More of My Fraudulent Literary Nonsense: On Coetzee

I read Waiting for the Barbarians by the latest Nobel Prize winner for literature. One of his earlier and lesser works, I believe it to be. It was pretty good overall. It's in 1st person present tense, which is interesting. It's a kind of compelling and fairly blatant commentary on modern imperialism (no, no, no! We're not talking about some communist America-hating Frenchman, so you can turn off the anti-Patriot alert if you're sensitive to that kind of thing: it was published in 1980 by a S. African), criticism of bureaucratic centralism (or so it seemed to me, but that may be a long shot), and the kind of attitude where people villify some nebulous semi-nonexistant enemy in order to justify their cruel treatment of them. Chances are that it has something to do with Apartheid, but I have no clue what the connection is. Nevertheless, given the current circumstances of the world, anybody can probably squeeze a gram of relevance out of Waiting for the Barbarians. The thing is though, is that there was this weird long sexual escapade that the protagonist/narrator/basically-the-only-character had, that I could not figure out. It was pretty important to the plot structure, but I haven't the faintest idea what thematic purpose it serves. In all honesty, I don't think I really understand this novel very well. In fact, I don't think I understand it well enough to be writing this. But I'll be frank, Coetzee's writes has a very fresh and talented style that I enjoy. He does a fabulous job of implying things without actually describing them literally. That can get a bit dense and confusing when not reading super deliberately, but it's very cool when you're being attentive. So Nobel Prize worthy? This book definately isn't, but his other books are probably better. Then again, when I think of some other Nobel Prize winning authors I've read... Toni Morrison (I shudder multiple, multiple times....), Aleksandr Solzenitzhen (I don't know how to spell his name, but the only thing that A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich has going for it is that the incredible bleakness and emptiness of the writing serves to mirror and reinforce the incredible emptiness and bleakness of Soviet labor camps; it only serves to bore me. Although I shouldn't say that it was necesarily a bad novel because it wasn't. It's just more historical and factual than really a fictional novel is generally considered. Although the prison slang is really cool!)

I use parentheses that are way too big way too often on here. Too many splintering trains of thought!