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Waiting for the Barbarians by J.m. Coetzee
Category: Fiction
How do you eradicate contempt, especially when that contempt is founded on noting more substantial than differences in table manners, variations in the structure of the eyelid? Shall I tell you what I sometimes wish? I wish that these barbarians would rise up and teach us a lesson, so that we would lear ...Show more
Waiting for the Barbarians by J. M. Coetzee
Category: Fiction
"For decades the Magistrate has run the affairs of a tiny frontier settlement, ignoring the impending war between the barbarians and the Empire, whose servant he is. But when the interrogation experts arrive, he is jolted into sympathy with the victims and into a quixotic act of rebellion which lands hi ...Show more
Youth by J.M. Coetzee
Category: Fiction
A student in 1950s South Africa has long been plotting an escape from his country. Studying mathematics, reading poetry, saving money, he tries to ensure that when he arrives in the real world, he will be prepared to experience life to its full intensity. Arriving at last in London, however, he finds ne ...Show more
Youth by J. M. Coetzee
Category: Fiction
He has escaped South Africa. Everything is going well, he has attained his first goal, he ought to be happy. In fact, as the weeks pass, he finds himself more and more miserable. In this unforgiving portrait of the artist as a young man, John flees his apartheid-riven homeland for the bleak London of t ...Show more
Youth by J.M. Coetzee
Category: Fiction
The narrator, a student in 1950s South Africa, plots an escape from his native country, from the stifling love of his mother, from a father whose failures haunt him - and from what he is sure is impending revolution. However, arriving at last in London, he begins the dark pilgrimage of an outsider.