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Before this, I’d read three other books by J.M. Coetzee: Waiting for the Barbarians, Life and Times of Michael K, and Disgrace. I enjoyed all three — very much. His style is so wonderfully simple and yet precise and still poetic. Despite never having read Robinson Crusoe, for some time I have been looking forward to reading Coetzee’s Foe (1986), his next book after winning the Booker for Life and Times of Michael K. When Foe was released Coetzee was criticized because it did not appear to be a politically relevant book like his others. While I agree that it is not overtly political, its portrayal of language and how language can build power is acute and politically important in a less obvious way. My problem with it was that I found it a bit boring and not as well tailored as his other books.
The book is a sly reworking of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Like Crusoe (I said I’d never read it, not that I’d never read about it :) ), Foe is a story within a larger frame. The book begins with quotation marks as Susan Barton begins her dramatic monologue. We come to know that she is telling a writer, Mr. Foe, about her arrival on Cruso’s island, a wind-blown and rather barren island somewhere out from Brazil. Through snippets in this monologue, we find out that she had been in Bahia, Brazil, searching for her lost daughter, to no avail. On her return to England, the ship on which Barton was sailing suffered a mutiny. Barton, who had been cozy with the now-dead captain, was placed in a small boat with the captain’s body and castaway. Eventually, dying of thirst with hands hurting from incessant rowing against the current, she throws herself into the ocean, eventually to be washed up on an island. On the shore she is found by Friday, Cruso’s black servant and fellow castaway. For the next year Barton learns to cope with the wind and the waste on the island, constantly hoping for salvation. This is Part I.
In Part I, there are some beautiful lines that introduce the major theme of the novel.
But who, accustomed to the fullness of human speech, can be content with caws and chirps and screeches, and the barking of seals, and the moan of the wind?
Speech — the ability to make sound, to be heard, to be listened to, to communicate, to create a history – is the novel’s main theme, particularly as applied to those without power. We soon find out that Friday’s tongue has been removed by someone. Slave merchants? Cruso himself? We don’t really know. While on the island, Barton wants to teach Friday the ability to communicate, but Cruso says Friday knows what’s needed. Also, Barton wants Cruso to find a way to write his story so that it can be shared with others, but he has no interest. We never find out how Cruso came to the island. Despite the lack of communication, in some way these three diverse individuals manage to form a slight sense of being while trapped together on the island, and their connections don’t seem to rely on words. Barton wonders,
What had held Friday back all these years from beating in his master’s head with a stone while he slept, so bringing slavehood to an end and inaugurating a reign of idleness? And what held Cruso back from tying Friday to a post every night, like a dog, to sleep the more secure, or from blinding him, as they blind asses in Brazil? It seemed to me that all things were possible on the island, all tyrannies and cruelties, though in small; and if, in despite of what was possible, we lived at peace one with another, surely this was proof that certain laws unknown to us held sway, or else that we had been following the promptings of our hearts all this time, and our hearts had not betrayed us.
When salvation comes Barton is certain it will lead to a better life. However, Cruso does not survive the journey home. Barton and Friday find themselves lost and destitute in England. With no money but with hope, Barton goes to Mr. Foe, hoping he’ll put her island adventure – what we’ve just read – into print. She’s certain she lacks the skill to do it (“Return to me the substance I have lost, Mr Foe: that is my entreaty. For though my story gives the truth, it does not give the substance of the truth (I see that clearly, we need not pretend otherwise).”). Thus we find out why Part I of the book is in quotations: it is Barton’s recounting of the events on the island.
When Part II begins, Foe has abandoned his home to creditors, and Barton has no idea how to find him. Her only hope for herself and Friday is unresponsive. This Part contains Barton’s letters imploring Foe to continue writing her story (“For surely, with every day that passes, our memories grow less certain, as even a statute in marble is worn away by rain, till at last we can no longer tell what shape the sculptor’s hand gave it.”). She and Friday are in worse circumstances than they were on the island. When the creditors finally leave Foe’s home, Barton and Friday move in.
Part II is where the book started to lose my intense interest. At times it was still fascinating: there is an encounter with a girl claiming to be Barton’s daughter (it’s vague but vital to the story — the girl is a symbol); there is evidence Foe sent the girl; there is further evidence the girl is being genuine. There are multiple observations of Friday and what appears to be his complete oblivion. Still, I found myself just wanting the book to move forward and end. Coetzee’s own narrative becomes surreal as Barton’s reality becomes uncertain and characters enter and leave the story like ghosts through walls. I’m sure I didn’t give it the time it deserved, but I was getting impatient before the narrative started falling apart, and it’s hard to get back on track when it’s going to take even more patience.
All of this builds up to a more pleasing, though still abstract, Part III when Foe finally speaks for himself. Turns out he has been giving Barton’s story a lot of thought, but he doesn’t like her way of telling it. He tells her the story should be about her search for her daughter, something merely tangential, almost incidental, in Barton’s account and in her letters.
‘. . . It is thus that we make up a book: loss, then quest, then recovery; beginning, then middle, then end. As to novelty, this is lent by the island episode — which is properly the second part of the middle — and by the reversal in which the daughter takes up the quest abandoned by her mother.’
All the joy I had felt in finding my way to Foe fled me. I sat heavy-limbed.
The book has much more to it than I was able to put down here, and for that reason it is worth reading. I don’t think it is Coetzee’s best work by a long shot, but in hindsight (after getting through the undergrowth) I very much liked the layers built upon this phrase: “. . . what it is to speak into a void, day after day, without answer.”
Before you read the book:
I’m pretty sure that even though it didn’t win the Best of the Booker J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace was the runner up. To me, anyway, it was the second most substantive book on the shortlist and it seemed like most people I talked to who didn’t vote for Midnight’s Children voted for Disgrace. At any rate, I thought it might be nice to take another look at an earlier Coetzee novel that won the Booker Prize but that was not considered for the Best of the Booker: Life and Times of Michael K (1983).
Here we meet an apparent simpleton, Michael K. He lives near his mother in a city that is getting torn up by war. Though he’s comfortable in his routine, K decides to hook a cart up to a bicycle so he can take his mother away, back to the village where she grew up. The book is divided up into three parts: Part I is from K’s perspective; Part II is from the perspective of the doctor who treats K; and the very short Part III is again from K’s perspective.
As in Disgrace, Coetzee’s prose is sparse yet elegant, painful and full of irony.
The damp weather was no good for her, nor was the unending worry about the future. Once settled in Prince Albert she would quickly recover her health. At most, they would be a day or two on the road. People were decent, people would stop and give them lifts.
Unfortunately, and it’s no surprise, K’s plans do not pan out. The consequences are ugly. But somehow, the book is beautiful. This is one of those rare works of art that by showing ugliness gets the reader (who pays attention) to recognize, more deeply, beauty. I’m not talking about cartharsis here. This book doesn’t necessarily dwell on the tragedies that occur – they are presented here more like an inconvenience. I’m not sure how it happens, but while reading this book - this book about war and about one man’s physical decline as he attempts to become invisible – during the day I looked around me and saw so many wonderful things. Things looked brighter. I was happier. It was not because I was contrasting my life with that of Michael K. It was because in his life I could see some fundamental beauty which I could then recognize in my own. I would read the sad way Michael K passes time while alone or in captivity and feel some fundamental truth, some elemental beauty even among the ugliness of human nature. For example, this simple passage from early in the book is simple, its momentary bliss is rare, yet for all its simpleness it shouts a message louder than the ravages going on around the characters:
[H]e was again able to take his mother, wrapped in coat and blanket, for a seafront ride that brought a smile to her lips.
I liked this book more than Disgrace. In both, Coetzee has a way of using simple words in seemingly simple sentences, coming up with a fabulously understated style:
He had a feeling that he was losing his grip on why he had come all these hundreds of miles, and had to pace about with his hands over his face before he felt better again.
But Life and Times of Michael K felt more compassionate than Disgrace. Because Coetzee had to recognize the fundamental beauty I talked about earlier, I felt more drawn to K and to the writer. Simple passages like the one here made me feel like Coetzee was not merely defending a character – as I felt in Disgrace, where Lurie is almost completely unlikeable on the surface – but also working hard to get the reader to love a character that he loved:
There was a cord of tenderness that stretched from him to the patch of earth beside the dam and must be cut. It seemed to him that one could cut a cord like that only so many times before it would not grow again.
Michael K is deceptively complex. He seems simple. He barely talks. The simple style of the novel strengthens this feel. However, like the novel itself, there is much more below the surface. The doctor, who tells Part II, is one of the only characters who recognizes Michael K as something more than a simpleton. His revelation is probably flawed too, but that leaves more room for readers to get what they can from the life of Michael K.
After you read the book:
I wrote here mostly about the beauty I found in Michael K. But here I want to look at some of the horrors I encountered along the way. When Michael K’s mother died his silence left me stunned. He was frightened of his mother, and it was interesting that because of this he is almost scared to grieve for her. Though he seems to be running away from the war to Prince Albert, I felt that mostly he was still trying to carry out her will, and not because he loved her just that much but because he was frightened of what would happen to him if he didn’t. This hold she had on him made him fairly impotent when she was alive. Now she’s dead and his body too begins to waste away.
Did you see hope in the tryst he had with the woman at the end? Was there some vitality reentering his life? I wanted to see it that way, but the encounter felt too cheap. It almost seemed to underscore the decline of Michael K.
[This book was shortlisted for the Best of the Booker 2008. The other five are The Siege of Krishnapur, The Conservationist, Midnight's Children, Oscar and Lucinda, and The Ghost Road.]
Before you read the book:
When Coetzee won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003, Disgrace (1999) was the first book I bought by him. Though it was short, it took me a long time to open it up and begin to read. Years in fact. When I finally did begin reading it, I consumed it in less than one day, a busy day at that.
Disgrace is a very quick read. But it’s not quick just because it’s short (though it is short); it is a quick read because Coetzee’s writing is sweet and simple. I don’t remember getting tied up by a single sentence. It’s siplicity on the surface is even more impressive when considering the complexity – all the allusions, all of the conflicted feelings – that is actually going on. As an example of how fast this book can move and yet how much goes on in the lines, anything I disclose in this post takes place in the first thirty pages – and so much happens in those thirty pages, so many emotions that affected me viscerally.
However, though short and quick, I still don’t think I get all I should have gotten from the book – so please enlighten me with your comments!
The novel opens up when David Lurie’s prostitute stops meeting with him. He’s caught a glimpse of her outside the hotel room where they met weekly and where, until now, they’ve had a great relationship. He wants to console her, tell her that he understands:
He is all for double lives, triple lives, lives lived in compartments. Indeed, he feels, if anything, greater tenderness for her.
But she cannot deal with the fact that a client has seen her in her daily life, so she drops him. His week becomes ”as featureless as a desert.” He seeks to assauge his libido (let alone his ego) by seducing one of his students. It is one of the most painfully compelling sections of a book I’ve ever read. In a way I felt guilty for reading it, like I was somehow involved. That sick feeling of guilt and desire radiates from the page. It’s an unpleasant thing to experience, especially when Coetzee inserts cold reason.
He is vexed, irritated. She is behaving badly, getting away with too much; she is learning to exploit him and will probably exploit him further. But if she has got away with much, he has got away with more; if she is behaving badly, he has behaved worse. To the extent that they are together, if they are together, he is the one who leads, she the one who follows. Let him not forget that.
And this is just the first thirty pages. The real force of the book comes after this, when Lurie moves away to live with his daughter on her farm. There is more disgrace to come.
David Lurie is a character to be despised – at least, that’s what I wanted to do. I couldn’t fully despise the man though. Somehow I could not help but pity him and feel somewhat complicit. Underneath the cold, selfish skin, there was a real human being. I don’t quite know why. I admit that I have not fully informed myself of the criticism this book takes from those who purport to know about South Africa and race relations post-apartheid. I’m not sure how I’d feel about it if I knew more, but as I stand now, it is a book to be read for its stylistic, stark beauty and for its substance.
For after you read the book:
Mostly I have just questions here, about various matters.
What is the connection with the animals? That was an aspect that I didn’t particularly care for honestly, but maybe I just didn’t get it. Even though I pitied the animals, it was in no way sufficient for me to associate that pity with anything I consider more important.
I can see some reasons why Lucy was so passive about her rape and her assaulters. But I know this offended a lot of people. How does it fit in the larger picture of the book? Her passivity and the somewhat redemptive ending do not seem to mesh in my mind.
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