| ||||||||||||||||||
 Trade In this Item for up to £0.25
Get an extra £5 when you trade in books worth £10 or more until June 30, 2012. Trade in Foe (King Penguin) for an Amazon.co.uk gift card of up to £0.25, which you can then spend on millions of items across the site. Trade-in values may vary (terms apply). Find more products eligible for trade-in.
|
|
There is a newer edition of this item:
|
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
More About the Author
Product Description
Review
"A small miracle of a book...of marvelous intricacy and overwhelming power." --The Washington Post Book World
"Foe is a finely honed testament to its author's intelligence, imagination, and skill.... The writing is lucid and precise, the landscape depicted mythic yet specific." --Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
"Foe is a finely honed testament to its author's intelligence, imagination, and skill.... The writing is lucid and precise, the landscape depicted mythic yet specific." --Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
Product Description
A small miracle of a book...of marvellous intricacy and overwhelming power' - The Washington Post Book World. Coetzee reinvents the story of Robinson Crusoe, directing our attention to the seduction and tyranny of storytelling itself.
Inside This Book
(Learn More)
First Sentence
'At last I could row no further. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
'At last I could row no further. Read the first page
Explore More
Concordance
Browse Sample PagesConcordance
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
9 of 11 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Coetzee - a male South African Booker Prize winning author - has got right into the mind and body of a young woman from 18th Century England - and cast her away on none other than Robinson Crusoe's island. There, she finds an ageing Crusoe doggedly building terraces, day after day, with his mysteriously tongueless black slaveboy, Friday. Crusoe accepts Susan's presence, but is deeply set in his ways. The island is his world and his - to her - reasonless building of the terraces, is his way of bringing order to an otherwise terrifyingly lawless existence. Once, Crusoe has a fever and Susan comforts him with her body - an event most beautifully and sparely described - but they become no closer as friends. Finally a sail appears and the trio head back to England. But Crusoe dies in Susan's arms en route and she, with Friday now at her heels, determines to find an author who can properly tell their tale. This is when she meets Defoe - who becomes in part her potential saviour, providing her with sustenance - but also her 'Foe', because in his attempts to make the book appealing to the widest public, he actuallly writes her out of the tale... This is a book all about the power of words, the search for a voice and Truth. I won't give away the amazing ending, but simply recommend this extraordinary book to anyone who loves a gently demanding, but superb, read.
Format:Paperback
Daniel DeFoe's classic novel of shipwreck and survival is given an alternative re-telling by South African Nobel Laureate JM Coetzee in this short novel "Foe".
The story is told from the first person perspective of Susan Barton who is left adrift on a small boat with a dead captain after the crew of the ship she was sailing on to find her missing daughter on, mutinied. She washes ashore a desert island and finds that she is not alone. A man named Crusoe and his tongue-less former slave and manservant Friday are the only other two people living on the island. Their life on the island and subsequent escape to 17th England is documented here, up until she meets Daniel Foe, a budding novelist whom she wants to write her story and make her a celebrity.
Daniel Foe is of course Daniel DeFoe, who bought the faux title "De" to add before his last name to make it seem that he was nobility when he in actuality was not.
The book talks about stories and storytelling, the power of fiction, the power of words and narrative, and how we live and how we see ourselves in our heads in relation to the real world. I found the book a very fast paced read and enthralling in parts. Barton's encounters with Foe were particularly fascinating and Coetzee does a good job of recreating 17th century England well. Despite a rather obligatory literature ending - dreamlike and vague - I found it to be a good read that I enjoyed reading on the plane this summer. Coetzee's best is still for me "Disgrace" but "Foe" is an oft overlooked fine addition to this remarkable writer's canon and those looking for an accessible and interesting novel by this writer would do well to start here.
The story is told from the first person perspective of Susan Barton who is left adrift on a small boat with a dead captain after the crew of the ship she was sailing on to find her missing daughter on, mutinied. She washes ashore a desert island and finds that she is not alone. A man named Crusoe and his tongue-less former slave and manservant Friday are the only other two people living on the island. Their life on the island and subsequent escape to 17th England is documented here, up until she meets Daniel Foe, a budding novelist whom she wants to write her story and make her a celebrity.
Daniel Foe is of course Daniel DeFoe, who bought the faux title "De" to add before his last name to make it seem that he was nobility when he in actuality was not.
The book talks about stories and storytelling, the power of fiction, the power of words and narrative, and how we live and how we see ourselves in our heads in relation to the real world. I found the book a very fast paced read and enthralling in parts. Barton's encounters with Foe were particularly fascinating and Coetzee does a good job of recreating 17th century England well. Despite a rather obligatory literature ending - dreamlike and vague - I found it to be a good read that I enjoyed reading on the plane this summer. Coetzee's best is still for me "Disgrace" but "Foe" is an oft overlooked fine addition to this remarkable writer's canon and those looking for an accessible and interesting novel by this writer would do well to start here.
Format:Paperback
Mr Coetzee writes so wonderfully, it really doesn't seem to matter here that there isn't much of a 'story' or that the ending is a bit weird. This is a moving meditation on the impact of slavery on the human psyche. Susan's reflections on what has happened to 'Friday' who has suffered named and unnamed terrors, and what this means for his humanity, gives us a deep insight into Coetzee's own thoughts about apartheid. Susan's own frustrations in her attempts to control her own story and move from the periphery are also deftly explored. As usual, Coetzee also explores the darker side of the writer's role, exploiting the stories of others. Serious subject matter written with great skill.
Would you like to see more reviews about this item?
Were these reviews helpful?
Let us know
Most Recent Customer Reviews
Emperor's New Book, or subtle beyond all understanding?
Writers of a postmodern bent be warned! If you're going to deconstruct a classic, you'd better make sure your book is in the same league as the original. Read more
Published on 27 Dec 2009 by Shamus P. Maxwell
A postmodern rewriting of a classic
In "Foe" J.M. Coetzee retells and rewrites Defoe's classis "Robinson Crusoe". In my opinion, this is what postmodernism is all about: making you doubt about voices, narrative and... Read more
Published on 30 April 2009 by Marco Colombo
'I am not a story', but a formidable masterpiece
This remarkable short novel has two interlinked levels: the relation fiction (art / writing) - reality and the `meaning / message' of a particular work of art, in our case... Read more
Published on 6 Dec 2007 by Luc REYNAERT
Difficult, but rewarding: it stays with you.
Man, this took me ages to read considering it's only 200 pages long. Like the rest of Coetzee's books, this is really about South Africa and yet it's not about south africa. Read more
Published on 3 Dec 2006 by Gs Greaves
Confusing
First of all I have to say that English is not my mother tongue, but I think that my problems to understand this book have not been only a vocabulary issue, I have just finished... Read more
Published on 5 Jan 2005 by Guillermo Arroyo Martinez
A really intriguing book
This book is a really interesting re-telling of Defoe's classic 'Robinson Crusoe' it really unravels the Crusoe myth and storytelling in itself. Read more
Published on 4 Feb 2003 by E. Smith
coetzee is THE MAN.
I'd never heard of Coetzee when I read Foe, but I am now determined to read everything by him .. Foe is quite simply an amazing book ... based on the old Crusoe story ... Read more
Published on 6 Aug 2001 by abortive@hotmail.com
Makes you wonder about story-telling
Coetzee once again manages to capture the readers' attention by cleverly twisting facts and experiences around. Read more
Published on 16 Jun 2001
Strange
A rather strage book telling the story of a woman who became stranded on an island inhabited by Cruso and his slave Friday. Read more
Published on 7 April 2001
Not for those looking for a 'ripping yarn'
If you want an essay on the nature of storytelling and writing then this is the book for you. Before becoming disappointed by Coetzee's characterisation of Susan Barton, one must... Read more
Published on 7 Sep 1999
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
|
|
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
