Foe [Hardcover]

J. M. Coetzee (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 31, 1998

When Susan Barton is marooned on an island in the middle of the Atlantic she enters the world of two men. One is a mute negro called Friday; the other is Robinson Cruso. The Island is a society already at work. Its rules are simple: survival, industry and order. Cruso is master and Friday is the slave. Susan watches the creation of a barren world - an architecture of stone terraces above bleak and empty beaches - and waits to be rescued. Back in London, with Friday in tow as evidence of her strange adventure, she approaches the author Daniel Foe. But Foe is less interested in the history of the island than in the story if Susan herself, and battle lines are drawn between writer and subject. Sole witness to this contest, as he was to the mystery of Cruso's island, is the silent Friday.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

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. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

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. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 157 pages
• Publisher: Ravan Press (Pty) Ltd (December 31, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0869753088
• ISBN-13: 978-0869753088
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (30 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #11,066,753 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

J.M. Coetzee's work includes Waiting for the Barbarians, Life & Times of Michael K, Foe, and Slow Man, among others. He has been awarded many prizes, including the Booker Prize (twice). In 2003, he received the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

35 of 36 people found the following review helpful:

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

By 

mp - See all my reviews

This review is from: Foe (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.

36 of 41 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 (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

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Best "Robinson Crusoe" book., April 17, 2005

By 

S. Andrews "~Kuriin~" (In My Imagination) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Foe (Paperback)

I had to read Robinson Crusoe and Foe for my English 101 class, mainly due to the fact that I have/had to write a Compare and Contrast essay on the two. I can safely say that Foe is by far a much better title than its predecessor. Why, I ask myself. I think it's because of the old-style grammar back then, it's just difficult to get into.

Foe on the other hand, starts off right in the beginning with adventure. It's no snooze. I love this book.