Waiting for the Barbarians.

COETZEE, J.M.

$20,000.00

Item Number: 133608

Johannesburg : Ravan Press, 1981.

First South African edition of this modern classic. Octavo, original cloth. Association copy, inscribed by the author to his first wife on the title page, “Philippa love from John.” Philippa Jubber and John Maxwell Coetzee were married in 1963. They had two children, Nicolas (1966–1989) and Gisela (b. 1968). In 1965 Coetzee entered the graduate school of the University of Texas at Austin, and in 1968 graduated with a PhD in English, linguistics, and Germanic languages. His doctoral dissertation was on the early fiction of Samuel Beckett. Fine in a near fine dust jacket with some toning to the spine. Housed in a custom half morocco clamshell box. One of the finest association copies extent.

Waiting for the Barbarians is an allegory of oppressor and oppressed. Not just a man living through a crisis of conscience in an obscure place in remote times, the Magistrate is an analogue of all men living in complicity with regimes that ignore justice and decency. "I have known few authors who can evoke such a wilderness in the heart of a man.... Mr. Coetzee knows the elusive terror of Kafka" (Bernard Levin, The Sunday Times). 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. It was the basis for the 2018 film directed by Ciro Guerra and featuring Mark Rylance, Robert Pattinson, and Johnny Depp.