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Ranked #8 in South Africa, Ranked #20 in African — see more rankings.
Reviews and Recommendations
We've comprehensively compiled reviews of Waiting for the Barbarians from the world's leading experts.
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Imraan Coovadia Waiting for the Barbarians was the Coetzee book that I was always most attached to – I think it’s the Coetzee book that most South Africans are attached to. Coetzee takes the mood of the 1980s state of emergency – when people were being detained and disappearing and there was a fear of communist or black madness on the borders – and he makes it more interesting by creating this partial allegory of some unnamed empire. The whole point of the book is contained in the title. It’s a bit like The Importance of Being Earnest. It’s a book you can’t imagine with a different title. It’s about a... (Source)