Foe

J. M. Coetzee · b. 1940 · South Africa / Australia

Why it matters

Susan Barton washes ashore on Cruso's island, outlives him, and returns to London to fight the novelist Mr. Foe for authorship of her own castaway story, while Friday, his tongue cut out, cannot tell his. Coetzee's rewrite of Robinson Crusoe asks whose voice actually survives into the book.

At a glance

A metafictional frame nesting Crusoe's tale inside letters and a silenced narrator resists easy resolution.