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Foe

3.46 of 5 stars 3.46 · rating details · 3,067 ratings · 193 reviews

With the same electrical intensity of language and insight that he brought to Waiting for the Barbarians and The Master of Petersburg, J.M. Coetzee reinvents the story of Robinson Crusoe—and in so doing, directs our attention to the seduction and tyranny of storytelling itself

In 1720 the eminent man of letters Daniel Foe is approached by Susan Barton, lately a castaway on...more

Paperback, 157 pages

Published January 5th 1988 by Penguin Books (first published 1986)

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Oct 09, 2007 Chris Holmes rated it 5 of 5 stars

In recent readings of Coetzee's Defoe-pastiche, I have become facinated with the figure of Friday's "empty" mouth. Obviously the open-O, the unvoiced scream, the signs arranged on the beach as evidence of Friday's voice as it is both silenced and withheld, speaks to the trope of subaltern. That said, I believe Coetzee is more interested in our assumption that Friday is without a speech organ, tongue-less. Recall that the only evidence of this tonguelessness comes from the travel narrative that C...more

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Oct 05, 2009 brian rated it 4 of 5 stars

human communication. we make do with what we have. we fool ourselves. for sake of survival and sanity we must believe words perfectly correspond to the ideas and objects they signify. but they don't. we're all involved in a ridiculous game of existential 'operator': lying to ourselves that the blonde with the budding tits at that end whispered the same thing the stuttering asian kid who smells like kimchi told me at this end.

to riff on that old semiotics-101 saw: words may be the means by which...more

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Jan 27, 2013 Ana rated it 5 of 5 stars

This book is sheer poetry. The language, the pacing, the images - a feast for the mind!
As I see it Coetzee is the most important writer of our times. It is almost ridiculous to praise his style, as the way he formulates the questions and ideas of his writing is so perfectly self-contained and self-explanatory. Unaffected simplicity and clarity translate into utmost sophistication.
At the centre of his work lies the idea of compassion: for animals, for the ones left behind by society, for the crip...more

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Oct 04, 2007 Quinn Slobodian rated it 3 of 5 stars

Coetzee's sometimes strained exercise here is to write together the narratives of Daniel Defoe's two major novels, Pamela and Robinson Crusoe. Once again, the central undertaking is Coetzee's straining to hear the voice of the subaltern through his characters and once again concluding with the best-solution-possible as some complicated ritual of bodily compassion and performative abjection. As the characters of The Darjeeling Limited need a drowned Indian boy to make their trip meaningful, Coetz...more

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Mar 17, 2009 Christopher rated it 4 of 5 stars

J.M. Coetzee's 1986 novel FOE is a retelling of ROBINSON CRUSOE that uses Daniel Defoe's well-known story as a basis for a bitter commentary on colonialism. To really get anything out of Coetzee's novel, you'll need to read ROBINSON CRUSOE first. The Penguin Popular Classics edition is an inexpensive way to read that important work.

As FOE opens, we are introduced to Susan Barton, an Englishwoman returning from Brazil who is set adrift on the seas by mutineers. She washes up on an island populate...more J.M. Coetzee's 1986 novel FOE is a retelling of ROBINSON CRUSOE that uses Daniel Defoe's well-known story as a basis for a bitter commentary on colonialism. To really get anything out of Coetzee's novel, you'll need to read ROBINSON CRUSOE first. The Penguin Popular Classics edition is an inexpensive way to read that important work.

As FOE opens, we are introduced to Susan Barton, an Englishwoman returning from Brazil who is set adrift on the seas by mutineers. She washes up on an island populated by Robinson Crusoe and his servant Friday. Yet, these are not the same characters we've encountered before. Unlike the clever protagonist of Defoe's novel, "Cruso" is a dull old man, complacent with his miserable existence on the island, not wanting rescue and making no effort to better his living condition. Friday is not a the Brazilian cannibal that Defoe portrayed, but a horribly mutilated African slave. When the trio is finally rescued, Cruso soon dies, but Barton and Friday return to England. There Barton encounters Mr. Foe and narrates her story to him, only to find that he is not interested in the remarkable truth of her experiences, but instead bends the story to his own preconceptions.

Coetzee's main message seems to be that Europeans have robbed colonized peoples of their own history. By supressing any report they might make of their past, and forbidding them from speaking now for themselves, the colonizers have reduced the natives to the very savages Europeans claimed they were from the beginning. Towards the end of the novel, Coetzee turns things even more postmodernism, showing how difficult it is to create a "true" narrative.

If I had to compare Coetzee's writing here to anyone else, I'd say that the dialogue reminds me of Harold Pinter, and the enigmatic dream or dream-like sequences towards the end are reminiscent of Gene Wolfe. The novel is only around 150 pages long and can be tranquilly read over the span of a few hours. I found the narrative style somewhat grating, thus my review of four stars, but nonetheless I found this a remarkable and extremely thought-provoking book, and I recommend it.(less)

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May 05, 2013 La Stamberga dei Lettori rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: polyfilo

Effettivamente l'impressione che si ha durante la lettura di 'Foe' è quella di una narrazione brulla e arida, di fatti, di oggetti e di sensazioni. Caratteristica, questa, che rende procedere nel romanzo poco appetitoso, per usare un attributo sempre legato alla sfera sensoriale del gusto come fa la protagonista, Susan Barton.
La posizione di questa versione femminile di Robinson Crusoe - Cruso, come viene chiamato in questa versione della storia - è improntata al più scarno realismo immaginabile...more

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Apr 06, 2013 Tim Chambers rated it 4 of 5 stars

This book was suggested to me by an editor at Harper Collins, for reasons I still do not understand, as a model for my own novel, Banana Republican Blues. I just finished reading it for that reason. What I found interesting about it is that it offers a useful reflection on the problem of autobiography in fiction. What was Defoe supposed to make of the heroine, Susan Barton's, story of a man who spent fifteen years on an island moving a 100,000 stones to form terraces on a hillside, without growi...more This book was suggested to me by an editor at Harper Collins, for reasons I still do not understand, as a model for my own novel, Banana Republican Blues. I just finished reading it for that reason. What I found interesting about it is that it offers a useful reflection on the problem of autobiography in fiction. What was Defoe supposed to make of the heroine, Susan Barton's, story of a man who spent fifteen years on an island moving a 100,000 stones to form terraces on a hillside, without growing anything in them? It doesn't make for much of a plot. So, it deals with the problem of turning mundane truth into the stuff of the sublime.

I had a similar problem in writing my own novel about an uneventful road trip, but this wasn't why the editor suggested I read Foe. To make my novel interesting, I had to invent everything. Which is what Defoe did, of course, and what his fictional counterpart does with the story Barton provides him. Instead he invents a life for her.

Coetzee's tale is that of Susan Barton's life since being set adrift by a mutinous crew and washing ashore of Cruso's island. It is also a tale of the assumptions we make about otherness. Cruso's friend, Friday, who returns to England with Barton, is referred to throughout as a cannibal, and is assumed to be a slave. As he has no tongue -- it having be cut out when he was a boy -- he hasn't the means to speak for himself, which leaves him in a state of dependency, first on Cruso, then on Susan, which Susan finds onerous. But she also begins to see his humanity and identifies with it. In the climax, Foe begins to teach him to write, so that he might have the means to tell the full history of his a Cruso's castaway lives, at which point the viewpoint shifts several years into the future, when a new narrator appears, disconcertingly, in the same first person POV, to relate a final dream sequence in which the whole basis for the tale is presumed to unravel, which is what, of course would happen to the victor's tale were it related to us, instead, by the voiceless loser.(less)

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Jan 20, 2013 Fushigi rated it 3 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Robinson Crusoe fans?, those interested in English literature

Shelves: set-books, read-in-english

The book was a complete surprise to me. I really dislike the story of Robinson Crusoe and I was pretty put off by this book at the beginning. The first chapter was really boring, telling me about the story I already knew, and about the characters I didn't like. The main hero, Susan, irritated me, seemed unnecessary, just some dull addition to a dull story. But as I was reading, I became more interested; the book finished the story of Cruso and concentrated on Susan and Friday, and on their probl...more

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Jun 22, 2012 Britt rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: my-bookcase

Great, yet confusing... I love Coetzee's style and I like the way he takes Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and turns it into something different altogether. The book keeps you guessing all along, and it never becomes clear what is actually going on. Is Susan Barton crazy, is the girl really her daughter, is Foe playing a trick on her?
More than being a 'story' in which you actually get to find out what's going on, Coetzee focusses more on underlying questions. He explores what it means to be a writer, t...more

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May 06, 2012 Jane McGaughey rated it 3 of 5 stars

The first time I read Robinson Crusoe, it was as a picture book for young readers. Crusoe was Nordic-looking and heavily bearded; Friday had shoulder-length hair and was quite grateful once he was no longer on a spit waiting to be dinner. Crusoe's fur hat was quite memorable, as well. The thought of a woman on that island honestly had never crossed my mind - blame patriarchy if you will, or the speed of the turn-the-page-chimes on the record player, but a feminized version of the story was a nov...more

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Sep 06, 2011 Matt rated it 4 of 5 stars

I foolishly promised some insight, in my review of _Master of Petersburg_ into what separates a great Coetzee from a not-so-great one. I'm not sure I can really deliver, though this is a great book-- it reads incredibly smoothly, and the curtain, or perhaps the frame, around successive sections keeps expanding in each new section to change the stakes and deepen the reading experience.

Here, the narrator is one Susan Barton, who is shipwrecked for a year with Cruso and who then is with him when he...more

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Apr 03, 2011 Andrew rated it 5 of 5 stars

The best modern novel I've read in the last year. My first experience with Coetzee won't be my last. Coetzee strips the Robinson Crusoe/Alexander Selkirk legend of its didactic purpose, and we realize the agony of being abandoned. De Foe's novel shows Crusoe finding salvation and organizing civilization through a broadly imperialist pattern. Coetzee's Crusoe is a lazy, empty, forelorn man who has no interest in settling an island or redeeming savages. When Susan Barton (the addition to the novel...more

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Mar 27, 2013 Roy Elmer rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: contemporary-literature, historical, literary-fiction

I have been wanting to read Foe for a while. For a couple of years in actual fact, and long before I found this site. I forgot all about it until I stumbled across it in a charity shop in York, and paid the princely sum of £2.99; a sort of treasure finders fee. I got it back to the hotel and did a bit of checking on here, to find that it received an average of 3.5. I can see why that might be the case, as on reading it, it is a very literary piece of fiction. It's not populist, it doesn't have m...more I have been wanting to read Foe for a while. For a couple of years in actual fact, and long before I found this site. I forgot all about it until I stumbled across it in a charity shop in York, and paid the princely sum of £2.99; a sort of treasure finders fee. I got it back to the hotel and did a bit of checking on here, to find that it received an average of 3.5. I can see why that might be the case, as on reading it, it is a very literary piece of fiction. It's not populist, it doesn't have much in the way of a structured plot, and it can be very difficult to follow the thread of what's going on. If you can get past these things though, you'll find something really very profound.

Foe isn't so much a narrative of fiction, so much as a narrative on fiction itself. Coetzee asks the reader some deep and searching questions about what actually constitutes fiction here, and what makes fiction fictional. There are some genuinely deep discussions on a range of issues, and some really memorable sections of prose. There are discussions on the meaning of memory as it pertains to storytelling, gender and the struggle for a woman to be seen as more than either possession or whore, an argument on what truth really means, and the differentiation between your own truth and someone else's, there are discussions on morality and law, the isolation of the human condition, slavery and race and the disenfranchisement of ethnic minorities, as well as a range of other subjects, and Coetzee has crammed all of this in to a mere 157 pages, in such eloquent and powerful style.

The novella is decided in to three sections. The first is the narrative of Susan Barton's marooning on a desert island, where she stumbles across Cruso and Friday; it forms a sort of retelling of Robinson Crusoe, but with a twist and is fascinating in it's own right as a short story. The second part consists of an internal debate, in the form of letters written to Foe by the protagonist of this retold story, and her machinations on what actually makes her story real. Can she tell her story as it actually happened? Will it get told as it happened? Is there loss in adding in fantastical elements to draw the reader in? What of Friday and his place in a world of words in which he cannot speak? The third segment is altogether a little odd, and forms an argument about the meaning of words and their use, their power and their form. This section seems to be an argument as to what constitutes creation; are authors gods in their own right? Their characters never truly speak, like puppets on a string, and so can never truly be 'real', but the words they are given and the roles that they play, make them real in the eye of the beholder. It is truly fascinating stuff all the way through.

I gave this a four, as I love the intricacy of this sort of thing, and have studied literary criticsm, so it's right up my proverbial street. That said, the strange structure of the narrative, and the fact very little really happens, may mean that it doesn't appeal to everyone. Give it a go, and see how you get on. (less)

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Jan 08, 2009 Josh rated it 3 of 5 stars

I think back to the scene in Billy Madison when the game show host says to Adam Sandler, "Mr. Madison, what you've just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul."

When I watched J.M. Coetzee deliver his 2003 Nobel-prize accept...more

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Jan 09, 2009 Lauren rated it 4 of 5 stars

What I love about Coetzee's writing is how good he is at immediately bringing the reader into his character's world, which is completely different in each book. Foe takes place in 1720, and the narrator is a woman named Susan Barton who after searching for her disappeared daughter in Bahia, is castaway on an island on her return to Europe. On this island she meets Cruso and his manservant of sorts, Friday. They live on this island for a year, until they are rescued and brought to England. Here S...more

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May 09, 2013 Neal Adolph rated it 4 of 5 stars

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...more 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.(less)

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May 23, 2009 Michael K. rated it 3 of 5 stars

Begins as a compelling character study - in this case the character being studied is the author, in all her permutations - but devolves into, as is so common with these metanarratives on literature, a treatise wherein the characters becomes syncopes, ciphers for ideas rather than fully-formed in, of, and for themselves. Which is all good and well, I imagine - Coetzee is probably quite content with that idea - but the characters at the outset are so interesting that their "demise" is a bit of a l...more

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May 17, 2011 Radin Surina rated it 2 of 5 stars

Quotes in the book:

"Where is justice in it? Robbed of his childhood and consigned to a life of silence. Was Providence sleeping?"

"If Providence were to watch over all of us, who would be left to pick the cotton and cut the sugar cane? For the business of the world to prosper, Providence must sometime waste and sometimes sleep, as lower creatures do."

"I told myself, I was keeping a watch for a sail. But too often my eyes would settle on the horizon in a kind of fixity till, lulled by the beating...more

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Apr 03, 2011 Tortla rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: historical-fiction, schooly, writing-on-writing, feministy, epistolary

Metafictional consideration of language and storytelling and subjectivity which I think Spivak would approve of.

SPOILERS (if you believe in such things...I think they're really irrelevant for a novel like Foe, the enjoyment of which hinges so strongly on its artful use of language and complex handling of issues of storytelling and ambiguous plotting--basically the fact that it's good literature makes it worth reading even if I "spoil" it for you)

Susan Barton starts the story as a young lady, and...more Metafictional consideration of language and storytelling and subjectivity which I think Spivak would approve of.

SPOILERS (if you believe in such things...I think they're really irrelevant for a novel like Foe, the enjoyment of which hinges so strongly on its artful use of language and complex handling of issues of storytelling and ambiguous plotting--basically the fact that it's good literature makes it worth reading even if I "spoil" it for you)

Susan Barton starts the story as a young lady, and over the course of the novel exercises a sort of defiant authority in attempting to inspire Foe to tell the story of Robinson Crusoe. In defiantly refusing Foe's attempts to put her under his authority by including the story of her search for her child, and rejecting the girl named Susan Barton who claims to be her child, she refuses to be put under the authority of the colonialist hegemony which he represents. Also, she acknowledges the impossibility of respectfully/adequately portraying/knowing Friday's story. Which is manifested in his tongue-less-ness. All very very interesting embodiments of Spivak's perspective on the Other and the woman. I have tons to say on this but don't want to bore you. Basically, this book is a beautiful challenge.

Key divergences from Defoe's Robinson Crusoe:
page 9: Crusoe lives in a sparse hut, on a diet of fish and eggs (NOT turtles' eggs, no raisins/corn/rice/bread/limes)
page 12: Crusoe is totally unreliable (in a way that reminded me of Odysseus...)
page 16: Crusoe doesn't even *want* to write, keep track of time, or otherwise record his time on the island
page 54: there are never any footprints
Also: Crusoe dies on the ship which rescues him and Susan Barton. He has sex with Susan Barton a couple of times. He (possibly) cut out Friday's tongue.

Essential quotations on language/storytelling:
page 22:
"You speak as if language were one of the banes of life, like money or the pox" (Susan Barton to Robinson Crusoe)
page 118:
"The story of Friday's tonge is a story unable to be told, or unable to be told by me" (Daniel Foe to Susan Barton, in a discussion of Friday's lack of tongue and storytelling which is *so* Spivak-approve-able)(less)

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Jun 10, 2012 Julie rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: 1001-books-to-read-before-you-die, fiction

In general, I enjoy reading books which tell a well-known story from a different perspective. The Wide Sargasso Sea showed how using today's standards, Mr. Rochester from Jane Eyre is a sexist, overbearing boor. And Gregory Maguire's Wicked is a brilliant and complex retelling of the children's classic The Wizard of Oz. But I felt there were many problems with Coetzee's Foe. This is a retelling of the classic Robinson Crusoe through the eyes of Susan Barton, a woman who is castaway on Crusoe's d...more

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Sep 21, 2012 Aries Poon rated it 4 of 5 stars

In Foe, Coetzee reinvented (some would say "rewrote" but I disagree) Defoe's Robinson Crusoe.

But in Foe, adventurous Crusoe becomes weak-minded Cruso (without an "e"), civilized Friday from a Caribbean descent becomes a negro whose tongue was cut off and unable to speak. Coetzee also introduces a female castaway Susan Barton, the key character, and a writer Daniel Foe, possibly a hybrid of Defoe and Coetzee himself.

The Penguin edition is of only 157 pages. The story moves fairly quickly. You ba...more

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Feb 04, 2010 Jim rated it 4 of 5 stars

This is a book where much of the work will be done once the cover have been closed and I suspect the urge to pick it up and thumb through it will be strong especially after that final section to which my first response was quite simply: "Eh?" and I immediately went back to the start of Part IV and reread it. I felt very much the same after reading another metafiction recently, Paul Auster's Travels in the Scriptorium . Going back over it while writing this if there was one thing I noticed was ho...more

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Jan 17, 2012 kissmyshades rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2012, african, novel-novella

"But seen from too remote a vantage, life begins to lose its particularity. All shipwrecks become the same shipwreck, all castaways the same castaway, sunburnt, lonely, clad in the skins of the beasts he has slain. The truth that makes your story yours alone, that sets you apart from the old mariner by the fireside spinning yarns of sea-monsters and mermaids, resides in a thousand touches which today may seem of no importance, such as: when you made your needle (the needle you store in your belt...more

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Jan 20, 2013 Kathryn Lane rated it 2 of 5 stars

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

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Dec 09, 2011 Shovelmonkey1 rated it 4 of 5 stars Recommends it for: fans of the original Crusoe

Recommended to Shovelmonkey1 by: 1001 books list

Shelves: 1001-books, bookcrossing-books, travel-books

I read this a long time ago and have only just got round to thinking about a review now. Now is me sitting in front a netbook with a large glass of red wine, the work phone switched off (praise all your gods, it is the weekend) and a pile of salted cashew nuts to hand. You could cast me adrift on a desert island now, with no hope of redemption and as long as I could take the wine and the nuts (I'll leave the works phone, thanks) then I probably wouldn't utter so much as a squeak of protest.

Turns...more I read this a long time ago and have only just got round to thinking about a review now. Now is me sitting in front a netbook with a large glass of red wine, the work phone switched off (praise all your gods, it is the weekend) and a pile of salted cashew nuts to hand. You could cast me adrift on a desert island now, with no hope of redemption and as long as I could take the wine and the nuts (I'll leave the works phone, thanks) then I probably wouldn't utter so much as a squeak of protest.

Turns out that leaving it a while to review this book was probably a tactical faux pas on my part because it has not left enough of an impression to allow the memories of salient points ( a fellow goodreader pointed out today that book amnesia is frequently the benchmark of a bad book), witty lines and poetic description to come flooding back. Give me an hour, more wine and I'll probably fill in the blanks with some kind of skewed version of Coetzee's sequel/ parallel to Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (recently read and reviewed), but I'll try to finish writing before it gets to that sloppy point.

In lieu of being able to offer any new startling observations on this text I have just read two excellent reviews:

Chris Holmes' http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...

and Brian's review http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...

both which are worth reading with or without the wine.

Coetzee tackles the story of Robinson Crusoe and his castaway years by adding into the mix, a female companion who has returned to England and brought with her the story of her life on an island with the now deceased Cruso and the man Friday. The story she tells is very different to that of the Crusoe we know from popular publication. Does this make it any less true? I suppose the point is that communication, or if you are Friday, lack thereof, is constantly open to interpretation. Is what we say actually interpreted by those who hear it in the way we mean it? Probably not. The faceless communications of today (text, Tweet, blog and even goodreads) leave a lot of scope for misinterpretation and error. With Cruso I guess the question is, how much of his-story is in this case her story?

(less)

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Jan 16, 2012 Jm_oriol rated it 5 of 5 stars

A partir d'una visió alternativa de Robinson Crusoe, remarcant les mancances i les incomoditats dels naufrags (sembla que ho trava a faltar a l'original) i la vida a una illa deserta, Coetzee s'endinsa en el significat de les histories, qui les escriu, qui les llegeix, com s'adeqüen a aquest públic, i per sobre de tot qui no en pot dir res.

M'ha anat molt bé haver llegit, per casualitat, l'article de Foe, al llibre Un lector comú, de Virginia Woolf, on explica la manera de fe de Foe quant escriu...more

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Sep 24, 2010 heather rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2010, fiction, school, 1001-or-death

a dreamy and strange novel, built on the backs of many great european classics, but with much entirely its own to say. coetzee never allows a reader to be fully comfortable with a text, which is part of his greatness. the world is an uncomfortable and difficult place. this novel provides no answers, but asks many worthwhile questions about imperialism, religion, authorship, culture, human understanding, and a host of other big topics. the only big detraction for me is that if you choose to read...more

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Oct 11, 2012 Jonfaith rated it 3 of 5 stars

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 in...more

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Jul 24, 2010 Sam Ruddick rated it 5 of 5 stars

quick read. weird ending. great book. appears to be concerned with literature - the production, power, and implications of - but seems to me to be concerned with something rather more, and rather more immediate, as well. recommend it highly. i think the man does a good job of balancing a story that it is deeply personal (i.e. character based, concerned with individual longings and drives, et cet) with more abstract ideas (power of language, "race," and so on). this, i think, is accomplished by m...more

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Mar 31, 2010 Dave rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: read-in-2010

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

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About J.M. Coetzee

John Maxwell Coetzee is an author and academic from South Africa. He is now an Australian citizen and lives in South Australia.
A novelist and literary critic as well as a translator, Coetzee has won the Booker Prize twice and was awarded the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature.

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Quotes from Foe

“We must cultivate, all of us, a certain ignorance, a certain blindness, or society will not be tolerable.” — 19 people liked it

“In a world of chance is there a better and a worse? We yield to a stranger's embrace or give ourselves to the waves; for the blink of an eyelid our vigilance relaxes; we are asleep; and when we awake, we have lost the direction of our lives. What are these blinks of an eyelid, against which the only defence is an eternal and inhuman wakefulness? Might they not be the cracks and chinks through which another voice, other voices, speak in our lives? By what right do we close our ears to them? (Susan Barton)” — 7 people liked it

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title link	preview: Foe
avg rating	preview: Foe Goodreads rating: 3.46 (3067 ratings)
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BBCode	[url=http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/525544.Foe?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_book][img]http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1348478847l/525544.jpg[/img][/url] [url=http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/525544.Foe?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_book]Foe by J.M. Coetzee[/url]

Foe

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