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Dec 28, 2009

Matt rated it:

"From such beginnings grow obsessions: I am warned." pg.79

This quote, taken wildly out of context, serves as an accurate description of my first experience reading J.M. Coetzee. Having read this small book in its entirety throughout the last twenty four hours, I now have the urge to read his other works as soon as possible. It is interesting how Mr. Coetzee and this book in particular have become a recurring Goodreads meme of sorts over the last few weeks, so i'm guessing t More...

6 comments like (18 people liked it)

Dec 01, 2009

Choupette rated it:

A lot of the time I feel like I'm going through life arbitrarily, uncaringly, skimming along the surface without really engaging in anything. I talk to people, I flit through their lives, but do I leave an impression? It's hard to tell; the calm surface of my own life remains unruffled, seems monotonously impregnable, impermeable to everything, and also anything.

It's rare, almost unheard of, for me to experience strong emotion. Although outwardly I may appear excited, sad, distraught More...

5 comments like (18 people liked it)

Jan 15, 2009

RandomAnthony rated it:

I’m going to write two Waiting for the Barbarians reviews. The first, in italics, is the one that someone seems to expect, the second is the one I would normally write. Take your pick!

Waiting for the Barbarians always reminds me of this time I was on a cross-country flight from DC to Oakland. This 400 pound Samoan guy in a black silk suit sat across the aisle from me. He feverishly wrote in his journal the entire flight, whispering things like “holy fuck!” and “yes, shit, I’ve go More...

13 comments like (25 people liked it)

Feb 02, 2009

Jessica added it

And then there're those days when you're like, "Who gives a shit about distance running, and why would I want to watch anyone run a fucking marathon?"

It didn't even occur to me before starting that I wouldn't completely love this book. And I mean yeah, it's really good or whatever, but who cares? It's good, blah blah blah. It's important and well-written, blah blah blah. So what? I'm not feeling it, so none of that helps me. Tonight on the packed train home, I shut this and More...

12 comments like (7 people liked it)

Jun 12, 2008

Nathaniel rated it:

Coetzee writes for academics. He writes to teach lessons, to have his themes discussed and perhaps to be chuckled at. I find his books rather deliberate, hardened and inevitable. Now, he’s a fine writer, can turn a passable phrase and get conceptual without becoming a total bore; but, he has a tendency to interpret his books for you and the mannerisms and hobbies of the characters in “Waiting for the Barbarians” slot them too neatly into representative categories, which makes this more of an all More...

5 comments like (11 people liked it)

Dec 02, 2007

Katherine rated it:

The story of the enigmatic magistrate of a colonial border outpost, which has until now maintained an uneasy coexistence with the "barbarian" tribes that populate the world outside its walls. But now that the empire has decided the barbarians are an imminent threat, the magistrate is forced to reexamine his relationship to the empire and to himself.

This novel could be set on any continent and in dozens of time periods. Coetzee immerses you in a non-specific setting at once More...

0 comments like (6 people liked it)

Dec 29, 2008

Tom rated it:

(Ok, I've just finished it, and though perhaps it is a bit "preachy" as some have complained, that limitation is more than compensated for by the fact that the Magistrate never lets himself off the hook for his own ambivalent treatment of the "barbarian" girl. Allegorical or not, this book strikes me as prescient regarding Abu Ghraib and Gitmo as Graham Greene's The Quiet American was regarding American fate in Vietnam -- but Coetzee is a far more lyrical writer than Greene. More...

3 comments like (3 people liked it)

Dec 28, 2010

Sarah rated it:

Waiting for the Barbarians by J. M. Coetzee is one of those books I had to read for college that I read only well enough to take the mid term or final and move on with other assignments. In other words, all these years later, I couldn't remember thing one about the novel. This Thanksgiving weekend I set things to right by re-reading the novel at a leisurely pace without the stress of having to study it. The book has now gone from "unmemorable" to "damn good novel" for me.
More...

1 comment like (3 people liked it)

Mar 12, 2011

Maggie rated it:

I knocked off two stars for the magistrate's weird obsession with younger women. I found it mostly irrelevant and disturbing. I know part of the point was that the magistrate himself was by no means a perfect guy, the complete foil of Joss - but it was a bit much. Maybe it was just the wrong time for me to read this book, but I found the characters to be two-dimensional, and I didn't like the magistrate at all. Despite all that, I was very interested in the parts of the book where he wasn't obse More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Feb 06, 2008

Ken rated it:

In one concise, engrossing, deceptively simple book, Coetzee beautifully summarizes and poeticizes the labyrinth of brutal contradictions that keeps humanity trapped within "the black flower of civilization."

Coetzee's unsettling conclusions about the root of empire, as well as his deftness in illustrating the extent to which we all become intractably compliant in its maintenance, speaks more profoundly and truer than the sum of all the other anthropological texts I've read More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Feb 01, 2012

Harmonybites rated it:

This is one of those short books that impacts you sometimes like a punch in the gut, and sometimes with a far more quiet, lingering power. Beautifully written in a spare, but often lyrical, style and intimate first-person voice, it has the quality of a fairytale or allegory. Narrated by a man we know only as the "Magistrate" in a far-off province of the "Empire," the title becomes increasingly ironic and ominous. There's mention of muskets, and of sun-glasses, but otherwise t More...

2 comments like (2 people liked it)

Jul 31, 2007

Bryant rated it:

This book might well serve as a "Heart of Darkness" for the contemporary political climate, where the line between good and bad, civilized and barbaric, is often clouded by torture, legal abuse, and illogical doctrines of preemption. Coetzee scrupulously investigates how principle gives ways to pragmatism, and how moral sure-footedness becomes moral slip-n-slide.

1 comment like (3 people liked it)

Jul 29, 2007

Robyn rated it:

This book is so intense that it actually turned me off reading for a while. I was reading it and some of it's many torture and imprisonment scenes while at my old shitty job and I just couldn't deal with it. I had to go back to Cathy comics and the crossword. This is actually praise. JM deserves his Nobel.

1 comment like (3 people liked it)

Jun 20, 2010

Kaloyana rated it:

Много неща могат да се кажат за тази книга и изобщо за писането на Кутси. Но аз не се чувствам толкова сигурна за да кажа каквото и да е, подобно на анализ. Нищо, което да обобщи книгата. Едва ли тя самата може да се обобщи. Пиша, под влиянието на емоцията, след прочитането.
Не искам да наричам книгата мрачна. По-скоро сурова и честна в стремежа си чрез мрака в човешката душа да извади наяве доброто или поне желанието и нуждата от стремеж към него. Едни успяват, други не. Всъщност успява т More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Mar 16, 2009

Rhonda rated it:

I have spent some time trying to understand this book, including some of the wonderfully expressive writing that it contains. Ultimately I think this is a book about human psychology on the order of Notes from the Underground, except expanded exponentially in many directions. I could not help but think of Eliot’s Gerontion throughout most of the book, as if this were some literary explication:

Here I am, an old man in a dry month,
Being read to by a boy, More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Oct 02, 2008

B-MO rated it:

Below is a close reading of a passage of this book which I felt was extremely important and interesting to understanding this book....BTW, this book was amazing...a string of closely tied together metaphors and iconography....

P136
“You feel that it is unjust, I know, that you should be punished for having the feelings of a good son. You think that you know what is just and what is not. Understand. We all think we know.” I had no doubt, myself, then, that at each moment ea More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Mar 31, 2008

svnh rated it:

edit: if you haven't read this book twice, you should.

there are too many things to be said about this novel for me to do it in this square, which is why i am seriously debating using it as the centerpiece to my graduate application writing sample.

anyone who loves a challenge and has the time to get involved with this novel should do so. once again, it is the subtlety that has sold me. it's the thing lurking beneath a prose that seems so honest, so plain, so trustworthy. More...

1 comment like (1 person liked it)

May 22, 2011

Daniel rated it:

This book contains some powerful meditations on sexuality, aging, colonization, torture, shame, and the state. I read this as a parable to the War on Terror, though it would fit with many other conflicts: the proxy wars in Latin America, the colonial wars in Africa, even the Black liberation movements inside the US in the 1970s.

Coetzee demonstrates in the very beginning of the book the ruthlessness of a state apparatus in a community created by the state but living largely outside of More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Sep 27, 2007

Marnie rated it:

i had mixed feelings. it's an allegorical story of an empire, a low-level bureaucrat at the edge of the empire who becomes disgusted with the techniques used by the government's military...he eventually takes a stand against it, becomes an enemy of the state, rah rah rah he feels redeemed. now. first instinct, i really didn't like it so much. another story of empire told from the POV of an "innocent" imperialist, another old white guy who uses his privilege by rejecting it to be a mora More...

3 comments like (1 person liked it)

Mar 23, 2007

Alicia rated it:

Another amazing novel by Coetzee. I read this one twice. It is a bit more abstract than the other novels I've read, which were based specifically in South Africa, but it addresses the same themes of colonialism, race relations, guilt, and love of the land. Perhaps because it is more abstract, set in a nonspecific, fictional land with two groups or races of people (colonizers from the Empire and the indigenous), it is easier to imagine it being the United States than South Africa... though many o More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Aug 06, 2011

Matthew added it

“I was the lie that Empire tells itself when times are easy, he the truth that Empire tells when harsh winds blow. Two sides of imperial rule, no more, no less. But I temporized ... Thus I seduced myself, taking one of the many wrong turnings I have taken on a road that looks true but has delivered me into the heart of a labyrinth." begins J.M. Coetzee’s journey of personal growth in the face of adversity. Dealing with themes such as language and communication, force and power, colonizatio More...

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Jan 09, 2009

Sara rated it:

I'm not generally a Coetzee fan, or at least haven't been wild about what I've read of his in the past, but this book was quite beautifully written. There's a wonderful estrangement in the prose, evident from the opening passage on ("I have never seen anything like it: two little discs of glass suspended in front of his eyes in loops of wire."), which, alongside the carefully worked image of blindness throughout the book, works to really bring to question what and when humanity looks a More...

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Dec 26, 2008

Enrique rated it:

En esta historia, Coetzee habla de un imperio el cual espera la invasion de los barbaros, Coetzee no pone tiempo, lugar ni nombre al imperio, por lo que puede aplicar en varios casos a las colonizaciones de los grandes poderes europeos en cualquier epoca, en este libro, Coetzee narra a través del magistrado, quiene es la unica persona con conciencia en la trama, toda la injusticia y el exterminio a los nativos durante la colonizacion del imperio, el magistrado es un personaje que trata de cerrar More...

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Oct 01, 2011

Lauren rated it:

J.M. Coetzee is an author's author. He has had numerous literary awards and lavish critical praise bestowed upon him, and yet I never hear him mentioned among anyone's favorite writers (perhaps I am swimming with the wrong literary schools?). This is the third book of his I have picked up (after Disgrace and Elizabeth Costello) and though the themes of the three works vary widely, they have this in common: they are gorgeously written, trenchant pieces of prose which have enormous moral complexit More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Aug 10, 2011

La Stamberga dei Lettori rated it:

Aspettando i barbari non è una lettura particolarmente piacevole. Il lettore lo comprende quasi subito. L'ambientazione indefinita, ovvero la provincia più estrema di un immaginario impero ai confini con i territori abitati dai Barbari, non aiuta il lettore a immaginarsi la vicenda del romanzo. Inoltre ricorrono scene di sgradevole crudeltà, di cui sarà vittima anche il protagonistra del romanzo, narrato sempre in prima persona. Per alcuni versi Aspettando i barbari può ricordare Il deserto dei More...

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Jul 09, 2011

Henry added it

Thesis statements from this book which may as well represent Coetzee's body of work, his anti-imperialist and misogynistic old-man savagery, from what I've seen:

"I behave in some ways like a lover--I undress her, I bathe her, I stroke her, I sleep beside her--but I might equally well tie her to a chair and beat her, it would be no less intimate." (42)

"What has made it impossible for us to live in time like fish in water, like birds in air, like children? It More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

May 05, 2011

Jason rated it:

The Magistrate of the Empire waits out the days until his retirement. His has been a mostly happy life, if mostly devoid of relationships outside of his lust for a young prostitute, but then the Empire arrives, seeking out terrorists. Well, they're called barbarians, but the point stands. What the book follows are the increasing atrocities of empire and the magistrate rebelling against these, becoming an enemy of the state himself and a prisoner, tortured and abused.

This book is clearl More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Mar 13, 2011

R. August rated it:

Reading "Await Your Reply" I had it figured out half way through, and half way through this I had it figured out. It seems the difference between good writing and great writing is that rather than feeling superior over prosaic plot lines I felt sinking inevitability and struggled against it as it loomed closer and closer, trying to get the characters to do other than what I knew they would. I can see what the other reviews say about the allegory of the Empire and the Conrad-esque deg More...

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Jan 22, 2011

Sean rated it:

There is much that can be said about the novel "Waiting for the Barbarians" by J.M. Cotzee. The author has constructed a first-rate allegory that explores the personal costs of a man caught in the middle of the forces of empire. Not always pleasant but infinitely thought provoking, "Waiting for the Barbarians" is perhaps the best fictional mediation on the cost of control, the psychology of colonialism and the perpetuation of empire, painted with an interesting, engaging narr More...

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Dec 07, 2010

Stasa rated it:

This is a writer's response as part of my MFA.

Response to Waiting for the Barbarians, by J.M. Coetzee
On the heels of Riddley Walker I found some interesting parallels between Hoban’s writing and Coetzee’s writing. Both used the first person to make this more personal, more like someone telling the events directly. The tense is primarily present tense. The worlds, the milieu, are made up—that is they are not present day and not actual events and places—and finally the entire st More...

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