J M Coetzee - Waiting for the Barbarians

Certainly has an impact - this is a powerful novel - but not very much fun to read. It's perhaps too obviously an allegory, and some of its symbolism rather too obvious (the scars on the girl's body, for example) - but I do tend to be a hard marker about these kinds of things, and perhaps I spend too much time reading stuff on the boundaries of 'literature' to really enjoy a Novel like Waiting for the Barbarians. As with all these books that I'm reading for my course, will look forward to the new perspective brought by studying it formally later on.