"When some men suffer unjustly . . . it is the fate of those who witness their suffering to suffer the shame of it." This observation by the Magistrate in J. M. Coetzee's 1980 novel, Waiting for the Barbarians, may well serve as an epigraph to the body of work by this South African writer, the first author ever to win Britain's prestigious Booker Prize twice. In 1983, he was honored by the prize committee for his apocalyptic Life and Times of Michael K. In 1999, he again received the prize for Disgrace, a novel about shame and responsibility in post-apartheid South Africa. Coetzee's prose is trim, elegant, enigmatic; David Attwell in his critical study, J.M. Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing, called it "postmodern metafiction." Growing up during the brutal years of South African apartheid, Coetzee deals with the issues of the day, but in an oblique, symbolic, and, at times fable-like manner.
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