Waiting for the Barbarians.

COETZEE, J.M.

$4,000.00

Item Number: 4295

London: Secker & Warburg, 1980.

First British edition, preceding the South African first of this modern classic by the Nobel Prize-winning author. Octavo, original cloth. Signed by J.M. Coetzee on the title page. Fine in a fine dust jacket without the usual sunning to the spine with a small closed tear. Housed in a custom half morocco clamshell box made by the Harcourt Bindery. An exceptional example.

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.