Peter Goldsworthy
Peter Goldsworthy divides his time equally between writing and medicine. His novel Wish (1995) has been recently rereleased in the Text Classics series, and his novel Maestro (1989) as an Angus & Robertson Australian Classic. Humphrey Bower’s stage adaptation of Wish was performed by the Perth Theatre Company earlier this year. A new collection of poetry will appear in 2015, his first for fourteen years.
All essays by Peter Goldsworthy
She and Her Man: Foe
There are many ways to read Foe (1986), which has a shifting choose-your-own-strange-and-surprising-adventure flavour to it; I’ve tried a few. My favourite is to reverse-engineer Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe from the perspective of the castaway Susan Barton’s account of her very different experience of Cruso in Coetzee’s novel. Putting the chronological cart before the horse (a method that owes something to Jorge Luis Borges’s deadpan comic masterpiece Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote), we realise that Robinson Crusoe would have been a much duller book (not that it is free of unabridged longueurs) if Defoe had not first read Coetzee’s Foe and fictionalised and glamourised Barton’s account of her largely adventure-free time marooned on the island, in order to create a more ripping yarn.
