A barbárokra várva (original 1980; edition 2003)

Haunting fiction about Empire and oppression. Evocative, with a faint glimmer of hope. ( )

When I said of Coetzee's Disgrace that it was written with "unbelievable assurance given the wilderness explored," I had not yet read Waiting for the Barbarians, and so did not know Coetzee's assurance had come from practice, since the wilderness of the former is pretty much the wilderness of the latter. In terms of the general social scheme (though the scene of one is somewhat less personal and more epic than the other) of oppressors oppressing the oppressed and up to their necks with dirty hands, and the general life arch of the central character, the books are duplicates. Given the sequence, in effect having read it before, no wonder I found Waiting the lesser and perhaps a lesser book. Still having read far more Henry James than I ever wanted to, I am familiar with persons, sometimes called artists, who return over and over to the same obsessions trying for yet one more turn of the screw.

"Waiting for the Barbarians" is an exquisitely written fable about the fateful encounters between soldiers and civilians, settled folk and "barbarians" on the frontier of a great unnamed Empire something like the Roman one - but which has the advantage of rudimentary guns. The main conflict in the novel is the inner tension felt by one of the "colonizers" - a man who has devoted his life to the "imperialist" cause but who has started to question the overall "civilizing mission" of the metropolitan power.

I wish I could say this was a four star book, but I really wasn't satisfied with the way that the plot turned in the last third of the book. I thought that toward the end of the book the central character lost a great deal of his "autonomy" and became more and more of a "vehicle" for the author. Since the author is J. M. Coetzee, it is interesting to see how this plays out, but I have a preference for fictions where there is less sense of a puppetmaster manipulating plots and thoughts in order to make a point, however valid that point might be. ( )

author is still new to me; wondering if public humiliation and the "impotent" aging foreigner are common in all his books ( )

I'm not sure that this work has as much impact as Coetzee's other work, but it's still well worth the time. Coetzee's careful depiction of an elderly man caught in the workings of an empire on a colonialized space is both touching and, at times, hard to take. His careful attention to the body and to torture are, especially, difficult to read. This narrator, though, is worth exploring, and someone reminiscent of Kazuo Ishiguro's Remains of the Day. On the whole, this may not be as fast or as unique as Coetzee's other work, but it is just as intelligent and worthwhile. ( )