Foe (Hardcover)

by J. M. Coetzee (Author) "'At last I could row no further..." (more)
Key Phrases: Susan Barton, Clock Lane, New World (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Imaginatively conceived and richly orchestrated, this slim novel by the author of Waiting for the Barbarians is at once a variant of the immortal Robinson Crusoe and a complex parable of art and life. Englishwoman Susan Barton, having been cast away by Portuguese mutineers, reaches the remote island occupied by another castaway named Cruso (sic and his man Friday. She lives on the desolate rocky island for over a year before they are "rescued" by an English ship. Cruso dies en route, and she and Friday are transported to England. The world, she says, demands stories of its adventurers; but how is the story to be told? Indeed, what really happened and what are the facts of her life? What of the mute Friday, sole witness to the events, whose tongue was cut out by marauding slavers? Or did Cruso commit the savage act? In England, she beseeches author Daniel Foe (sic to take the raw material and make a convincing narrative. How does art give life to experience, enliven it, make it vivid, memorable? The truth is sly, evasive; but the novelist closes in upon it with poetic precision to create a small, enigmatic work of art. We are pressed to see in the characters' relationships an allegory of the evil social order that poisons the author's native South Africa.
Copyright 1986 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.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 157 pages
• Publisher: Viking Adult; 1st Edition edition (February 23, 1987)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0670813982
• ISBN-13: 978-0670813988
• Product Dimensions: 20 x 20 x 20 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars See all reviews (23 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,113,671 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

31 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Robinson Crusoe Re-Visioned, May 2, 2001

By	Melvin Pena (Evanston, IL United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Foe: A Novel (King Penguin) (Paperback)

J.M. Coetzee is an extraordinarily gifted and insightful writer. The only other novel of his that I've read is "Life and Times of Michael K," but both that and this novel, "Foe" are sparse, beautiful, enigmatic works. "Foe" takes a postmodern look at Daniel Defoe's classic eighteenth-century novel, "Robinson Crusoe." Of course, reading Defoe's novel first gives you the fullest understanding of the background Coetzee is working from, but I believe that as much as anything, it is unnecessary to be intimately familiar with Defoe. Defoe's novel is an appropriate novel to rewrite because the plot is one that is ingrained into Western consciousness - everyone knows the basic story of shipwreck, survival, and rescue.

"Foe" takes such preconceived ideas and shows that although we may feel comfortable with that basic narrative, comfortability can cause us to take stories for granted and make us complacent readers. In "Foe," Coetzee turns the story, characters, and subject positions of Defoe's foundational novel on their heads to disrupt our ready notions of truth, trust, and story. The major question we ask throughout the very short novel is 'Who's story is the right one?' Is there ever one right story?

Coetzee turns the autocratic, garrulous, enterprising Robinson Crusoe into Cruso, a stoic castaway who no longer cares to leave his island and spends each day in a futile pursuit. He builds terraces where nonexistent future generations can plant imported seeds. Friday, Cruso's servant, is changed from a subservient, excitable islander to a former African slave who may or may not have a tongue and does not speak at all. Coetzee's major innovation is the introduction of Susan Barton, the novel's primary narrator, who tells the story of the island in conversation and letters addressed to Daniel Foe, a noted English author.

Susan, as narrator, deals intensely throughout the novel with trying to get Cruso's story published. Meanwhile, she attempts to handle her own issues, to wit, her search for a missing daughter, Foe's disappearance, and her torturous relationship with the mute Friday. Overall, this is a fantastic novel, fraught with problems of language, narrative, and gender.

35 of 40 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A retelling of a classic tale that's actually a reinvention., September 2, 1996

By A Customer

This review is from: Foe: A Novel (King Penguin) (Paperback)

Foe begins as a realistic retelling of Daniel Defoe's classic tale, though names and situations have been sufficiently altered make such a retelling in fact a reinvention. What begins as a straightforwardly realistic narration, ostensibly epistolary in form, becomes, in the end, a discursive metaphor for the act of storytelling itself. Susan Barton begins as narrator of the novel but ends it as muse to an author (named Foe) whose own narration has become canonical (even to the point of being widely-known but rarely read). The 1st 40 pages of the book are linear--the shipwreck, the washing-ashore, the meeting of Friday & Cruso (sic), and--finally--rescue. But the subsequent parts of the novel, though no less linear, become less about a tale of shipwreck survival than about a tale of narrative survival. Susan Barton begins battling the punningly-named Foe for the survival of her original conception of herself as Cruso's living successor, while Foe, becoming more authoritative than mere scribe of her exploits, posits such possibilities as her daughter's reunion with Susan and those details which actually appear in the Robinson Crusoe we all know. The tension and focus shift (almost imperceptibly) from what is (in Susan's mind) to what could be (in Foe's). Susan is transmogrified from an actual character to merely the muse--the ennervating inspiration--that drives Foe to write his book. In the end, what we get is the story of how a story shapeshifts into its final form and how its failed possibilities are no less alive than its successful ones. The novel dives into the wreck of Daniel Defoe's failed alternatives and succeeds by plumbing what depths _Robinson Crusoe_ (probably) did not

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Whos story is this anyway?, January 26, 2004

By	CJ Mathews (Nottingham, UK) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Foe: A Novel (King Penguin) (Paperback)

"Foe" is a short yet complex and rewarding engagement with Daniel Defoe's classic account of the archetypal castaway Robinson Crusoe. Coetzee approaches the story of Crusoe as one of dubious genealogy - in "Foe" it is related by the opportunistic castaway Susan Barlow, a woman who found herself stranded on the island kingdom of a man named Cruso and his mute servant Friday. At the time of the novel's telling, Susan and Friday are in England where she is attempting to get the tale of her adventures retold by the embattled writer Daniel Foe.

The primary concern of this novel is the art of storytelling. It is a story that is almost painfully conscious of its status as a story; as a narrative, or rather, collection of narratives. As such, it is continually punctuated with other stories and echoes of other stories - fairy tales, myths, other novels - and is continually debating the ownership and authorship of the tale being told. This narrative reflexivity becomes most apparent when Foe acknowledges that they (the characters) are themselves the creations, `puppets', of some `conjurer unknown to us'.

The relationships between the four main characters - Susan, Cruso, Friday and Foe - are constantly explored in terms of master/slave dialectics. The mutual dependency central to the master/slave dialectic is emphasized continually and the four characters form a complex web of relationships with reciprocating obligations and reliances resonating through the text. The most interesting of these bonds is Susan's relationship with Friday - a man whom she frequently regards as lacking even the most basic status as a person yet depends on nonetheless. Tellingly, Friday's lack of a tongue dooms his `story' to be forever lost. Through this relationship the text raises, if allegorically, the wider issue of the impact of European imperialism upon those who became subjects and their resultant lack of `voice' in the culture that enveloped them.

The novel's primary flaw is its overt and all-consuming concern with issues of narrative voice and the status of language. These preoccupations verge on being heavy-handed and may deter some readers, particularly in the third section where Susan and Foe repeatedly engage in discussions of their own position in relation to the story that is being told. However, if you are even remotely interested in these issues you will find it a compelling and intelligent work.

Because of the overriding concern with issues of narrative voice and origin in "Foe", the first-time reader of Coetzee would be better directed to either of his two Booker Prize-winning novels - "The Life and Times of Michael K" and "Disgrace" - as they are more orthodox (and more importantly, artistically superior) works and would serve as better introductions to the work of this important and increasingly recognised author. Nevertheless, "Foe" is a unique if imperfect accomplishment and well worth a read.