In nearly every way J.M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians is a novel beyond the ordinary, and I cannot imagine anyone reading it and remaining unmoved by its anguish and sense of futility. Memories of Kafka and Faulkner dart through Coetzee's surreal fable of racial brutality and injustice. The mood is that of Albert Camus as he examined the condition of existential man in The Stranger.

The novel takes place at a trading outpost at the farthest reaches of a state called "The Empire."…

For around 30 years the aging magistrate who narrates Coetzee's novel has presided over the affairs of the lazy village…. But news of native raids on pack trains and flocks of sheep in the outlands have reached the capital, and the Third Bureau division of the Civil Guard has dispatched a senior officer [Colonel Joll] to investigate banditry along the frontier. (p. 1)

[Barbarian prisoners...