Sohail Ahmed

I haven't enjoyed a novel in recent years as much as I did "Waiting for barbarians". The theme is a favorite of mine - the rebellion of an erstwhile worker of an Empire against it. This theme could have looked ordinary in the hands of an ordinary writer. But Coetzee did not go the oft trodden path. His focus was on the estrangement between the so-called civilized people and the barbarians. One of the reasons that I loved this novel was that it was plain old story telling - except that Coetzee employs present tense - instead of the tools such as magical realism; the novel, for me, shows that conventional storytelling has the power to tell modern complex stories.