Even more misterious and deep than the first two times I read it. In spite of the slow reading, the following of the clues, the theories built over its passages, themes, characters, I still don't know what is really happening there. What is this ship? (Costello?) asks the dead body of Viernes. Perhaps it doesn't matter. What matters here is that this is a truly infinite book, an immortal one. One can read it over and over again and it will never lose a bit of interest, beauty, misteriousness and a dark, serious charm. It is a piece like no other. Impressive.

This completes my detoxification of Robinson Crusoe. Foe is Coetzee’s elegant, imaginative examination of Defoe’s classic. Its not a retelling or a sequel - it recreates a new dish from the same ingredients. Crusoe (Cruso here) dies early on & Coetzee introduces a woman character as the lead and Defoe himself (under his ‘real’ name, Foe). The cleverest conceit of all is that Friday’s role is greatly expanded, but as in the original, he remains completely mute. Coetzee makes this muteness speak volumes. Post-modern and post-colonial, Foe is also a meditation on story-telling and the life (as opposed to the death, cf Barthes) of the author.

n  
"We must make Friday's silence speak, as well as the silence surrounding Friday."
n

Daniel Defoe /Daniel Foe's novel Robinson Crusoe was Coetzee's childhood favorite novel. At first, he had thought it was a memoir of the title character. In fact, Foe published the book as an account of a real castaway. The realization that the character was fictional, this intermixing of real and fictional, had a huge impact on him. Besides this novel, Coetzee also visited the Robinson Crusoe in the short story he read as Nobel prize acceptance speech, 'He and His Man'. The theme of which can be summed up in the following quote (from 'Foe'):

n  
"Cruso rescued will be a deep disappointment to the world; the idea of a Cruso on his island is a better thing than the true Cruso tight-lipped and sullen in an alien England."n  
n

That is the case here as well. Besides being an adventure novel, Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (I haven't read the book) is a symbol of British Nationalism in its worst form "He is the true prototype of the British colonist. ... The whole Anglo-Saxon spirit in Crusoe: the manly independence, the unconscious cruelty, the persistence, the slow yet efficient intelligence, the sexual apathy, the calculating taciturnity." (James Joyce)

Of course, the ideal of an intellectual living an isolated life in Britain with no or little experience of sea and seamen is going to be nowhere near the actual people who might be cast away. The Crusoe as Coetzee presented him is not adventurous, not at all persistent in his effort to escape, doesn't try to start a civilisation, had no offers from cannibals for him to refuse and thus prove his nationalism, didn't rescue Friday, rather bought him, was pretty happy in living on an island and doesn't make half as good a story.

However, the book is far more than a retelling - we have only talked one-third of the book. The book later goes meta-fictional, creating a new conversation between real and fiction and fills itself with reflections on the art of story-telling:

later fills itself of reflections on the art of story-telling:

n  
'When I reflect on my story I seem to exist only as the one who came, the one who witnessed, the one who longed to be gone: a being without substance, a ghost beside the true body of Cruso. Is that the fate of all storytellers?'
n

And then the most important theme, the silent ones.

The narrator, for the most part, is Susan Barton. In Coetzee's alternative version, it is Susan who brought Crusoe's story to Foe (who is present as a character), for him to write. A voice that disappeared in Foe's book, just as the female voices usually disappeared from narratives written by men at that time. And she herself lacks the confidence, rather choosing to take the passive position of muse, who must speak through others.

n  
n  

n   
"Do you know the story of the Muse, Mr. Foe? The Muse is a woman, a goddess, who visits poets in the night and begets stories upon them. In the accounts they give afterwards, the poets say that she comes in the hour of their deepest despair and touches them with sacred fire, after which their pens, that have been dry, flow. When I wrote my memoir for you and saw how like the island it was, under my pen, dull and vacant and without life, I wished that there were such a being as a man-Muse, a youthful god who visited authoresses in the night and made their pens flow. But now I know better. The Muse is both goddess and begetter. I was intended not to be the mother of my story, but to beget it. It is not I who am the intended, but you."
n  

n  
n

Hers, though, is not the only silenced voice. Another silenced voice is that of Friday. Probably most remarkable feature of the Foe's book was Crusoe's slave Friday whom he named after the day he was found. The lack of a name in itself is symbolic. To drive the point home, Coetzee made Friday's silence physical by making him tongueless. Now, a real tribesman wouldn't probably won't be as submissive as Foe will have us believe, so much that'Man-Friday' the proverbial phrase, is derived from the name of this character, for a perfectly submissive servant but:

n  
"Friday has no command of words and therefore no defense against being re-shaped day by day in
conformity with the desires of others."
n

Susan, a mother who has lost her daughter, adopts Friday.

n  
"A woman may bear a child she does not want and rear it without loving it, yet be ready to defend it with her life."
n

In her compassion for Friday, she is able to see through the hypocrisy of Western Colonialism. Were Westerns really trying to civilize people or did they just wanted slaves:

n  
n  "There are times when benevolence deserts me and I use words only as the shortest way to subject him to my will. At such times I understand why Cruso preferred not to disturb his muteness."n  
n

or

n  
"How did he differ from one of the wild Indians whom explorers bring back with them, in a cargo of
parakeets and golden idols and indigo and skins of panthers, to show they have truly been to the Americas?"
n

And thus, Coetzee starts talking about the conditions of underdogs - women, Africans:

n  
"How dismal a fate it would be to go through life unkissed! Yet if you remain in England, Friday, will that not become your fate? Where are you to meet a woman of your own people? We are not a nation rich in slaves."
n

Susan frequently compares Friday and at times herself to a dog, not to belittle Friday or herself but:

n  
"Rather I wish to point to how• unnatural a lot it is for a dog or any other creature to be kept from its kind; also to how the impulse of love, which urges us toward our own kind, perishes during
confinement or loses its way."
n

Coetzee is very particular about animal rights, he has said something similar in 'Disgrace' as well.

Probably, talking about his own literary ambitions, Coetzee say, we must make the underdogs speak, must help them where they need help. Susan wants Friday to be able to speak, feeling the inhumanity and loneliness of the power she will otherwise have on Foe.

n  

n   
"I say that the desire for answering speech is the desire for the embrace of, the embrace by, another being. Do I make my meaning clear? You are very likely a virgin, Friday. Perhaps you are even unacquainted with the parts of generation. Yet surely you feel, however obscurely, something within you that draws you toward a woman of your own kind, and not toward an ape or a fish. And what you want to achieve with that woman, though you might puzzle forever over the means were she not to assist you, is what I too want to achieve, and compared in my similitude to an
answering kiss."
n  

n  
n

But she doesn't have high hopes:

n  
"Nature did not intend me for a teacher, I lack patience."
n

The Foe of the story though is optimistic:

n  
"The waterskater, that is an insect and dumb, traces the name of God on the surfaces of ponds, or so the Arabians say. None is so deprived that he cannot write."
n

Note- I haven't read Robinson Crusue, all information about that book I used here is Wiki-sourced.

O perspectivă interesantă asupra romanului Robinson Crusoe narată de o femeie naufragiată pe aceeași insulă. Multă critică socială, fragmente epistolare, final deschis - există, până la urmă, destule elemente care să motiveze lectura, dar parcă ar lipsi ceva.

ترجمه‌ ي ونداد جليلي چندان دلچسب نبود و ديگر اينكه رمان بيش از اندازه درونگرا و پر استعاره است و به گمانم خواننده ي انگليسي زبان بسيار ازش لذت خواهد برد تا خواننده ي ترجمه هاي دم دستي خوان ِ پارسي

A reinvention of Robinson Crusoe with a widow Susan Barton on her way back from Brazil on an unsuccessful search for her daughter. She is cast off a ship after the crew mutiny and kill the Captain her lover. She finds herself on Crusoe’s island. Friday is basically Crusoe’s slave with his tongue out. The theme of not being able to tell his story is replicated with Susan after she is saved and returns to England. She meets Defoe but he finds her story boring and wanted to change it to something more entertaining with cannibals and monsters. Rather than the day to day monotony of being shipwrecked on an island.

The power dynamic of Susan and Friday and then her with Defoe is thought provoking. She is unable to write her story as Friday cannot tell his and relies on Defoe. A good novella well written. The building of the terraces on the island for crops that will never be planted. The dancing by Friday to keep warm in cold London to what is reality and what is the true story behind Susan Barton all made for me an entertaining read.

I keep wanting to like Coetzee, but I just can't get past my irritation at his characters' voices and the opaque symbolism scattered throughout. This is my second venture into one of his novels (the first being "Disgrace") and while I'm interested in the themes he explores, I can't get past the pretensions of his prose to actually be engaged by his writing.

I assume this book would be studied in High Schools or Unis. The writing of a Nobel prize winner is typically full of hidden meanings, styles and unique structures. This book has these and more.
Susan Barton is castaway on a remote island and finds herself with Friday and Cruso. They are rescued, Cruso dies and Barton tries to get the author Daniel Foe to wrote her (or Cruso's stories).
Told in four parts as a story, then as a series of letters, then a more standard narrative and lastly in a short dream-like sequence.
The book covers the silence of the underclass (Cruso has no tongue), the power of the privileged, the fiction of writing fiction and what is reality.

Foarte fainã prima jumãtate a cãrţii, apoi cam multã imaginaţie si metaforã per me. Interesantã abordare oricum

Ovaj roman sažimam kroz psovanje. Prvo sam psovala fakultetskoj obavezi jer bih ovo kao "morala" pročitati, pa sam psovala profesorici kojoj je ovo nadroman i na koji vjerovatno masturbira, pa sam onda psovala sebi jer sam uzela da čitam ovo sranje, i onda na kraju malo psovke i za autora. Nemoguće je ne opsovat majku i zapitat se kako neko na 150 stranica može strpati toliko sranja i šatrologije!

It's not hard to see what drew Coetzee to the Cruso myth. Stranded on an austere patch of land with only a black servant to keep you company: reminds me an awful lot of the author's native South Africa. The long first section of the book, in which Susan Barton washes ashore on Cruso's island, is a tour-de-force, one of the best sustained pieces of writing Coetzee's ever done. But the shift to England, where Susan enlists Daniel Defoe to write her story, comes along with endless ruminations on the interplay between between fact and fiction--questions over who is truly birthing the story and, god help us, the role of the muse--and the thing gets rather tiresome. Coetzee has this in common with Italo Calvino: he's an elegant, world-class writer who nonetheless could get diverted by meta-fictional games that, I'm sorry, are a little beneath him.

Meanwhile, the author's refusal to resolve intriguing questions he's set up--such as the true identity of a girl who claims to be Susan's long-lost daughter--strikes me as needlessly tight-assed. I'm all for subtlety, but this book keeps too many secrets to itself. The way Susan leads the girl into a forest and leaves her there could have had the uncanny force of a Hawthorne story (think of something like "Roger Malvin's Burial"); instead, it simply seems unfinished.

Still, the settings are beautifully wrought, and in Friday's plight Coetzee shows us how slavery scrapes hollow not only the slave but the master: late in the book, Susan tries to put Friday back on a boat to Africa, but there is nowhere for him to go--his Africa is long gone. This is a noble failure of a book if ever there was one.

For those interested in cover art: the cover painting is by John Collier, whose art appears on all the Penguin editions of Coetzee's books, and is a haunting piece of work.

I turn the bottom corners up when I read a passage that is particularly good. When I read Coetzee's books, many pages are turned up. There are few writers that are as masterful in crafting language as he is. His awareness of voice, timbre, and mood is almost matchless in modern writers. And every word is precisely selected. You are aware of this when you read his work generally; certainly aware of it when you read this book as well.

None of his books are easy. This is another thing to note about Coetzee. Novellas are his secret tool for exploring massive questions about humanity: systems of governance, civilization, relationships of power. In Foe he takes on the notion of story and history, and embeds into it the grand narratives of human relations from the past several hundred years.

The strength of Coetzee, though, lies in his ability to take grand narratives and twist and turn inside them so that they are not so grand and not so perfectly idealized. It is an incredible and rare feat for fiction writers, and may be why, when I introduce him to my friends, I explain that he is an essayist of social conflict who happened to become a fiction writer. In this work, he takes on notions of colonialism in its most abstract ways. In particular he talks about race and voice and rights of self-representation. It is stunning. The relations between the actors are nuanced and difficult to make sense of. And, most tellingly, it is haunting. The last four pages are filled with the softest, more tragic violence in the entire novel (and, to be sure, this is an incredibly violent novel) - and its meaning, like all of his other works I have read, is not found in an answer but more questions.

I would recommend this work. I would recommend it in full. I would warn that it, like all of his works, is not easy to sink into at first. Indeed, this work, of all of them, believes in itself in its opening section less than any other. But it comes out strong. Foe is a masterful, impeccably constructed tale that, for any other author would be a crowning jewel. For Coetzee, it is merely the fine silverware that we take for granted because we know he better to show us.