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Foe

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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.

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

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.

This is a fascinating book. About what it means to write and to be written -- to be a character and an author. Very much reminds me of Italo Calvino at points. I really found it beneficial to have recently read _Robinson Crusoe_. Coetzee plays with that text -- tracing it at some points and making important diversions at others. The idea of writers responding to eachother, carrying on a dialogue in their stories, is very interesting.

"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.

I was thrilled to hear that Coetzee won the Nobel Prize, I am a huge fan of his work. This is probably the easiest to read of his books and a good illustration of his talent. Writers and artists will find special meaning in this beautifully crafted metaphor woven around the story of Robinson Crusoe.

In Daniel Defoe's classic novel "Robinson Crusoe," the island is a boys' playhouse with no girls allowed. Solitude is a relentless adventure. And the servant Friday is a slaveholder's pipe dream, a black man with no past who becomes European thanks to the civilizing influence of the white title character. J.M. Coetzee dares to ask: what if all of that is wrong?

This book is divided into four parts. First, the heroine, Susan Barton, is cast adrift and finds herself on the island of Robinson Cruso [sic] and Friday. The beginning is very abrupt, as it must be for the character, and it demands that you as the reader put effort into understanding what has happened and what land mines live under the unfolding events. Susan lives with Cruso for a year, always being treated as an unwanted guest, until the chance comes for her to get them back to England. Cruso dies within sight of England, in despair of his enforced return to society.

Part two is an epistolatory narrative of how Susan tries to set Friday free while also trying to persuade writer Daniel Foe to write her story. (This was Daniel Defoe's birth name, before he decided the prefix on his last name sounded more dignified and businesslike.) In part three, she finally tracks the elusive Foe down and sets about explaining to him why her story is important enough to tell as is -- unsuccessfully, it seems, since he wrote her out of his final draft.

Part four leaves all the narrative behind to allow an unnamed first-person narrator into the ruins of the story. Who is he (she?) and what is the purpose for this intrusion? The most explicitly postmodern portion of the book, this chapter forces you to close the book with more questions than answers when you get to the final page. And this, perhaps, is Coetzee's intent with this substantially inscrutible novel.

This novel is not difficult -- I read it in one evening. But then I had to go back and read it again the next evening, because of the number of questions which plagued me. This is the sort of book that leaves you unsettled just to be in the room. That's why many readers may not like it, and that's where its real magic lives.

Taking on themes of imperialism, the fallacy of civilization, race and sex, and metanarrative, this book takes one of the world's most complex stories, puts it in a new and thought-provoking package, and throws it back in your face. It refuses to let you read passively; to gain from this book, you must talk to it, ask it questions, and mull over the questions it gives you. Perhaps this is why it's popular in reading groups and university courses.

This is not a simple book, not a book to read in bed, not beach reading. It is very vexing and inctricate. And the very qualities that make it so much worth reading may alienate readers who like to be comforted and put to rest by art. But for readers willing to take a chance and make themselves vulnerable to a book, this is a rewarding reading experience from one of the most highly regarded writers in post-colonial English today.

I gaurantee that you won't be able to better spend 3-4 hours than to spend it reading this short novel! In this sort-of-retelling of the Robinson Crusoe story in the 'bigger picture', 'as it really happened', Coetzee asks us to think about what storytelling really is-- What liberties can authors take? Who's story can we really trust? Further, who is the real author of any narrative? But his cleverness and insights into his craft should not be the focus of a discussion about this book.. unless you're trying to figure out the mystical ending..

On its surface, Foe is a re-imagining of the classic Robinson Crusoe story from the perspective of a woman, Susan Barton, who washes up on Crusoe's (here Cruso's) lonely island. The Cruso story, though, is perhaps better conceived as the setting than the plot of this shimmering and introspective book. The real heart of Coetzee's work is not Cruso and his island, but rather the woman, Susan Barton, and what might be called her narrational struggles. Throughout the novel, Susan attempts to impose and maintain her own telling of the story in the face of opposition from the other characters. She is pitted, at different moments, against Cruso, who denies Susan's request that he keep a journal and whose recollection of the past is murky at best; against Friday, whose inability to speak (possibly because he has no tongue) and refusal to communicate in a way Susan can understand prevents her from internalizing and incorporating him into her narrative; against the girl who claims to be Susan's daughter, and whose conflicting version of Susan's own life disrupts the internal coherence of her story; and against the appropriately-named Foe, the writer, who Susan asks to be the author of her story, and against whom she struggles to maintain the boundaries of her tale and of her life.

Running alongside Susan's struggle is the equally impressive and metaphysically slippery presence of Friday, the silent African slave. Echoing a theme common to many of Coetzee's novels, Friday's 'otherness' is, for Susan, inaccessible and a challenge to her worldview, and she responds to his aloof silence with alternating anger and entreaty, attempts to conquer and co-opt. Friday's refusal to communicate with Susan on her terms can be seen, at some level, as an act of resistance against her insistence that he be incorporated into her story and be re-written from her perspective, and also, perhaps, as a metaphor for the ultimate act of post-colonial defiance - the refusal to be incorporated into European world-narratives.

At the end of the day, it is never clear which of these many narratives holds the 'truth' the story, and, indeed, the novel's implication is that 'truth' is ultimately just another word for 'dominant narrative'. A fascinating and intellectually challenging read.

Exquisite. Coetzee's Robinson Crusoe (by Daniel DeFOE) and more, much more. It's difficult to say and I change my mind twice a week but, at the moment, my favorite writer is a toss up between Coetzee and Gore Vidal.