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I foolishly promised some insight, in my review of _Master of Petersburg_ into what separates a great Coetzee from a not-so-great one. I'm not sure I can really deliver, though this is a great book-- it reads incredibly smoothly, and the curtain, or perhaps the frame, around successive sections keeps expanding in each new section to change the stakes and deepen the reading experience.
Here, the narrator is one Susan Barton, who is shipwrecked for a year with Cruso and who then is with him when he dies, shortly after rescue. We then follow her adventures, with Friday, in England, as she tries to survive and to get money from selling the story to Foe/ Defoe.
There are the sort of expected aporiae here: what happened to Susan's daughter, for example, or to Friday's tongue-- and the circling around these topics allows Coetzee to poke at his richest material, concerning our responsibility to and deep rooted fear of our fellow man. It really is an allegory for post-Apartheid South Africa, in ways that are easy to see, but incredibly difficult to resolve.
There are moments here, I'll admit, when I wasn't completely onboard, when I found Susan unsympathetic and the narrative seemingly without direction. In the end, I was convinced that such feelings were meant to be aroused, though some readers might not be able to overcome that drift. And I haven't looked at _Crusoe_ again, but I don't think Coetzee's prose is accurately seventeenth century style. To me, that's a good thing, but instead, the prose style feels like of Victorian (though much shorter). I did wonder about that a little, but I don't want to question it too much, since it made the book that much more readable.
Here, the narrator is one Susan Barton, who is shipwrecked for a year with Cruso and who then is with him when he dies, shortly after rescue. We then follow her adventures, with Friday, in England, as she tries to survive and to get money from selling the story to Foe/ Defoe.
There are the sort of expected aporiae here: what happened to Susan's daughter, for example, or to Friday's tongue-- and the circling around these topics allows Coetzee to poke at his richest material, concerning our responsibility to and deep rooted fear of our fellow man. It really is an allegory for post-Apartheid South Africa, in ways that are easy to see, but incredibly difficult to resolve.
There are moments here, I'll admit, when I wasn't completely onboard, when I found Susan unsympathetic and the narrative seemingly without direction. In the end, I was convinced that such feelings were meant to be aroused, though some readers might not be able to overcome that drift. And I haven't looked at _Crusoe_ again, but I don't think Coetzee's prose is accurately seventeenth century style. To me, that's a good thing, but instead, the prose style feels like of Victorian (though much shorter). I did wonder about that a little, but I don't want to question it too much, since it made the book that much more readable.