Coming Soon: Waiting for the Barbarians

I'm going to just blurt it out, without any excuses or sugarcoating: I have never read any J.M. Coetzee. The first man to ever win the Booker Prize twice, the man whose novel has inspired a Philip Glass opera, the man who is pretty much widely regarded as a bad ass in the contemporary literature world...Never read him. Oops! So when I was browsing my bookshelves the morning, looking for the perfect B.O.W. for next week (without going to the bookstore and dropping some nonexistent dollar dollar bills), my eyes were immediately drawn to the slim black spine snuggled in between Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell and William Congreve's The Way of the World.

Now, I vaguely remember purchasing Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians several years ago while at one of my favorite Charlottesville used bookstores, motivated I'm sure by one of my you-were-an-English-major-for-pete's-sake-and-look-it's-only-three-dollars-buy-it-and-buy-it-now feelings. Since that initial impulse, however, the book has inexplicably gone unread--collecting dust and rubbing covers with Clarke and Congreve--that is until next week! I am really excited about diving into this allegorical volume, which it seems has some parallels to Conrad's Heart of Darkness: issues of colonialism, narrator naiveté, crises of conscience, etc. In fact, I'm curious to know whether my brother Brian has read this one, since he commented in one of last week's posts that HoD made his top three list. Either way, check in two Saturdays from today for a review on this little guy!