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JUNE 2019 - reread
In FOE we witness an author who cheats the cards before our eyes with his innate ability to retell stories, adapt them and give them new meaning. Coetzee challenged one of the most widely published books in history, Daniel DeFoe’s “The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe�� by transforming the famed author DeFoe into an antagonist Foe, Crusoe into Cruso (without the e), included a castaway woman, Susan Barton (based on the heroine of DeFoe’s ROXANA) and a mute slave named Friday. Socially constrained by being female in the 18th century, Barton sought Foe, a male author, to chronicle her year on the island with Cruso. Barton and Foe disagree on the nature of writing with Foe pushing for fabrications to give ‘substance�� to Barton’s dull tale.

This is my second time reading Foe and I was drawn to Friday’s character. I appreciated how Coetzee was able to restore agency to Friday’s silence by making both Foe and Barton unable to identify with Friday and at the same time Coetzee chose not to be the one to give Friday a voice because it was not his place as a white South African - considering that Foe was published when apartheid, an era marked by silence, was still ongoing.

The words story/stories is used a total of 137 in this 156 page book and true/truth/truly is used 97 times. Coetzee does not only want us to think about the art of storytelling but he also forces the reader to ask questions than to provide us with answers: who has the authorial control for telling stories? does silence mean there are no stories to be told? how does language misinform? what is the relationship between language and self? can silence be a form of resistance to oppressive power? what memories do we rely on for truth? how are authors influenced by their personal circumstances and culture in the writing of stories? And maybe the greatest gift this little miracle of a book gives us is the encouragement to question history itself. FOE is both a middle finger to postcolonial narratives and a really enjoyable lecture in creative writing.


Mar 2018
It’s taken me a while to pen down my thoughts on this brilliant retelling of Daniel Defoe’s ‘Robinson Crusoe�� mostly because Coetzee packed in so much in such a slim book that I’m still mulling over the subtleties. Is it a homage to Defoe, considered as the ‘father of fiction�� or is it a parody to the classical tale of colonialism and imperialism? I’m swinging towards the latter. Coetzee deliberately opposed Defoe’s hero with a heroine and included Daniel Foe as the antagonist who took Susan Barton’s story and wrote her out of it - effectively reducing her to a muse and giving life to the famous story of Robinson Crusoe. It made me question who’s narrative I could trust, Defoe’s or Coetzee. And it also made me question what liberties an author can take. The writing is exquisite, the characters dream like and it’s overall a very clever book. The pettiness in me was howling at how Coetzee stripped off Defoe’s nobility by eliminating the prefix ‘De�� in his antagonist’s name 😂. I’m not a big fan of retellings but I’m digging the idea of authors responding to each other and carrying on the dialogue centuries later. This is a masterpiece.