Waiting for the Barbarians

Waiting for the Barbarians is a novel by the South African writer J. M. Coetzee. First published in 1980, it was chosen by Penguin for its series Great Books of the 20th Century and won both the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize for fiction. American composer Philip Glass has also written an opera of the same name based on the book which premiered in September 2005 at Theater Erfurt, Germany. Coetzee is said to have taken the title as well as to have been heavily influenced by the 1904 poem "Waiting for the Barbarians" by the Greek poet Constantine P. Cavafy. Coetzee's novel was as well deeply influenced by Italian writer Dino Buzzati's novel The Tartar Steppe (which too had been based on Cavafy's poem). Plot The story is narrated in the first person by the unnamed magistrate of a settlement that exists on the territorial frontier of "The Empire". The Magistrate's rather peaceful existence...