxwell Coetzee, born 1940, received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003. The reality of South Africa appears repeatedly in Coetzee’s work. He has said that apartheid values and behavior could arise anywhere. According to the Nobel Comittee his novels focus on the cruel rationalism and cosmetic morality of western civilization while capturing man's divine spark in moments of defeat and weakness. Coetzee venerates Franz Kafka and Samuel Beckett as literary examples.

Other books we've read by the same author:

Disgrace