Waiting for the Barbarians
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Waiting for the Barbarians
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Narrated by:
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Andrew Wincott
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By:
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J. M. Coetzee
About this listen
For decades the Magistrate has been a loyal servant of the Empire, running the affairs of a tiny frontier settlement and ignoring the impending war with the barbarians. When interrogation experts arrive, however, he witnesses the Empire's cruel and unjust treatment of prisoners of war. Jolted into sympathy for their victims, he commits a quixotic act of rebellion that brands him an enemy of the state.
J. M. Coetzee's prize-winning novel is a startling allegory of the war between oppressor and oppressed. The Magistrate is not simply a man living through a crisis of conscience in an obscure place in remote times; his situation is that of all men living in unbearable complicity with regimes that ignore justice and decency.
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- Length: 4 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 57
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 53
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Story4 out of 5 stars 52
For 10 years Guy Roland has lived without a past. His current life and name were given to him by his recently retired boss, Hutte, who welcomed him, a one-time client, into his detective agency. Guy makes full use of Hutte's files - directories, yearbooks, and papers of all kinds going back half a century - but leads to his former life are few. Could he really be that person in a photograph, a young man remembered by some as a South American attache?
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1 out of 5 stars
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I'm a simple person
- By Angela on 03-20-16
By: Patrick Modiano
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Miguel Street
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Ron Butler
- Length: 5 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 147
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 135
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 134
"A stranger could drive through Miguel Street and just say 'Slum!' because he could see no more." But to its residents, this derelict corner of Trinidad's capital is a complete world, where everybody is quite different from everybody else. In this tender, funny early novel, V. S. Naipaul renders their lives (and the legends their neighbors construct around them) with Dickensian verve and Chekhovian compassion.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Mixed feelings.
- By anton on 10-27-18
By: V. S. Naipaul
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The Schooldays of Jesus
- By: J. M. Coetzee
- Narrated by: James Cameron Stewart
- Length: 9 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 37
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 31
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Story4 out of 5 stars 31
David is the small boy who is always asking questions. Simon and Ines take care of him in their new town, Estrella. He is learning the language; he has begun to make friends. He has the big dog, Bolivar, to watch over him. But he'll be seven soon, and he should be at school. And so, with the guidance of the three sisters who own the farm where Simon and Ines work, David is enrolled in the Academy of Dance. It's here, in his new golden dancing slippers, that he learns how to call down the numbers from the sky.
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2 out of 5 stars
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SEXUAL PERVERSION PRESENTED AS BRILLIANT
- By Amazon Customer on 09-29-18
By: J. M. Coetzee
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Fatelessness
- A Novel
- By: Imre Kertész, Tom Wilkinson - translator
- Narrated by: Josh Bloomberg
- Length: 8 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 40
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 35
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 35
At the age of 14, György Köves is plucked from his home in a Jewish section of Budapest and, without any particular malice, placed on a train to Auschwitz. He does not understand the reason for his fate. He doesn't particularly think of himself as Jewish. And his fellow prisoners, who decry his lack of Yiddish, keep telling him, "You are no Jew." In the lowest circle of the Holocaust, György remains an outsider.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Shockingly Mundane
- By D. A. Elliott on 01-13-20
By: Imre Kertész, and others
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The Conservationist
- By: Nadine Gordimer
- Narrated by: Nadia May
- Length: 7 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall3.5 out of 5 stars 45
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Performance3 out of 5 stars 41
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Story3.5 out of 5 stars 38
Mehring, a rich, powerful and vital industrialist, has all the privileges and possessions that South Africa has to offer. But his possessions refuse to remain objects: his wife, son, and mistress leave him; his foreman and workers become increasingly indifferent to his stewardship; and even the land rises up, as drought, then flood, destroy his farm. Nadine Gordimer, winner of the 1991 Nobel Prize in Literature, paints a portrait of a man both reckless and calculating, left only with the possibility of self-preservation.
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2 out of 5 stars
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I tried three times to listen to this book.
- By Anonymous User on 11-12-11
By: Nadine Gordimer
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Here and Now
- Letters (2008–2011)
- By: Paul Auster, J. M. Coetzee
- Narrated by: Paul Auster, J. M. Coetzee
- Length: 7 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 51
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 45
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 44
Although Paul Auster and J. M. Coetzee had been reading each other’s books for years, the two writers did not meet until February 2008. Not long after, Auster received a letter from Coetzee, suggesting they begin exchanging letters on a regular basis and, “God willing, strike sparks off each other.” Here and Now is the result of that proposal: the epistolary dialogue between two great writers who became great friends. Over three years their letters touched on nearly every subject, from sports to fatherhood, film festivals to incest, philosophy to politics....
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5 out of 5 stars
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Euridite Bromance
- By Dale C. on 08-08-24
By: Paul Auster, and others
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The Feast of the Goat
- A Novel
- By: Mario Vargas Llosa, Edith Grossman - translator
- Narrated by: Alejandro Vargas-Lugo, Coral Peña, Ian Guerra
- Length: 18 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 144
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 127
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 128
Haunted all her life by feelings of terror and emptiness, 49-year-old Urania Cabral returns to her native Dominican Republic - and finds herself reliving the events of 1961, when the capital was still called Trujillo City and one old man terrorized a nation of three million. Rafael Trujillo, the depraved ailing dictator whom Dominicans call the Goat, controls his inner circle with a combination of violence and blackmail. There is a conspiracy against him, and a Machiavellian revolution already underway.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Enlightening But Challenging
- By Sassafras on 03-03-22
By: Mario Vargas Llosa, and others
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The Death of Jesus
- A Novel
- By: J. M. Coetzee
- Narrated by: Cameron Stewart
- Length: 6 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 16
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 12
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Story4 out of 5 stars 12
In Estrella, David has grown to be a tall 10-year-old who is a natural at soccer, and loves kicking a ball around with his friends. His father Simón and Bolívar the dog usually watch while his mother Inés now works in a fashion boutique. David still asks many questions, challenging his parents, and any authority figure in his life. In dancing class at the Academy of Music he dances as he chooses. He refuses to do sums and will not read any books except Don Quixote.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Well-written simple story of an uninteresting Family Life
- By Tom on 10-20-23
By: J. M. Coetzee
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A Bend in the River
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 10 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 574
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 380
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Story4 out of 5 stars 388
In this incandescent novel, V.S. Naipaul takes us deeply into the life of one man, an Indian who, uprooted by the bloody tides of Third World history, has come to live in an isolated town at the bend of a great river in a newly independent African nation. Naipaul gives us the most convincing and disturbing vision yet of what happens in a place caught between the dangerously alluring modern world and its own tenacious past and traditions.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Beautiful, insightful, troubling
- By Lawrence on 01-15-05
By: V. S. Naipaul
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The Echo Maker
- By: Richard Powers
- Narrated by: Bernadette Dunne
- Length: 20 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 139
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 121
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Story4 out of 5 stars 121
On a winter night on a remote Nebraska road, 27-year-old Mark Schluter flips his truck in a near fatal accident. His older sister, Karin, returns to nurse Mark back from a traumatic head injury. But when he emerges from a coma, Mark believes that this woman is really an impostor who looks just like his sister. Shattered, Karin contacts the cognitive neurologist Gerald Weber, who eagerly investigates. What he discovers in Mark slowly undermines even his own sense of being.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Too much time for a boring story
- By HannahMK on 08-06-20
By: Richard Powers
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Late Essays
- 2016-2017
- By: J. M. Coetzee
- Narrated by: Steven Crossley
- Length: 9 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 8
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 5
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Story4 out of 5 stars 4
J.M. Coetzee is not only one of the most acclaimed fiction writers in the world, he is also an accomplished and insightful literary critic. In Late Essays, a thought-provoking collection of 22 pieces, he examines the work of some of the world's greatest writers - from Daniel Defoe and Samuel Beckett to Irene Nemirovsky and Goethe. Challenging yet accessible, literary master Coetzee writes these essays with great clarity and precision, offering listeners an illuminating and profound analysis of a remarkable list of writers and their works.
By: J. M. Coetzee
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Beware of Pity
- By: Stefan Zweig
- Narrated by: Nicholas Boulton
- Length: 14 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall5 out of 5 stars 243
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 215
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 212
In the twilight of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a young cavalry officer is invited to a dance at the home of a rich landowner. There - with a small act of attempted charity - he commits a simple faux pas. But from this seemingly insignificant blunder comes a tale of catastrophe arising from kindness and of honour poisoned by self-regard. Beware of Pity has all the intensity and the formidable sense of torment and of character of the very best of Zweig's work. Definitive translation by the award-winning Anthea Bell.
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5 out of 5 stars
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One of my favorite authors
- By Adeliese Baumann on 03-21-18
By: Stefan Zweig
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The Emigrants
- By: W. G. Sebald
- Narrated by: Mel Foster
- Length: 7 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 75
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 65
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 65
The four long narratives in The Emigrants appear at first to be the straightforward biographies of four Germans in exile. Sebald reconstructs the lives of a painter, a doctor, an elementary-school teacher, and Great Uncle Ambrose. Following (literally) in their footsteps, the narrator retraces routes of exile which lead from Lithuania to London, from Munich to Manchester, from the South German provinces to Switzerland, France, New York, Constantinople, and Jerusalem.
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5 out of 5 stars
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A Masterpiece
- By B. Dowdy on 04-02-18
By: W. G. Sebald
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After You’d Gone
- By: Maggie O'Farrell
- Narrated by: Elle Newlands
- Length: 11 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 166
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 146
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Story4 out of 5 stars 146
Alice Raikes takes a train from London to Scotland to visit her family, but when she gets there she witnesses something so shocking that she insists on returning to London immediately. A few hours later, Alice is lying in a coma after an accident that may or may not have been a suicide attempt. Alice’s family gathers at her bedside and as they wait, argue, and remember, long-buried tensions emerge. The more they talk, the more they seem to conceal. Alice, meanwhile, slides between varying levels of consciousness, recalling her past and a love affair that recently ended.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Very well written.
- By Audible Fan on 02-24-21
By: Maggie O'Farrell
What listeners say about Waiting for the Barbarians
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall3 out of 5 stars
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Performance4 out of 5 stars
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Story2 out of 5 stars
- Sam
- 05-19-24
Mostly about being a horny old man
The majority of the book is about a weird relationship between the main character and a tortured woman.
The narrator's voice is what kept me in. Great performance in my opinion.
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story4 out of 5 stars
- Jen
- 04-05-20
An Interesting Read For The Current Times
Though a difficult read due to the disturbing content at times, I found this book curiously and frighteningly relevant to the current political times in which we are living, especially in the USA. It is a book well worth reading in that it prompts us to look inside ourselves to examine how fear of the unknown can drive us to act as human beings and also to remind us of how resilient we can be in difficult times.
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9 people found this helpful
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Jeff Lacy
- 03-15-21
Impressive performance by Andrew Wincott
Andrew Wincott’s performance is well modulated for this evocative novel. He gets everything right: voices, accents, the narrative.
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2 people found this helpful
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Overall2 out of 5 stars
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Performance1 out of 5 stars
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Story4 out of 5 stars
- Erin Dozier
- 08-12-20
Read it your self
Great story, has all of life’s struggles, and coming to terms with oneself and those insignificant people with significant power.
I should have read it myself.
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2 people found this helpful