Jun
25
A little while ago I posted about having read J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting For the Barbarians. The books has stuck with me mainly for its minimalism and the depth of character it portrays. The magistrate depicted is real enough to hang some clothes on, but at the same time dramatic so that he is not realistic. A true depiction of realism, hyper realism as in the paintings of Estes, becomes tedious and boring almost by definition. It becomes normal and unremarkable. It is the distillation, the concentration of the real into palpable but heightened reality that makes for real drama.
Waiting For the Barbarians strikes a great balance of touched up realism accompanied by the sometimes mundane details that makes it feel livable. So while there were times as a reader I became bored and almost put the book aside, I would not change a detail in it. Waiting For the Barbarians may be much slower and less thrilling than, say, a Le Carre, but I would much sooner hack away some of the detail from Le Carre’s lengthy descriptions than trim a few words off Coetzee’s meandering which gives Waiting For the Barbarians its subtleness
