This book was disappointing. To kick it off, Lawrence extensively describes the mother's life and her bad relationship with her husband, and why thereThis book was disappointing. To kick it off, Lawrence extensively describes the mother's life and her bad relationship with her husband, and why therefore her children give her renewed life and love. Her favorite child dies, two grow up and move out, and she just has her son Paul. Based on the title, we should now focus on a conflict between the mother, Paul, and his lovers.
And in Lawrence's words, that was the intent: ". . . when they come to manhood, they can't love, because their mother is the strongest power in their lives, and holds them." But I have major issues with how it plays out.
Most importantly, I don't care about Paul as a character. This is a huge problem, because he is now the main character to such a degree that the mother barely features in the flesh except to be grumpy about his lovers occasionally and die. The shift of the main POV from the mother to Paul is sudden and unwelcome, and I kept wondering when we were going to get back to the mother, whose character is much more fully fleshed-out and comprehensible due to the time spent on her for the first quarter of the book. Because Paul's attachment to his mother is the one under observation, the book might as well have started with him around age five if all that character development for her was going to be largely trashed.
The mother's proud spirit, hard work, suffering under her husband, and love for her children makes her sympathetic and interesting, whereas Paul can only be a clingy baby. Paul is described as sullen and easily wounded, not very charismatic or socially capable, and viciously resentful of any judgments of himself. He gets a job he obviously doesn't deserve, then makes friends with the women at work and likes to draw. That's him in a nutshell.
...whatever? I wanted to see new things happen in the mother's life, for her to find some kind of new love, and instead I was watching this grumpy kid wandering around the woods with a gloomy girl who he treats cruelly and readily feels he hates. For a while, I expected that this was a temporary detour, and we'd soon be back to our more sympathetic, long-developed main character of the mother. "This bit's going on rather long."
But then the interminable pages of his anti-romances just kept going. From the moment the POV shifts to Paul all the way to the end of the book, I never cared much about him or either of his semi-unpleasant lovers. It feels circuitous and superfluous long before the end. In Lawrence's words, Miriam "fights his mother," so it can't work. Then Clara doesn't work either, because he still cares more for his mother. So the main point--the struggle between love for a mother and love for a lover--doesn't need Miriam in order to occur. It feels like so much padding.
But I could not care less about any of that because I have already been shown an interesting character whose life I want to see develop, and instead I'm saddled with this guy. Paul is only interesting through his mother. I would much rather read about her directly and see her grow and change.
Lawrence had the option here, for example, to get truly daring and depict an incestuous relationship after showing Paul failing to find love elsewhere because of his mother's hold. The scene where Paul kisses her neck and she cries that she never truly had a husband had more emotional force than anything that came after. It would make perfect sense for BOTH of them if Paul abandoned other women and turned inward, and I think more concerning society, stifling maternal love/attachment, and psychology could be explored this way.
This is just one example of alternative options for this book. Another possibility would be for the mother to find some kind of new interest following Paul's increasing absence due to his romances. For example, an unexpected new baby with her husband despite her later years could create all sorts of interesting reactions in Paul, who has become accustomed to the idea that he is her world and will be until she dies. Or she could have an affair with another man after feeling she is losing Paul to Miriam. Both these things would create new counter-reactions in Paul, which could create new struggles for her, etc.*
Instead, we have over 200 pages of these boring romances, abandoning a fully rounded character to spend all the time on the transference of their life force over to a limp noodle who is more a vehicle for Lawrence's excessive exploration of an idea than a recognizable human being. Because there's little more to half the book than "look at how his mother's strong hold on him and his love for her keeps him from really living," once you've seen that, there's not much left. The only other conflict is, "Will he choose Miriam? Will he choose Clara?" Because I don't care about any of these three people, it doesn't matter much that he has to choose neither. Very disappointing.
*I do understand that the book is semi-autobiographical, but I would be happier with a straight autobiography or a less monotonous work of fiction....more
If there has been a better writer than Tolstoy, I haven't encountered them yet.If there has been a better writer than Tolstoy, I haven't encountered them yet....more
This book drained my faith in the Nobel Prize for Literature. Perhaps a textbook case of preexisting reputation taking something farther than it deserThis book drained my faith in the Nobel Prize for Literature. Perhaps a textbook case of preexisting reputation taking something farther than it deserves. Can this truly be by the author of the superb 'Waiting for the Barbarians'? I would be proud for life to have written that; 'Foe' would embarrass me.
I read reviews in hopes of finding the apparent greatness that I missed, but again I was disappointed. They say the same things that are obvious: themes of racism, sexism, language, power. The narrator cannot have the story she wants told, told. She is Friday's master and refuses to acknowledge it, while Friday is literally missing his tongue. In each case, communication is power.
And...yeah, that's it. There is nothing deep about cutting out a slave's tongue to make a statement about race, colonialism, varieties of masters and slaves. There is definitely nothing deep about a woman in a man's world banging the men who have power over her and not getting her way about various things with either of them. The most unique theme is the power of language and writing, but it is done weakly, and everyone who wasted their time reading this could just as well have read Ralph Ellison's 'Invisible Man' to get that theme in atomic force. As for unreliable narration by a woman in a sexist world back in the day, Margaret Atwood's 'Alias Grace' is far superior.
This is a stream-of-consciousness novel. The bread and butter of such a novel are prose and revelation. A master example is Virginia Woolf's 'To The Lighthouse'; a quality modern example is Kazuo Ishiguro's 'The Remains of the Day.' Woolf's prose is exquisite, fluid, and constantly provoking thought on myriad aspects of existence. Ishiguro's prose is plain, but realistic, and the subconscious motivations of his narrator that slowly come to light are heartbreaking and relevant to many of our lives.
The chief sin of 'Foe' is not that its themes are obvious and hackneyed in their forms, but that its prose is dull, repetitive and empty. It may be one of the most empty books I have ever read, in this sense: apart from the overarching themes, it says almost nothing. You know that moment when a line, a thought, a side note in the main plot or themes, makes you jump inside or tilt your head in thought? 'Foe' is almost impressively absent those moments. How a man as deep and capable of great writing as Coetzee managed to write this many words without saying anything remarkable is beyond me.
The narrator returns to the same topics over and over: What happened to Friday's tongue? Why isn't Foe answering me? Who is this girl who showed up? I've almost written all of them just there. Books that layer repetitive recurrences in this manner usually reveal new information or ideas each time, but this one does not. I am not exaggerating when I say that the contents of this novel, in themselves, gave me *nothing* new.
I learned far more from, say, the high fantasy novel 'Wizard's First Rule' by Terry Goodkind that I liked as a teen. It has dozens of pages about a magical dominatrix in red leather enslaving the protagonist. That's what Coetzee is up against in this comparison, and somehow he's losing. ...more
Loading...
