About this title: 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 him in prison, branded as an enemy of the state. ...
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Binding: Trade paperback
Publisher: Penguin Books
Date Published: 1982
ISBN-13:9780140061109ISBN:014006110X
Description: Good. No dust jacket as issued. Some underlining, otherwise VG. Trade paperback (US). Glued binding. 160 p. Audience: General/trade. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Date Published: 1982-04-29
ISBN-13:9780140061109ISBN:014006110X
Description: Good. Binding is tight and square. Has underlining and notes through book. Has some light edge and corner wear. Careful packaging and fast shipping. We recommend EXPEDITED MAIL for even faster delivery! read more
Description: Good. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Description: Acceptable. Former Library book. Shows definite wear, and perhaps considerable marking on inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Description: Like New. Book in almost Brand New condition. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Description: Very Good. Former Library book. Great condition for a used book! Minimal wear. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Date Published: 1982
ISBN-13:9780140061109ISBN:014006110X
Description: New. Brand New! Buy with confidence-your satisfaction is guaranteed at B-Logistics! Due to the large scale of our operation, we do not have access to the specific contents/condition of our items. Please note that Expedited shipping is not available at this time. read more
Binding: Softcover
Publisher: Viking Pr
Date Published: 1982-04-01
ISBN-13:9780140061109ISBN:014006110X
Description: NEW. Softcover. From an inventory that is 100% brand-new, 100% direct from the publishers' distribution channel. We carry NO pre-owned, NO remaindered. We pack in CARDBOARD to ensure the pristine quality is maintained. (Bubble-wrap alone is NOT sufficient to protect from USPS equipment. ) Guaranteed brand-NEW, protected with CARDBOARD, your satisfaction is guaranteed. BKLUVID: 9780140061109. read more
"Politically inspired terror and extreme cruelty are mostly premised on fiction but a kind of fiction with no place for pitty and respect. This is a strange story, the wold of a aprawling Empire and its henchmen poised for a war we cannot understand (nor can they1) Gripping, written in the best English prose of present times, it sets off our imagination unbound."
"I have spent some time trying to understand this book, including some of the wonderfully expressive writing that it contains. Ultimately I think this is a book about human psychology on the order of Notes from the Underground, except expanded exponentially in many directions. I could not help but think of Eliot's Gerontion throughout most of the book, as if this were some literary explication:
Here I am, an old man in a dry month, Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain. I was neither at the hot gates Nor fought in the warm rain Nor knee deep in the salt marsh, heaving a cutlass, Bitten by flies, fought.
I am torn between suggesting that this book is a psychological allegory or an allegorical psychology. Of one thing I am absolutely sure after reading this book and that is this: other than that this book details how people can be mistreated in a prison, it has nothing whatsoever to do with Abu Ghraib. If it brings such to mind, I suggest that the reader is understanding this work in only two dimensions.
This book depicts, at very least, a certain man, a magistrate, and his myriad of social relations in which he finds himself both comfortable and uncomfortable. Ultimately, he finds a kind of existential salvation in the satisfaction that he understands things as they are. As the old adage goes, he has gained perhaps the wisdom to know that which he cannot change.
As explanation, I quote:
"In all of us, deep down, there seems to be something granite and unteachable. No one truly believes, despite the hysteria in the streets, that the world of tranquil certainties we were born into is about to be extinguished. No one can accept that an imperial army has been annihilated by men with bows and arrows and rusty old guns who live in tents and never wash and cannot read or write. And who am I to jeer at life-giving illusions? Is there any better way to pass these last days than in dreaming of a saviour with a sword who will scatter the enemy hosts and forgive us the errors that have been committed by others in our name and grant us a second chance to build our earthly paradise?"
As writing goes, it is both stunningly stark and empty in its assessment of human-kind as is, indeed, this entire book. In fact this book requires a certain maturity to read properly because, despite one's religious beliefs, it asks that we examine ourselves in the mirror for even those remote signs of noble success and achievement. It is not so much a condemnation of other people who do other things nearly as much as it is a condemnation in the miracle of life which somehow ended up at the top of the food chain and has abused the earth and its inhabitants continuously ever since.
When the magistrate confronts the colonel behind the window of his carriage when he has returned from the frontier, defeated and in full retreat, the magistrate says: I have a lesson for him that I have long meditated. I mouth the words and watch him read them on my lips: "The crime that is latent in us we must inflict on ourselves," I say. I nod and nod, driving the message home. "Not on others," I say: I repeat the words pointing at my chest, pointing at his."
This drives the major point home as to what this book is about: our inability to atone for ourselves in any meaningful way, despite our best efforts and finely honed principles. In fact, I think that the greater point would be that anything we do will, with finality, effectively destroy the fine ideals with which we began our earthly quest. This major issue reminds me of Burroughs' Naked Lunch where he describes a kind of reality which hits home all at once as one finally realizes "what is on the end of one's fork."
Indeed, this was not the only Eliot which Barbarians brought to mind, but also the Wasteland, especially the preface to the poem, a quote from The Satyricon. As background, the Sibyl, most famous of ancient prophetesses, was granted immortality by Apollo but forgot to ask for eternal youth. Hence she aged hideously and, in this quote, when asked what it is that she desires, she says that she wants to die. So it is that we believe that we want so many things in our lives and yet we come to recognize that these things do not bring us what we want and, thusly,we remain in despair, eternally contemplating our mistakes. In many ways, the magistrate, the one who once enforced the law becomes the Sibyl, unable to find atonement, unable to unlock salvation. The magistrate then becomes each of us.
This is a powerful book, a narrative about morality and amorality, our efforts at selfishness and humanity often amounting to the same thing. It was also a stark depiction of the limits of what we need in order to be human, the pain which we are capable of inflicting on one another without effort and that which we do out of a sense of righteousness which seems to be incapable of finding its mark. Ultimately, however, one is left with the lingering idea of awe and wonder, knowing that each of is required to act towards something and yet unable to do so without composite guilt and responsibility.
Alas, I have to confess that I did not find this a great book, even though it did have pretensions to greatness. I find it well worth reading and very well written, but I tend to think it wandered all over the landscape, introducing us to new visions and new people with whom it was difficult to relate. Itired of the myriad of repeated bodily functions which became tedious and ceased to have much value. Perhaps some graduate student might spend some time and achieve a PhD out of the interpretations, but most of this is about life which is devoid of spirituality and empty. Not only cannot I identify with this outlook, but if I did, I should probably not have bothered to read the book.. and that would have kept me from seeing myself a little closer in the mirror. For this alone, I am grateful for its existence."
"I'm not generally a Coetzee fan, or at least haven't been wild about what I've read of his in the past, but this book was quite beautifully written. There's a wonderful estrangement in the prose, evident from the opening passage on ("I have never seen anything like it: two little discs of glass suspended in front of his eyes in loops of wire."), which, alongside the carefully worked image of blindness throughout the book, works to really bring to question what and when humanity looks aside. Is it too much? Perhaps--Coetzee definitely walks the line between powerful tale and hit you over the head morality; however, I found myself here swept along with the book so intensely that I did not notice. What did cause me to stop and pause, and what is the reason I give this book 4 and not 5 stars, is Coetzee's refusal to really bring into focus any female characters as more than just functions of their (often sexual) relationship to men. Woman as victim; woman as puzzle to be solved; woman as other."
"En esta historia, Coetzee habla de un imperio el cual espera la invasion de los barbaros, Coetzee no pone tiempo, lugar ni nombre al imperio, por lo que puede aplicar en varios casos a las colonizaciones de los grandes poderes europeos en cualquier epoca, en este libro, Coetzee narra a través del magistrado, quiene es la unica persona con conciencia en la trama, toda la injusticia y el exterminio a los nativos durante la colonizacion del imperio, el magistrado es un personaje que trata de cerrar los ojos ante la tirania y el uso de la fuerza desmedida de las tropas imperiales ante los supuestos barbaros, que resultan ser simples nativos y pescadores de la zona, al final este personaje trata de reivindicarse a través del cuidado de una joven barbara con la cual lleva una relacion intima pero no sexual que en cierta forma busca el protagonista para redidmir su alma ante los abusos de su imperio. Todo esto lo lleva a una serie de situaciones inesperadas que al final desmbocan en la caida del ejercito ante los barbaros, que en realidad no es otro que el imperio mismo que causa su caida.
El libro es atemporal y puede aplicarse en varias epocas y paises, Coetzee tiene una forma de narrar muy directa y tenaz aunque a veces un poco cruda pero fulminante e irrebatible, uno de las mejores novelas de uno de los mejores escritores aun vivos"
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