The Story of the Island

Costello rewrote Molly and we are not shown a page. Barton wrote the island and we are shown the pages Foe refused.

That is the difference between a masterpiece used as a burden and a testimony used as raw material. Barton does not want to be interesting. She wants to be accurate: an older Cruso who builds terraces and will not leave them, a Friday whose tongue is gone, an island with no goats worth mentioning. Foe, who knows the market, reaches for the cannibals. The book that escaped into our world is his. Hers remains the account Coetzee prints and then spends two-thirds of a novel watching get rewritten.

Menard wanted the Quixote in the same words. Barton wants Crusoe in different ones, and loses. The further loss is Friday. Cruso says the slavers cut out his tongue so he could not tell his story. Foe tries to teach him to write. The last section of Coetzee’s novel goes down to the wreck and finds a stream issuing from Friday’s mouth that “flows up through his body and out upon me; it beats against my eyelids.” That is not a book. It is what a book would have been if anyone in the chain of authors had been willing not to speak for him.

On the readability rating. Part I is Barton’s narrative, at length. It is not a 1719 volume under her name. The volume under someone else’s name is in every bookshop, and is the reason this entry exists.