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J.M. Coetzee's latest novel, The Schooldays of Jesus, will soon be available from Viking
With the same electrical intensity of language and insight that he brought to Waiting for the Barbarians, J.M. Coetzee reinvents the story of Robinson Crusoe—and in so doing, directs our attention to the seduction and tyranny of storytelling itself
In 1720 the eminent man of letters Daniel Foe is approached by Susan Barton, lately a castaway on a desert island. She wants him to tell her story, and that of the enigmatic man who has become her rescuer, companion, master and sometimes lover: Cruso. Cruso is dead, and his manservant, Friday, is incapable of speech. As she tries to relate the truth about him, the ambitious Barton cannot help turning Cruso into her invention. For as narrated by Foe—as by Coetzee himself—the stories we thought we knew acquire depths that are at once treacherous, elegant, and unexpectedly moving.
- Sales Rank: #204202 in Books
- Published on: 1988-01-05
- Released on: 1988-01-05
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 7.80" h x .50" w x 5.10" l,
- Binding: Paperback
- 160 pages
From Publishers Weekly
This slim novel by the author of Waiting for the Barbarians is both a variant of Robinson Crusoe and a complex parable of art and life. PW noted that the characters' relationships are "an allegory of the evil social order that poisons the author's native South Africa."
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Cast adrift by a mutinous crew, Susan Barton washes ashore on an isle of classic fiction. For the next year, Robinson Cruso sculpts the land while Friday mutely watches Susan intrude upon their loneliness. Life is mere pattern for the two unquestioning castaways, but Susan is not of their story and she pushes Cruso for rationales that don't exist in a world of imagination. Finally rescued and returned to London, Susan leads Friday to Daniel Foe, the author who will write their tale. Foe, however, sees a different story and seeks "to tell the truth in all its substance." Discovering such truth is Coetzee's aim in Foe, an intriguing novel strikingly different from his earlier works. Here he scrutinizes the gulf between a story and its telling, giving us a thought-provoking text wonderfully rich in meaning and design. Paul E. Hutchison, English Dept., Pennsylvania State Univ., University Park
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Review
"A small miracle of a book...of marvelous intricacy and overwhelming power." —The Washington Post Book World
"Foe is a finely honed testament to its author's intelligence, imagination, and skill.... The writing is lucid and precise, the landscape depicted mythic yet specific." —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
Most helpful customer reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
Imaginative and provocative, but impenetrably enigmatic
By R. M. Peterson
This novel (novella?) is 157 pages. For the first 111 pages I was enthralled, especially as I had read Defoe's "Robinson Crusoe" only two months before. FOE is J.M. Coetzee's updated twist of "Robinson Crusoe". ("Foe" was Daniel Defoe's surname at birth; he later fancified it.)
FOE is the account of an Englishwoman, Susan Barton, about what happened on the South Atlantic island where Cruso (spelled by her without an "e") and Friday were marooned and how Daniel Foe came to write their story. Years after Cruso and Friday, Susan had been shipwrecked on that same island and she spent a year there with the two men before all three were "rescued" (Cruso and Friday were taken off the island much against their wishes) by a passing English ship. Cruso died before the ship reached England and Susan resolved to tell and publish their collective story in order to make money. So she enters into an arrangement with the experienced writer Daniel Foe.
The problem is that Susan's story about what happened is rather dull. Cruso had no tools, no weaponry, no seeds, nor any writing implements, and he had not transformed the isolated isle into an English Garden of Paradise. He was not imbued with the Protestant work ethic; in truth, he was bland, rude, and somewhat unhinged. Friday was equally asocial; he pursued his own eccentric rituals and what made him even more inscrutable was the fact that his tongue had been cut out by slavers (or, Susan worries, perhaps by Cruso) so that he had no way to express himself vocally. Friday was, in modern parlance, the embodiment of "the Other". Nor had anything especially dramatic ever occurred on the island: no footprints in the sand or attacks by cannibals, for instance.
Though the entire novel is slippery, rendering absolute certitude about anything virtually impossible, I can say with some confidence that Foe found Susan's story unmarketable. Given the actual novel "Robinson Crusoe", it is reasonably safe to conclude that in Coetzee's vision, Foe took many liberties and invented many things and, significantly, he wrote Susan out of the story.
Now we enter the realm where Coetzee's commentary shoulders aside his story. First, of course, there is the matter of ignoring women in our traditional stories of the civilizing of the globe. Friday, deprived of tongue and speech, seemingly stands for some sort of comment (but what, precisely?) on imperialism and colonialism. In addition, there would seem to be comments (but what, precisely?) on language and semiotics, on freedom and slavery, on story-telling and creativity, and on truth.
The novel tantalizingly presents itself as an allegory about something(s), but it ends up being impenetrably enigmatic. That is largely because in its last 45 pages the story spirals out of control. I am left with so little idea of what Coetzee might have been driving at that I really don't care, and I rather suspect that he doesn't really know either. It is almost as if, after writing the first 111 pages, Coetzee dropped some acid before dashing off the concluding 45 pages. Whatever the reason, the last 45 pages strike me much as the dreams of a mystic lunatic and I am left feeling somewhat cheated and resentful.
I understand that FOE is thought by many to be the "archetypal postmodern" novel. I guess I am too old-fashioned.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
Another Crusoe
By Roger Brunyate
"I am not a story, Mr. Foe. I may impress you as a story because I began my account of myself without preamble, slipping overboard into the waves and striking out for the shore. But [...] there was a life before the water [...] which makes up a story I do not choose to tell. [...] I am a free woman who asserts her freedom by telling her story according to her own desire."
The woman is Susan Barton, speaking to the writer Daniel Defoe (he added the "de" to his family name later). Rescued after being cast away on the Caribbean island, she has sought out the author to write her story and make her fortune. Her island adventure, which she tells in the first part, is a rather different version of the story that we know from ROBINSON CRUSOE. But the larger part of the book consists of a dialogue between Susan and Foe, partly in letters, partly in person, examining the themes referred to here: the nature of the writing process, the way our lives are shaped by the stories we choose to tell about them, and above all the meaning of freedom, especially as a woman or a member of a subjugated race.
Cruso (as the name is spelled here) was already on the island when Susan got there. Instead of the numerous items that Defoe will allow him to salvage from the wreck, Susan's Cruso came ashore with nothing but a knife and lives much more simply. So far from being rescued from cannibals, Friday was washed ashore with him, but he is a mute whose tongue has been cut out in childhood. At sixty, Cruso has no wish to leave the island, and when a ship does arrive to carry them away, he dies on the voyage, leaving Susan as the only witness, other than Friday who cannot speak.
Susan continues to write to Foe, even after he has been forced to flee his creditors. She takes possession of his empty house, sitting at the author's desk, writing letters that may never be delivered. But as she essentially shapes her own narrative, Defoe is simultaneously shaping hers, eventually writing her out of her own tale -- but also adding new elements as though to make a separate novel out of her, as he would later do with MOLL FLANDERS. Hence Susan's forcible objections in the quotation with which I started. Indeed, Defoe's inventions come to take surreal form, as Susan is visited by a long-lost daughter conjured from the writer's imagination in response to her grief, but bearing no resemblance to her real child. Coetzee's interest in recursive narratives has continued to the present day, as in his recent SUMMERTIME, but this 1986 novel is the most intellectually abstract of his that I have read, though fascinating in the manner of an Escher drawing.
But there are serious points behind the mind-games. Most obviously, the feminist complaint that although Susan can serve as Foe's muse, she has no control over the artistic progeny. Her castaway story will be reshaped with the relatively passive Crusoe as hero, whereas Defoe's heroines would all be fallen women. Even more interesting, for a South African author writing under Apartheid, is the silencing of Friday. Unable to speak for himself, unable even to write, Friday's existence depends entirely on those who write his story for him, and even Susan's willingness to accord him the freedom she claims for herself is valueless without the ability to give him the narrative to support it.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Five Stars
By clarkk
Hell, this is Coetzee--read the book.
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