Foe

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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Lord of the Flies by William GoldingTreasure Island by Robert Louis StevensonRobinson Crusoe by Daniel DefoeLife of Pi by Yann MartelThe Tempest by William Shakespeare
Desert Islands
33rd out of 93 books — 83 voters
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Nobel Laureates
76th out of 262 books — 154 voters


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Community Reviews

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Chris Holmes
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
brian
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
Ana
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
Quinn Slobodian
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
Christopher
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
La Stamberga dei Lettori
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
Tim Chambers
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
Fushigi
Jan 20, 2013 Fushigi rated it 3 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Robinson Crusoe fans?, those interested in English literature
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
Britt
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
Jane McGaughey
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
Matt
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
Andrew
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
Roy Elmer
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
Josh
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
Lauren
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
Neal Adolph
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
Michael K.
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
Radin Surina
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
Tortla
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
Julie
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
Aries Poon
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
Jim
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
kissmyshades
"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
Kathryn Lane
This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.
Shovelmonkey1
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
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
Jm_oriol
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
heather
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
Jonfaith
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
Sam Ruddick
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
Dave
This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.
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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.
More about J.M. Coetzee...
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“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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