Iščekujući varvare

Waiting for the Barbarians examines state violence and the responsibility of those who serve it. In a remote frontier town of an unnamed Empire, an ageing magistrate leads a quiet life until Colonel Joll arrives. Sent to investigate a supposed threat from the “barbarians”, Joll begins arresting and torturing prisoners, treating confessions extracted through suffering as proof of an enemy already imagined.

The magistrate shelters a young woman whom the interrogators have left disabled and partly blind. Trying to understand her experience, he confronts his own involvement in structures of domination. His sympathy is entangled with a desire for control, and the novel questions the limits of a privileged observer’s benevolence.

His decision to return the woman to her people brings him into conflict with the Empire’s agents. The official who once administered the law becomes a suspected traitor and experiences the humiliation of state repression himself.

Without fixing its setting to a particular country or period, Coetzee creates an allegory of imperialism, political paranoia and the manufacture of enemies. Its restrained narrative asks whether an individual can reject the violence of an order from which he has long benefited.