„Fo“ je jedna od meni najdražih Kucijevih knjiga, i najdražih knjiga uopšte. Čitalac koji se po prvi put sreće sa delom velikog maga, može u njoj pronaći iscrtanu mapu, ili šifrarnik za prepoznavanje velikog broja tema kojima će se ovaj autor baviti u svem svom stvaralaštvu. Ono što je tu meni najvažnije, i gde se Kuci kao pisac/mislilac i ja kao čitalac/zbunjenik/nepomirenik-sa-nepoznanicama najviše dodirujemo jeste problem bezglasnosti, odnosno važnosti glasa koji neko nema (recimo, bezglasne životinje), ili mu je nasilno oduzet (na rasnoj ili rodnoj osnovi), ili se pravimo da ne postoji glas koji bi se možda mogao razumeti. Kuci dolazi iz južnoafričkog podneblja što nužno nameće propitivanje odnosa između crnaca i belaca. On je belac, no njegova propitavanja ne daju jednostavne i očekivane odgovore (što ga beskrajno uzdiže u mojim očima), jer jednostavni odgovori na komplikovana pitanja uvek znače rezove, bolne i diskriminišuće. Ono što je njegova možda osnovna „misija“ (iako sam sigurna da on sam ne bi pristao da mu se prišiva postojanje neke misije) upravo je davanje glasa svim subjektima određenih odnosa, ili slikanje situacija u kojima bezglasna bića ostaju zarobljena i zaboravljena, unižena, silovana, kremirana, zlostavljana, nasilno obezjezičena, ili se ono što imaju da kažu izvrće iz raznih razloga tako što se u komunikaciju umeša određeni posrednik.
Knjiga „Fo“ (neobičnog imena, no – rastumačićemo ga tokom pažljivog čitanja) kao osnovu uzima poznatu radnju: brodolom, no ovoga puta ne samo brodolom muškarca, Krusoa, već i žene (naknadno pristigle saputnice, koja je tu možda samo da pravi dodatnu zbrku, ili ipak zato što je potrebno i njoj podariti glas). Pošto već od prvog pasusa primećujemo navodnike, jasno je da narator ove priče nekome (ne čitaocu, već nekom posredniku) priča ili ispisuje svoju pustolovinu. Narator(ka) je Suzan Barton, junakinja jednog drugog Defoovog romana, koja se Kucijevom majstorijom povezuje sa mnogo poznatijom Robinsonovom pustolovinom. Ona je bila na brodu nakon neuspele potrage za ćerkom u Brazilu, odakle se otisnula sa sumnjivom posadom i završila, posle pobune, u čamcu sa svojim mrtvim ljubavnikom – kapetanom broda. Odustavši od veslanja, kliznula je u more i plivajući, potpomognuta talasima, stigla do ostrva.
Ono što opisuje kao život na ostrvu razlikuje se u velikoj meri od opisa koji nam je dao Defo. Svi smo voleli Robinsona – ali, je li ta avantura verodostojna? To je jedno od pitanja koje Kuci nenametljivo postavlja, a može biti ključno za razumevanje ove knjige. Suzan Barton zatiče mrzovoljnog starca koji ne piše dnevnik, koji provodi vreme praveći terase pogodne da se jednog dana na njima zaseje neko seme, samo što semena nema a pitanje je i da li će ikad iko sa semenom doći na njegovo ostrvo. Ipak, njegov trud možda nije ništa besmisleniji od bilo koje druge ljudske aktivnosti (pogotovo ako se svaki ljudski život shvati kao ostrvo, što bi obezvredilo sva naša nastojanja, a još više ako se svaki život shvati kao mogućnost da se ostrva povežu i da se nekom nešto ostavi i nakon smrti). Sa njim je i Petko, njegov sluga, poslušni crnac koji ne govori, jer mu je, avaj, odsečen jezik. (Suzan nikad ne saznaje ko je to učinio, trgovci robljem ili...?) Robinson odbija bilo kakvu mogućnost da osavremeni išta dok živi na ostrvu, tako da oštro odgovara na sva pitanja junakinje (ona ovde može biti shvaćena čak i kao neka vrsta Eve, pa bi i njena nagovaranja da preduzmu nešto mogla biti svojevrsna želja da se ubere plod sa drveta saznanja). Naravno, Robinson, kao muškarac i belac – gospodar je i tog ostrva i njegovih stanovnika: crnca i žene.
On, ipak, nije zdrav, i tokom jednog od nastupa njegove bolesti – iznenada dolazi spasilački brod. Robinson umire na putu ka Engleskoj, dok žena i crnac ostaju prepušteni sebi. Sebi i još nekom: piscu.
Suzan Barton pokušava da ispriča (i proda!) svoju pustolovinu izvesnom Fou (to je, možda Danijel De Fo, pisan namerno tako da ovo Fo bude odvojeno, i da nas podseća na pitanje „Friend or foe?“). Njemu se čini da tu pustolovinu treba malo nafilovati. Čini mu se da njena istina nije toliko važna (kao istina priče, istina teksta, umetnička istina – ili možda samo kao zanimljivost koja se može bolje prodati?). U tom rascepu nastaju najvažnije diskusije koje Kuci pokreće ovim nevelikim romanom. U delovima teksta koje Suzan Barton nevešto ispisuje trudeći se da ih nekako prosledi piscu nalazi se njen stvarni život (da li?) ili bar ono što ona smatra istinom svog života. Je li pisac prijatelj ili neprijatelj ako njenu priču koristi kao objekat da bi izmislio neku drugu? Ko je tu stvaran, a ko nestvaran? Ne samo da ono što je njoj važno pretvara u manje važnu epizodu jedne šire priče o kojoj ona ne želi da govori, već joj pridružuje lažnu ćerku i njenu dadilju (stvarajući tako konfuziju iz koje nam postaje nejasno ko je živ a ko lik u priči, nisu li sve te žene samo figurice u njegovoj igri). Za sve to vreme, Petko je uz njih kao izvestan teret (ili su ONI NJEMU teret), bez jezika, nalazeći svoje načine da izrazi određene emocije, ili da se igra, da sprovodi svoje rituale, i da pokazuje da je ne samo ljudsko biće, nego da ono što on ima da kaže čeka da bude rečeno, makar ispod površine, među olupinama, među mrtvim robovima i morskim travama, zajedno sa krakenom – svojevsnim „pupkom sveta“ koji negde u dubini jednako plaši, posmatra i guta sve čemu dođe vreme da bude progutano. Petkova priča biće ispričana, možda kao bujica, možda kao udarac krakenovog kraka. Možda je način da pisac prestane da bude neprijatelj upravo u tome – da što poštenije traga za glasom onih kojima je (nasilno ili ne) glas oduzet ili falsifikovan. Pisac je i sam neko ko pisanjem pokušava da podari sebi glas (koji možda nije našao kroz neki drugačiji kanal, kroz uobičajenu govornu komunikaciju), sa željom da bude istinit ili bar dovoljno čujan. I o tome govore neke sporadično razbacane rečenice u raznim Kucijevim romanima, u kojima glavni junaci često lutaju nekim svojim bespućima kao da je svima njima odsečen jezik. Na kraju krajeva, ko se od nas nije bar nekad osećao kao da mu je jezik iščupan? Jezik možda nije srce, a bog možda nije stvorio prvo reč, nego nešto što se ne mora izgovoriti da bi bilo čujno. Možda se istina i važnost bića može na drugi način iskazati – ali onda je ono što je svima nama potrebno: neko čulo koje će biti sposobno da čuje sve varijante iskazivanja kojima se služi sve što je živo. Recimo da je to sasvim dovoljno da iskaže šta bi mogla biti (čak i neosvešćena i nepriznata) misija jednog pisca kakav je ovaj veliki čarobnjak. Velika preporuka za čitanje – pogotovo publici koja razume i podržava potrebu da literatura osim zanimljivosti, pustolovine i romantike progovori i nemuštim glasovima nasilno ućutkanih i gurnutih pod plašt nevidljivosti.

Wanted it to be better but ig when you take a boring book and try to do something new you’re still a boring book at heart

In the spirit of Foe, a story about this book... I bought this book at a recent $5 A Bag book sale at the library. Having walked away with 4 bags of books, it seemed like a pretty successful sale in and of itself. However, fate intervenes (dun dun DUN) and, picking it up to read tonight, I see a very familiar name scrawled in the front cover, a date/locale, and a seal imprinted on the title page. None other than the name of my favorite teacher back in high school and the date of my graduation. A favorite teacher that has since passed away but is sorely missed. Coincidence might be the invention of the storyteller here, but it's a coincidence I'm very happy about.

The book itself was interesting, both as a reinvention of Crusoe and a stand-alone. I was almost expecting a The Yellow Wallpaper twist to come into play. Definitely worth the read.

In Foe, Susan Barton is set adrift in a rowboat after a mutiny on a ship sailing from South America to Lisbon. She lands on an island where Cruso and Friday had been cast away years ago. In Coetzee's retelling of the Robinson Crusoe tale, Cruso is content with his simple life on the island. Friday has been transformed from a Caribbean to a black African whose tongue had been cut out by slave owners. The three castaways are rescued after Susan has spent one year on the island, but Cruso dies on his way back to Europe.

Susan wants to write their story so she contacts the author Daniel Foe to turn her narration into a book. But Foe wants to tell a different story about Susan than the one she thinks is important. Susan is also disturbed about Friday's lack of a voice. Although Friday has been liberated from slavery, he cannot ever really be free with no voice. The theme seems to be that the oppressed and disadvantaged have been silenced, and lost the authorship of their own stories.

J.M. Coetzee was writing in 1986 in South Africa where communication problems and cultural differences existed between the black Africans and white colonialists. The original Crusoe story was a fictional autobiography and adventure story with 17th Century ideas about colonialism, gender, and slavery. Coetzee has updated the tale by adding a woman narrator, an African servant, and a 20th Century outlook.

باز آفريني مدرن داستان كلاسيك رابينسون كروزو از دنيل دفو.ممكن است در نگاه اول تصور شود با داستاني ماجراجويانه طرفيم، اما در واقع "دشمن" در مورد نويسندگي و داستان نويسي است.در دشمن شخصيت نويسنده اي وجود دارد به نام "دنيل فو" كه وجود اين تشابه اسمي بين "دنيل فو" و "دنيل دفو" دست را براي تفسير هاي مختلف باز مي گذارد
داستان تا صفحه ي چهل خوب بود ولي بعد از آن جذابيت خود را از دست داد.و پايان مبهم داستان هيچ كمكي به عوض شدن نظرم در موردش نكرد.

Μια κυριολεκτική διαστρέβλωση του τίτλου από τον εκδότη και μια μεταφορική διαστρέβλωση του μύθου από τον συγγραφέα! Γίνονται και θαύματα.

https://pepperlines.blogspot.com/2018...

Υ.Γ. 4.5 *

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

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"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  
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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:

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'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?'
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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.

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"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."
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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:

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"Friday has no command of words and therefore no defense against being re-shaped day by day in
conformity with the desires of others."
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Susan, a mother who has lost her daughter, adopts Friday.

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"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."
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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:

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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  
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or

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

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

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"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."
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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.

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"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."
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But she doesn't have high hopes:

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"Nature did not intend me for a teacher, I lack patience."
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The Foe of the story though is optimistic:

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

Hhm, this started out well. The first page was amazing, but it was kind of downhill from there.

I am done. Rating? Review? I don't know. Maybe after I get home again, I'll know what I think.

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Returning the book to the library today, so I thought I'd revisit, and see if the book had enough time to settle in my mind, so I could rate it. Turns out, I still can't. I did the book a disservice by reading it too closely in time to Robinson Crusoe (which, btw, I loved!).

The best 'review' I can think of, is copying a couple of my updates notes:

"Hmmm .... :/

Don't know what I think of this. Friday isn't Friday at all, Cruso isn't Crusoe at all, the woman didn't exist in the original, and it's weird having Defoe be a character in the novel.

The writing is fine, highly readable.

Just finished Part I (the Island), and Part II (Susan and Friday's journey and arrival in England, and meeting Foe). Maybe Part III will help me decide ...

... (finished the) Third of four parts. This is the part where Susan and Friday catch up with Foe, and Susan tries to relate her story of the island, while Foe tries to find out more of the story of her time before the island, in Bahia.

The daughter who is not a daughter is there, with an attendant. This part of the story is bizarre, don't know how it fits in.

... I think I'm reading this too close in time to the reading of Robinson Crusoe. It's clear this story is not really a retelling, its using - very loosely - the frame of Robinson Crusoe for so, SO much more.

I'm reading a story of what the definition of 'is', is .... What is truth, what is reality, what is freedom, what is self-determination, who is substantial, who is a ghost/ephemera, etc"

...The last chapter .... the narrator? Is it the author, Coetzee?"

Another time, perhaps, I might come back and re-read this. It's a great book, I think, just not about Robinson Crusoe. It's about truth, and freedom, and subjugation, and self-determination, and a bunch more. I just couldn't appreciate it, because I was looking for the frame story, not the story within the frame.

People are extraneous, people are absent... Maestro Coetzee is complicated & this short novella is one of his earlier best... except for the ingloriously vapid ending. Hated it! But all the questions posed by J.M. Coetzee, mainly about fiction vs. Biography, & existential conundrums that arise, create a maudlin cloud... the pathos the reader deserves & also craves.

This small book is pack with so many great things to discuss. A really good book for a book club.
So…it takes the story of Robinson Crusoe and ads a lady with a boring take of what happened in the island.
It is not just a book about writing books or the discussion between what is the truth and what is fiction. Its also about voice and who has it and who doesn’t. For me was also about giving people space and time for them to tell their story however they can. And that a voice is not just the sound that comes from your mouth. A voice can came in different shapes – we just need to learn how to hear. And how it can be problematic when we speak on behalf of others. We need to tell their truth or when its boring we can change and spice it up a little bit?
The book has a lot of dialogue. Has a big epistolary chapter. And has a lot (A LOT) of unanswered questions. It didn’t bother me that much because the book is not about the missing answers, its more about who is there to listen.
The first chapter is really, really boring. But it’s supposed to. Because sometimes life is just boring. Even though the average reader wants something more, a bit of boringness can be good. And it was.

Ponderous, pretentious and strangely humourless despite its absurdity, Foe has not aged well: its conceit (a retelling of a canonical work) feels dated and cliche. The prose aims for an 18th Century feel, but often sounds like Yoda ('Many strengths you have, but invention is not one of them.') And once again, Coetzee proves he cannot write convincing female characters. Has any 'great' author written as many bad books as Coetzee has? At his best, he is a writer of exceptional power, but he strikes out more often than he connects.