Foe

If the greatest living novelist isn't Saramago, then he's surely South Africa's Nobel laureate (2003) J.M. Coetzee. Not all writers must have the Nobel to be considered great. The list of those snubbed includes the giants Joyce, Borges, Proust and, possibly, Nabokov and de Beauvoir.

The following excerpt is from Disgrace, concerning race relations in S. Africa through the eyes of a disgraced professor who flees to the countryside to live with his daughter. But I might give a nod to Foe, a brilliant short novel that takes the themes of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and molds them into a new form, a prose of thoughtful immediacy. Foe uses a postmodern storytelling concern, the question of whose story is the true one. The complexity is not in technique (eg watch me write some difficult prose, man), but in his presentation of characters who can never know one another and in what he the writer chooses to leave out. It's quite a feat and my description does not do it justice.

His books are easy to read and among the richest in modern literature. Now, Disgrace:

The two young sheep are tethered all day beside the stable on a bare patch of ground. Their bleating, steady and monotonous, has begun to annoy him. He strolls over to Petrus, who has his bicycle upside down and is working on it. ‘Those sheep,’ he says – ‘don’t you think we could tie them where they can graze?’
‘They are for the party,’ says Petrus. ‘On Saturday I will slaughter them for the party. You and Lucy must come.’ He wipes his hands clean. ‘I invite you and Lucy to the party.’
‘On Saturday?’
‘Yes, I am giving a party on Saturday. A big party.’
‘Thank you. But even if the sheep are for the party, don’t you think they could graze?’
An hour later the sheep are still tethered, still bleating dolefully. Petrus is nowhere to be seen. Exasperated, he unties them and tugs them over to the damside, where there is abundant grass.
The sheep drink at length, then leisurely begin to graze. They are black-faced Persians, alike in size, in markings, even in their movements. Twins, in all likelihood, destined since birth for the butcher’s knife. Well, nothing remarkable in that. When did a sheep last die of old age? Sheep do not own themselves, do not own their lives. They exist to be used, every last ounce of them, their flesh to be eaten, their bones to be crushed and fed to poultry. Nothing escapes, except perhaps the gall bladder, which no one will eat. Descartes should have thought of that. The soul, suspended in the dark, bitter gall, hiding.
‘Petrus has invited us to a party,’ he tells Lucy. ‘Why is he throwing a party?’
‘Because of the land transfer, I would guess. It goes through officially on the first of next month. It’s a big day for him. We should at least put in an appearance, take them a present.’
‘He is going to slaughter the two sheep. I wouldn’t have thought two sheep would go very far.’
‘Petrus is a pennypincher. In the old days it would have been an ox.’
‘I’m not sure I like the way he does things – bringing the slaughter-beasts home to acquaint them with the people who are going to eat them.’
‘What would you prefer? That the slaughtering be done in an abattoir, so that you needn’t think about it?
‘Yes.’
‘Wake up, David. This is the country. This is Africa.’