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.

OK the bottom of page 117 sums it up.
In his words: "It is like a loaf of bread.It will keep us alive,certainly,if we are starved for reading; but who will prefer it when there are tastier confections to be had?"

i think i need to read academic papers on this because i did catch some things while a lot went over my head...
i just picked it up on a whim because we mentioned it in class so i might be returning to it at some point when i acquire more knowledge on it and post-modernism as a whole.
definitely more enjoyable than the pro-english-colonialism hot mess that is the original robinson crusoe which i didn't even bother to rate (why is that a required read in middle school i will never know, but reading it for college was a different and more serious experience.)
i definitely have other thoughts i need to actually form when i read more about this book so this messy attempt at a review might change

A tricky story of narrative power and silence.

Susan Barton is the third, unknown castaway on Crusoe's island, and her account is quite different, both from Cruso's as rendered here, and from the eventual novel that Daniel Defoe will pen. None of these narratives, as far as I can tell, have much basis in history. Defoe seems to have been inspired by the story of marooned sailor Alexander Selkirk, but his story does not mirror any of the fictional counterparts.

Meanwhile, Friday has been changed from an obedient indigenous man who is reinvented as an English servant into a mutilated African slave of unknowable origins, whose endless, unbreakable silence is the heart of this book. Returned to England, Susan and Friday seek out the celebrated but perpetually bankrupt writer Foe, and attempt to have their story told.

This is a slippery, cerebral book -- sometimes more cerebral than entertaining, but occasionally it shifts into moments of being startlingly, vibrantly alive. It confirms Coetzee as one of my favourite writers who I never seek out but who never fails to impress when he falls into my lap.

Male author writing female character. Three guesses as to how it goes.
I could give a higher rating because he raises some points about storytelling and whatnot, but I'm choosing to hold him responsible for his bullshittery as a man writing a woman. Get fucked, C.

This review will overflow with cliché. Such is the sum of my experience. Fox is a meditation on silence. Coetzee explores the natural aspects of such. The sea and wilderness yield no ready wisdom. Such doesn’t communicate in our jejune terms.

There is also an algebra of silence by design. It is a poetry of omissions. It is the fruit of doubt and a coveted rank of humility. The narrative currents of our lives are larded with the silence, we adorn them with caprice and detail. Coetzee intervenes into what understand as a novelistic tradition, a landmark to judge our way. He ruminates and consider alternatives. This disorients and we may grow uneasy. As matters coalesce, he neglects close, only a hum and the whisper of the surf remain.

Foe, J.M. Coetzee

Foe is a 1986 novel by South African-born Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee. Woven around the existing plot of Robinson Crusoe, Foe is written from the perspective of Susan Barton, a castaway who landed on the same island inhabited by "Cruso" and Friday as their adventures were already underway.

Like Robinson Crusoe, it is a frame story, unfolded as Barton's narrative while in England attempting to convince the writer Daniel Foe to help transform her tale into popular fiction. Focused primarily on themes of language and power, the novel was the subject of criticism in South Africa, where it was regarded as politically irrelevant on its release. Coetzee revisited the composition of Robinson Crusoe in 2003 in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech.

Susan Barton is on a quest to find her kidnapped daughter whom she knows has been taken to the New World. She is set adrift during a mutiny on a ship to Lisbon.

When she comes ashore, she finds Friday and Cruso who has grown complacent, content to forget his past and live his life on the island with Friday—tongueless by what Cruso claims to have been the act of former slave owners—in attendance. Arriving near the end of their residence, Barton is only on the island for a year before the trio is rescued, but the homesick Cruso does not survive the voyage to England. In England with Friday, Barton attempts to set her adventures on the island to paper, but she feels her efforts lack popular appeal.

She tries to convince novelist Daniel Foe to help with her manuscript, but he does not agree on which of her adventures is interesting. Foe would prefer to set her story of the island as one episode of a, more formulaic, story of a mother looking for her lost daughter, and when he does write on the story she wishes, fabulates about Cruso's adventures rather than relating her facts. Frustrating Barton's efforts further, Foe, who becomes her lover, is preoccupied with debt and has little time or energy to write about anything. Barton's story takes a twist with the return of someone claiming to be her missing daughter.

عنوانهای چاپ شده در ایران: «آقای فو»؛ «دشمن»؛ نویسنده: جان مکسول کوتسی؛ تاریخ نخستین خوانش روز بیست و نهم ماه ژانویه سال2012میلادی

عنوان: آقای فو؛ نویسنده: جان مکسول کوتسی؛ مترجم: الناز ایمانی؛ تهران، امیرکبیر، سال1390، در151ص؛ شابک9789640013908؛ موضوع داستانهای نویسندگان افریقایی جنوبی تبار استرالیا - سده 20م

کتاب نخستین بار با عنوان: «دشمن» و با ترجمه جناب ونداد جلیلی در سال1389، در158ص، انتشارات نشر چشمه، با شابک9789643629762؛ منتشر شده است

سوزان بارتون زنی است، که در اقیانوس سرگردان شده؛ به جزیره ای میرسد، که «رابینسون کروزوئه»، و غلامش «فرای دی (جمعه)»، در آنجا زندگی میکنند؛ «سوزان»، از این جزیره، به همراه «فرای دی» نجات مییابد، و سعی میکند، به یاری نویسنده ای به نام «آقای فو»، از ماجراهای آن جزیره سخن بگوید؛

این رمان، ابزاری بوده، تا نویسنده ی داستان «جی.ام کوتسی»،‌ اعتراض خود بر آپارتاید حاکم بر کشور خویش «آفریقای جنوبی» را، ابراز دارند، و ادبیات نیز کالبدی تا به وسیله آن، بتواند تندی خشم خویش را بزداید، و آن را به گوش استعمارگران برساند؛ داستان «کروزوئه»، اينبار از زبان یک زن، بازگو می‌شود؛ زنی که زندگی در جزیره، او را وادار می‌سازد، تا بار داستان را نیز بر دوش بگيرد؛ مسئولیتی را، که «کروزوئه»، زیر بار آن نمی‌رود، و قادر به انجام آن نیست؛ «جان مکسول کوتسی»، رمان‌نويس و منتقد، زاده شده در «آفریقای جنوبی»، برای رمان‌های خویش، که بیانگر تأثیرات استعمار، بر جوامع بودند؛ مورد توجه قرار گرفتند، و در سال2003میلادی «جایزه نوبل ادبیات» را از آن خود کردند؛

تاریخ بهنگام رسانی 15/11/1399هجری خورشیدی؛ 03/10/1400هجری خورشیدی؛ ا. شربیانی

The tale that tells no tales. The one restraints and refuses to be understood. The trickiest book of earlier J.M. Coetzee's books I have read. Like his acclaimed signatures, Coetzee's Foe delivers multiple dimensions, complexities (with A LOT of questions afterwards) and lyrical prose. I've been struggling to understand. All I can say from the first read is that the book challenges the new idea of writing, and authorship and the clashes between the "authorship" as the sense of colonialism. The story is told by the winner, as they said. The land, the house, the master and the slave are the substantial motives. But what I couldn't yet figure out is the female roles of Susan Barton, the main character and the lost daughter with the same name. Their voices in the book are somehow disturbing and questionable. Many online sources say that Susan Barton is the voice of truth seeker, and the feminism recalled in the lost world of fragmented post-colonialism, but I find it hard to believe. Also the ending is confounding and surreal. Must be revisited soon.

Foe reminds me more of Robert Coover's multilayered, metafictional Spanking the Maid than of Robinson Crusoe. That book was about spanking, and this book is about getting ravished. But what's it really about, you ask, and I'm like ugh, isn't "multilayered and metafictional" enough? Fine, god. I'll mark serious spoilers but we'll discuss general plot points, so heads up.

On the first layer: Susan Barton is marooned on an island already inhabited by two other castaways. When she is rescued, she tries to sell her story. There are mysteries: one of the other castaways is mute. Supposedly his tongue was cut out, but she fails to verify this. Who cut out his tongue? Or did anyone? And who is the woman who shows up claiming to be her long-lost daughter?

Below that, it's about Daniel Defoe's 1719 classic Robinson Crusoe: the other two castaways are Cruso [sic] and Friday. The author she attempts to sell her story to is Foe [sic] himself. So this is metafiction, and here's another mystery: why didn't Barton herself make it into Foe's novel?

And below that, it's about the process of storytelling: whose stories are heard and whose are silenced and which truth gets told. Coetzee pretends that [De]foe wrote his books from life, but changed them to make them more entertaining. The version he eventually published has virtually nothing to do with its inspiration.

(Several of Defoe's other characters also show up here to help make the point. And it's true, actually, although not in the way Coetzee presents it: Defoe was inspired by the story of castaway Alexander Selkirk.)

Coetzee is South African, and he wrote Foe in the 80s, at the height of the controversy over a soon-to-die apartheid. When he presents Friday as mysteriously mute - the only character unable to tell his own story - he's talking about his country. He said that "South African literature is a literature in bondage. It is a less than fully human literature." That's what Friday represents, this less than fully human literature.

So the third level answers the questions of the first two. Friday is mute because the storyteller has muted him. And Barton isn't really a character: she's the Muse. She tells you so herself, during an explicit sex scene. (All that ravishing represents the process of creation - sorry, I know that's cliched, blame Coetzee. Barton begins the story moments after being gang-raped by mutineers, so there's a metaphor for you.) And the mystery daughter is the story itself - unrecognizable to the Muse by the time it arrives, twisted and yet presented hopefully by the storyteller. "Did I get it right?" And the Muse is like ugh, no, that's terrible.

Honestly, I think the book descends a little into wankery starting around Part III, 3/4 of the way through the book. It stops creating story and starts talking about it, and it's a bit on the tedious side. But it's done enough by that point to earn a little wanking; it's a very good book. Multilayered! And metafictional.

“Robinson Crusoe” was J. M. Coetzee’s favorite book as a child, one he has read many times. In “Foe” he has chosen to revisit this wonderful adventure book and create what anthropologists would call an origin myth for the book. Coetzee writes in a style not very distant from DeFoe’s original, that is easy to read with a grand lyrical quality that befits an author destined to win a Nobel Prize.

I thought DeFoe (original surname being “Foe” but requiring some more dignified prefix from vanity or the necessity to sell books) might have run into his tale while a guest of the state in Newgate Debtors Prison, but Coetzee had another vision. Here, widow Susan Barton travels to Bahia, Brazil in the New World searching for her kidnapped daughter, fails to find her, then sails away in a ship eventually overrun in a mutiny. Mutineers set her adrift in a boat with the corpse of their captain; she nears an island and abandons her former captain to swim ashore. There she is rescued by Friday and carried to a grumpy, hairy old European who tolerates her presence, Cruso himself (Mr Crusoe had lost an “e” while on the Coetzee’s island).

Barton adapts herself to the island and her new neighbors, giving them loads of advice which they ignore. At one point, Cruso becomes ill. He is nursed back to health and near recovery decides it is time to seek a simple intimate pleasure with Susan. In her turn, Susan is first surprised but, as he proceeds with his pleasuring, decides that he is a man who is needful, so what the heck – obviously this is not a feminist tract. Her pragmatic attitude continues throughout the story; she is passionate to get Cruso’s story told but blasé about sex. Sounds a great deal like Moll Flanders, another DeFoe creation and a great book!

Barton, Cruso and Friday are rescued after a year on the island but old grumpy succumbs while on the journey home. Susan is determined to tell Cruso’s story and seeks out a proper author to do the job; she is soon directed to a Mr. Daniel Foe. To Susan’s detriment, Foe is being hounded by creditors and she must spend time to track him down on several different occasions. Her next hurdle is to talk him into telling Cruso’s tale on the island as a separate piece rather than as a small part of Barton’s story of the search for her kidnapped daughter. Or so he says.

Foe is so-so as a simple story but Coetzee brings up so many issues during telling the story. The place of women. The ways Friday, an African whose tongue we are told was cut out by a Moorish slaver, is treated – how can one deal with a former slave, now freed man who cannot speak and cannot write? Coetzee caught a bit of hell in his native apartheid-ridden South Africa about the position and treatment of Friday when the book was published in 1983. Foe and Barton argue about the art of writing and the problems of being an author, let alone a penurious author.

This post-modern deconstruction work introduces many issues, too many to confront here. Suffice it to say that this tale is worth reading more than once to squeeze all out of it that Coetzee has distilled into it with a master’s touch.

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.

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.