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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.