Currently reading
The 5th Wave
14
The Light Between Oceans: A Novel
The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do To Get More of It
Clockwork Princess
The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness
Love Medicine
Love Medicine: Newly Revised Edition
Foe
In general, I enjoy reading books which tell a well-known story from a different perspective. The Wide Sargasso Sea showed how using today's standards, Mr. Rochester from Jane Eyre is a sexist, overbearing boor. And Gregory Maguire's Wicked is a brilliant and complex retelling of the children's classic The Wizard of Oz. But I felt there were many problems with Coetzee's Foe. This is a retelling of the classic Robinson Crusoe through the eyes of Susan Barton, a woman who is castaway on Crusoe's deserted island many years after Friday's arrival. The 3 are rescued and returned to England. Susan retells her story to a man named Daniel Foe, only her story is bleak, oppressive and filled with endless days of emptiness and despair. Friday's history and background remains unknown because his story can't be told - he is mute when someone (Crusoe possibly) removed his tongue. The story on it's own paints an interesting view of England at that time from the view of someone who is barely surviving. But the book had little to do with the original Robinson Crusoe and what was kept of the original book, changed the plot so drastically that I didn't feel that it gave me a different view of the same story. Instead, it was it's own story (mediocre from my point of view) that had snippets from the original.
