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Outline #3
Kudos
Rachel Cusk, the critically acclaimed author of Outline and Transit, completes her pathbreaking trilogy with Kudos
A woman writer visits a Europe in flux, where questions of personal and political identity are rising to the surface and the trauma of change is opening up new possibilities of loss and renewal. Within the rituals of literary culture, Faye finds the human story in disarray amid differing attitudes toward the public enactment of the creative persona, and she begins to identify among the people she meets a tension between truth and representation that causes her to consider questions of acclaim, justice, and the ultimate value of suffering. The third in the trilogy that began with Outline, Rachel Cusk’s Kudos takes as its theme the relationship between pain and honor, and investigates the moral nature of success as a precept of both art and living.
A woman writer visits a Europe in flux, where questions of personal and political identity are rising to the surface and the trauma of change is opening up new possibilities of loss and renewal. Within the rituals of literary culture, Faye finds the human story in disarray amid differing attitudes toward the public enactment of the creative persona, and she begins to identify among the people she meets a tension between truth and representation that causes her to consider questions of acclaim, justice, and the ultimate value of suffering. The third in the trilogy that began with Outline, Rachel Cusk’s Kudos takes as its theme the relationship between pain and honor, and investigates the moral nature of success as a precept of both art and living.
224 pages, Hardcover
First published June 5, 2018
About the author
Rachel Cusk
55 books4,249 followersRachel Cusk was born in Canada, and spent some of her childhood in Los Angeles, before her family returned to England, in 1974, when Cusk was 8 years old. She read English at New College, Oxford.
Cusk is the Whitbread Award–winning author of two memoirs, including The Last Supper, and seven novels, including Arlington Park, Saving Agnes, The Temporary, The Country Life, and The Lucky Ones.
She has won and been shortlisted for numerous prizes: her most recent novel, Outline (2014), was shortlisted for the Folio Prize, the Goldsmith's Prize and the Bailey's prize, and longlisted for Canada's Giller Prize. In 2003, Rachel Cusk was nominated by Granta magazine as one of 20 'Best of Young British Novelists'
She lives in Brighton, England.
Cusk is the Whitbread Award–winning author of two memoirs, including The Last Supper, and seven novels, including Arlington Park, Saving Agnes, The Temporary, The Country Life, and The Lucky Ones.
She has won and been shortlisted for numerous prizes: her most recent novel, Outline (2014), was shortlisted for the Folio Prize, the Goldsmith's Prize and the Bailey's prize, and longlisted for Canada's Giller Prize. In 2003, Rachel Cusk was nominated by Granta magazine as one of 20 'Best of Young British Novelists'
She lives in Brighton, England.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 1,517 reviews
September 26, 2018
Nominated for the Goldsmiths Prize 2018
Welcome to my Goodreads review of a novel that mocks Goodreads reviews! :-) (More about that later.) "Kudos" is largely dialogue-driven and set in the world of literary festivals and book marketing - and while Cusk only alludes to the events and places where she does actually take us, I think I solved some of her riddles. But let me start by outlining (haha, sorry) the story:
Faye, a writer and divorced mother of two (just like Cusk; Faye is also the protagonist of "Outline" and "Transit"), travels from Britain to Germany in order to take part in a literary festival. From the descriptions, I gathered that the city is probably Cologne (the underground auditorium being the Kölner Philharmonie, the festival being the lit.cologne, the design hotel being the Hotel Wasserturm, and the river being - of course - the Rhine). Fun fact: Rachel Cusk was a guest at the lit.colgne 2016, where she read from "Outline". At her hotel, Faye meets with her German publisher, who is a controversial man in the publishing world, although he - a salesman in his 30's - managed to save one of the country's oldest and most distinguished publishing houses after it had gone bankrupt. Here, Cusk is obviously alluding to the Suhrkamp controversy, a very public and soap-opera-like power struggle over the famous (and then-bankrupt) Suhrkamp publishing house, which is - you guessed it - Cusk's German publisher (and said salesman is Dr. Jonathan Landgrebe, although in reality, he doesn't quite look like his fictional version).
While in Cologne, Faye encounters different people from the literary world, talking to organizers, peers and journalists. Her outward movement is mirrored in the stories the people she meets tell her: All dialogue is dominated by the contemplation of life journeys and the passage of time, the juxtaposition of what lies behind and ahead of the characters. As it is typical for Cusk, the text sheds light on the dynamics of relationships and the role of women in society: "Kudos" is the name of a prize that is discussed in the book, and the question arises whether separate categories for male and female are in order, or whether only one person should receive the prize, regardless of his/her sex. Another topic that keeps coming up is Brexit and how Britain is perceived from the continent.
Once again, Cusk is using what she calls the "annihilated perspective", which means that while talking, her characters reveal things both about themselves and the other participants in the conversation. Instead of action, we get dialogue and thematically interrelated stories, and how Cusk weaves them together is absolutely captivating.
In the second part of the book, Faye travels on to a literary conference, and I guess the city she visits is Lisbon (a language that has a word for "a feeling of homesickness even when you are at home" is Portuguese (saudade); it's also a country whose people did "roam the world"; a capital close to the sea and famous for his steep terrain is Lisbon; the conference might be Disquiet International; the church is the Igreja de São Domingos). Similar to the first part, Faye meets and talks to people from the literary world, further illuminating the inner workings of the publishing world and a Europe in the state of flux. In case you might be irritated by the lack of, well, a storyline beyond that, trust me: To read Faye's conversations, all the little vignettes about relationships, literary careers and the state of our continent, is exciting and intriguing.
And now this Goodreads review will finish with a quote about Goodreads reviews - the following is stated by aforementioned German publisher (in the book, not in real life!):
"Sometimes, he said, he amused himself by trawling some of the lower depths of the internet, where readers gave their opinions of their literary purchases, much as they might rate the performance of a detergent. What he had learned, by studying these opinions was that respect for literature was very much skin deep, and that people were never far from the capacity to abuse it. It was entertaining, in a way, to see Dante awarded a single star out of a possible five and his "Divine Comedy" described as "complete shit", but a sensitive person might equally find it distressing, until you remembered that Dante - along with most great writers - carved his vision out of the deepest understanding of human nature and could look after himself."
Oh, the irony: Cusk's (American) publisher gave me a copy of her novel to review it on Goodreads! :-) But Cusk can certainly also look after herself, and this book is great. Go read it.
Welcome to my Goodreads review of a novel that mocks Goodreads reviews! :-) (More about that later.) "Kudos" is largely dialogue-driven and set in the world of literary festivals and book marketing - and while Cusk only alludes to the events and places where she does actually take us, I think I solved some of her riddles. But let me start by outlining (haha, sorry) the story:
Faye, a writer and divorced mother of two (just like Cusk; Faye is also the protagonist of "Outline" and "Transit"), travels from Britain to Germany in order to take part in a literary festival. From the descriptions, I gathered that the city is probably Cologne (the underground auditorium being the Kölner Philharmonie, the festival being the lit.cologne, the design hotel being the Hotel Wasserturm, and the river being - of course - the Rhine). Fun fact: Rachel Cusk was a guest at the lit.colgne 2016, where she read from "Outline". At her hotel, Faye meets with her German publisher, who is a controversial man in the publishing world, although he - a salesman in his 30's - managed to save one of the country's oldest and most distinguished publishing houses after it had gone bankrupt. Here, Cusk is obviously alluding to the Suhrkamp controversy, a very public and soap-opera-like power struggle over the famous (and then-bankrupt) Suhrkamp publishing house, which is - you guessed it - Cusk's German publisher (and said salesman is Dr. Jonathan Landgrebe, although in reality, he doesn't quite look like his fictional version).
While in Cologne, Faye encounters different people from the literary world, talking to organizers, peers and journalists. Her outward movement is mirrored in the stories the people she meets tell her: All dialogue is dominated by the contemplation of life journeys and the passage of time, the juxtaposition of what lies behind and ahead of the characters. As it is typical for Cusk, the text sheds light on the dynamics of relationships and the role of women in society: "Kudos" is the name of a prize that is discussed in the book, and the question arises whether separate categories for male and female are in order, or whether only one person should receive the prize, regardless of his/her sex. Another topic that keeps coming up is Brexit and how Britain is perceived from the continent.
Once again, Cusk is using what she calls the "annihilated perspective", which means that while talking, her characters reveal things both about themselves and the other participants in the conversation. Instead of action, we get dialogue and thematically interrelated stories, and how Cusk weaves them together is absolutely captivating.
In the second part of the book, Faye travels on to a literary conference, and I guess the city she visits is Lisbon (a language that has a word for "a feeling of homesickness even when you are at home" is Portuguese (saudade); it's also a country whose people did "roam the world"; a capital close to the sea and famous for his steep terrain is Lisbon; the conference might be Disquiet International; the church is the Igreja de São Domingos). Similar to the first part, Faye meets and talks to people from the literary world, further illuminating the inner workings of the publishing world and a Europe in the state of flux. In case you might be irritated by the lack of, well, a storyline beyond that, trust me: To read Faye's conversations, all the little vignettes about relationships, literary careers and the state of our continent, is exciting and intriguing.
And now this Goodreads review will finish with a quote about Goodreads reviews - the following is stated by aforementioned German publisher (in the book, not in real life!):
"Sometimes, he said, he amused himself by trawling some of the lower depths of the internet, where readers gave their opinions of their literary purchases, much as they might rate the performance of a detergent. What he had learned, by studying these opinions was that respect for literature was very much skin deep, and that people were never far from the capacity to abuse it. It was entertaining, in a way, to see Dante awarded a single star out of a possible five and his "Divine Comedy" described as "complete shit", but a sensitive person might equally find it distressing, until you remembered that Dante - along with most great writers - carved his vision out of the deepest understanding of human nature and could look after himself."
Oh, the irony: Cusk's (American) publisher gave me a copy of her novel to review it on Goodreads! :-) But Cusk can certainly also look after herself, and this book is great. Go read it.
December 22, 2022
this series never re-captured the same charm the first book had for me - what felt like a pure distillation of intellect and personal philosophy in an incredibly readable and concise form - but overall the pleasure of a literary fiction SERIES could have brought me through in and of itself.
and this was good!
bottom line: yet another rachel cusk fan is born.
------------------
pre-review
in the kind of reading slump in which you have to pick up and put down 20 to 25 books before you can hit page 50 of a single one
update: PHEW.
review to come / 3.5 stars
and this was good!
bottom line: yet another rachel cusk fan is born.
------------------
pre-review
in the kind of reading slump in which you have to pick up and put down 20 to 25 books before you can hit page 50 of a single one
update: PHEW.
review to come / 3.5 stars
March 31, 2022
I met with a number of my Goodreads acquaintances – to share with them my thoughts on the concluding part of Rachel's trilogy of books, a book now shortlisted for the 2018 Goldsmith Prize.
The first to speak was Meike – she was very keen, she said, to understand my views on the book. She herself was a dog lover from a European country, but could read books in at least two other languages including English. She could not she said, tell us, which country she came from or which languages she spoke, but said that if we read her reviews we should be able to recognise sufficient details to solve the riddle. She also said that if we read the notes she had taken before she came to the meeting, then we would find, that, there she had identified the country only, she said to take it out of her final remarks. She found, she said, this book was a mixture of dialogue and thematically interrelated stories. The dialogue, she said, was dominated by the contemplation of life journeys, the passage of time, the juxtaposition, she said, of what lies behind and ahead of the characters.
Doug, an American, interrupted. He was he said particularly keen to hear my views on the book. He himself was not always a fan of the type of experimental fiction celebrated by the Goldsmith Prize – a prize he noted for which Rachel’s two previous books had been shortlisted - a prize also open to male and female authors. In fact, he said, some of these books, he found to adopt a pretentious style and he, he said, would mark his views by writing his review in a parody of that style – reviews which were of course appreciated both by those who, like him, disliked the books but also, he found to his surprise, equally valued by those who enjoyed the books. He did, though, he said, make an exception for Rachel and rated her trilogy, which he said, he had read back to back over 4 days, very highly. Although he was initially disappointed at the lack of any epiphany in the third book, he realised he said, in reflection, that the very idea of an epiphany would probably have defeated the purpose of the book’s “annihilated perspective”
I noticed that Paul became visibly excited at the mention of the term “annihilated perspective” – a term that he said he had been able to trace to the writing of Stephen Pyne on the photography of Herbert Ponting, who, he said, had accompanied Captain Scott on his ill-fated 1911 Antarctic expedition. He was not entirely sure, he said, of the complete relevance of this to the book, but he had some spectacular photographs to show to any one interested. I am, he remarked, eager to hear the thoughts of you, Graham, on this book. He was, he said, not typically a fan of English language fiction and preferred to read more widely across the world of literature. However he said, he was a huge fan of Rachel. The only improvement he could suggest for the book would be, he said, if it had been translated into the language of a European country and then retranslated to English – almost serving, he felt, not just to improve the book, but as a literary symbol of Brexit and what, he said, he hoped would one day be the re-admittance of his country to some form of union with other European countries.
Neil said that for him the early retirement he had taken represented freedom both to pursue photography and to be able to read as widely as possible – he had not, though he noted, planned his early retirement via a spreadsheet. He would very much like to listen to my comments on the book. He noted that Meike was a dog owner, but she had not mentioned, he said, if her dog ran away at any stage, and if it did what that signified. It seemed to him, he said, that there was some significance to dogs running away, which he said, had completely escaped him. He was, he said, pleased to see that Rachel had not during the book, made significant reference to birds rather than dogs – as it was his experience, he said, that many otherwise brilliant pieces of literature were spoilt by incorrect avian taxonomy. He was, however, he said, disappointed to see what Rachel treated “envy” and “jealousy” as synonyms – nevertheless, this trilogy was, he said, a marvellous collection of books.
The last to speak was Jonathan – I had noticed as the others spoke that he was increasingly impatient at one of the phrases being repeated. He had not yet, he said, read the book and so was keen to understand if I followed this consensus of praise. He was he said, a voracious reader of books, and particularly enjoyed he said meeting writers, hearing them read from and discuss their books. It was his habit, he said, at such events, to approach the writer afterwards with a copy of their book and ask them not just to sign the book but to sign it with a personalised dedication that he had carefully selected from their book. He reminded me, that we, together, with Paul had attempted to approach Rachel at an event where she had read from her book – but that she had been more interested in looking aloof and in smoking than meeting her readers. He could not, he said, remember the inscription he had chosen, but he was sure, he said that it did not include the phrase “annihilated perspective” which was, he said, an effectively meaningless term and one which fell into the category of artifice.
They looked at me – I had, I said, prepared a review of the book, which if they agreed I would be happy to read to them. I read what I had written.
The first to speak was Meike – she was very keen, she said, to understand my views on the book. She herself was a dog lover from a European country, but could read books in at least two other languages including English. She could not she said, tell us, which country she came from or which languages she spoke, but said that if we read her reviews we should be able to recognise sufficient details to solve the riddle. She also said that if we read the notes she had taken before she came to the meeting, then we would find, that, there she had identified the country only, she said to take it out of her final remarks. She found, she said, this book was a mixture of dialogue and thematically interrelated stories. The dialogue, she said, was dominated by the contemplation of life journeys, the passage of time, the juxtaposition, she said, of what lies behind and ahead of the characters.
Doug, an American, interrupted. He was he said particularly keen to hear my views on the book. He himself was not always a fan of the type of experimental fiction celebrated by the Goldsmith Prize – a prize he noted for which Rachel’s two previous books had been shortlisted - a prize also open to male and female authors. In fact, he said, some of these books, he found to adopt a pretentious style and he, he said, would mark his views by writing his review in a parody of that style – reviews which were of course appreciated both by those who, like him, disliked the books but also, he found to his surprise, equally valued by those who enjoyed the books. He did, though, he said, make an exception for Rachel and rated her trilogy, which he said, he had read back to back over 4 days, very highly. Although he was initially disappointed at the lack of any epiphany in the third book, he realised he said, in reflection, that the very idea of an epiphany would probably have defeated the purpose of the book’s “annihilated perspective”
I noticed that Paul became visibly excited at the mention of the term “annihilated perspective” – a term that he said he had been able to trace to the writing of Stephen Pyne on the photography of Herbert Ponting, who, he said, had accompanied Captain Scott on his ill-fated 1911 Antarctic expedition. He was not entirely sure, he said, of the complete relevance of this to the book, but he had some spectacular photographs to show to any one interested. I am, he remarked, eager to hear the thoughts of you, Graham, on this book. He was, he said, not typically a fan of English language fiction and preferred to read more widely across the world of literature. However he said, he was a huge fan of Rachel. The only improvement he could suggest for the book would be, he said, if it had been translated into the language of a European country and then retranslated to English – almost serving, he felt, not just to improve the book, but as a literary symbol of Brexit and what, he said, he hoped would one day be the re-admittance of his country to some form of union with other European countries.
Neil said that for him the early retirement he had taken represented freedom both to pursue photography and to be able to read as widely as possible – he had not, though he noted, planned his early retirement via a spreadsheet. He would very much like to listen to my comments on the book. He noted that Meike was a dog owner, but she had not mentioned, he said, if her dog ran away at any stage, and if it did what that signified. It seemed to him, he said, that there was some significance to dogs running away, which he said, had completely escaped him. He was, he said, pleased to see that Rachel had not during the book, made significant reference to birds rather than dogs – as it was his experience, he said, that many otherwise brilliant pieces of literature were spoilt by incorrect avian taxonomy. He was, however, he said, disappointed to see what Rachel treated “envy” and “jealousy” as synonyms – nevertheless, this trilogy was, he said, a marvellous collection of books.
The last to speak was Jonathan – I had noticed as the others spoke that he was increasingly impatient at one of the phrases being repeated. He had not yet, he said, read the book and so was keen to understand if I followed this consensus of praise. He was he said, a voracious reader of books, and particularly enjoyed he said meeting writers, hearing them read from and discuss their books. It was his habit, he said, at such events, to approach the writer afterwards with a copy of their book and ask them not just to sign the book but to sign it with a personalised dedication that he had carefully selected from their book. He reminded me, that we, together, with Paul had attempted to approach Rachel at an event where she had read from her book – but that she had been more interested in looking aloof and in smoking than meeting her readers. He could not, he said, remember the inscription he had chosen, but he was sure, he said that it did not include the phrase “annihilated perspective” which was, he said, an effectively meaningless term and one which fell into the category of artifice.
They looked at me – I had, I said, prepared a review of the book, which if they agreed I would be happy to read to them. I read what I had written.
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May 1, 2022
LE VITE DEGLI ALTRI
Bentornata Faye. Mi sei mancata.
Faye è la protagonista anche di questo conclusivo episodio della cosiddetta trilogia dell’ascolto.
Protagonista non è forse il termine più corretto: Faye è l’ascoltatrice, è colei che riporta i discorsi altrui (e chissà mai perché qualcuno si aspetta che le voci parlino in modo diverso se sono riferite dalla stessa persona? Forse quel qualcuno avrebbe gradito Fay fosse ventriloqua). Li riferisce, qua e là intrecciando le sue domande, le sue sporadiche risposte, in un unico flusso.
Almeno dal punto di vista del ritmo il flusso è ininterrotto: con il primo episodio, Resoconto (Outline) e quest’ultimo (Kudos), ho fatto fatica a interrompere la lettura, mi sembrava di poter arrivare in fondo in un’unica sessione senza stop.
Ma tutte queste voci hanno il suono di una sola voce: quella dell’oggi, quella del mondo che è, che conosciamo e viviamo. È le nostre voci.
Ascoltiamole.
Ma tutte queste voci sono al contempo quanto di meno realistico mi sia capitato di leggere da molto tempo a questa parte, sono una magnifica invenzione letteraria.
E, se pur frammentate nelle voci delle persone che Faye incontra, si fa presto a percepire che in fondo è solo la stessa Faye a parlare.
A parlare di cosa? Di tante piccole e grandi cose, soprattutto quest’ultime, di intimità, di cose vicine all’anima, vuoi la morte del proprio cane, la separazione dal coniuge, il figlio che cresce.
Sul più bello, però, le voci si fermano: per scelta o perché interrotte. Ma non prima di avere trasmesso la solitudine e il dolore che ci fa tutti umani
In questo terzo e ultimo capitolo si torna soprattutto a parlare di scrittura e letteratura, un po’ come succedeva nel primo, e per me il risultato ne risente positivamente, torna la mia quinta stella.
Cusk chiama la sua protagonista per nome solo una volta – è il figlio a chiamarla così, invece che dire ‘mamma’: Faye è un’ottima ascoltatrice, sa quando e come fare la domanda giusta, e sa ascoltare, qualcosa in lei stimola e agevola la confidenza, l’aprirsi, il raccontare.
Di sé ci dice quello che si può leggere dietro le sue domande e dentro rare risposte.
Ma come dicevo, per me, la voce è unica: genialmente Faye/Cusk parla attraverso gli altri.
Ciao Faye, mi sa che questo è l’ultima volta. Mi mancherai.
Bentornata Faye. Mi sei mancata.
Faye è la protagonista anche di questo conclusivo episodio della cosiddetta trilogia dell’ascolto.
Protagonista non è forse il termine più corretto: Faye è l’ascoltatrice, è colei che riporta i discorsi altrui (e chissà mai perché qualcuno si aspetta che le voci parlino in modo diverso se sono riferite dalla stessa persona? Forse quel qualcuno avrebbe gradito Fay fosse ventriloqua). Li riferisce, qua e là intrecciando le sue domande, le sue sporadiche risposte, in un unico flusso.
Almeno dal punto di vista del ritmo il flusso è ininterrotto: con il primo episodio, Resoconto (Outline) e quest’ultimo (Kudos), ho fatto fatica a interrompere la lettura, mi sembrava di poter arrivare in fondo in un’unica sessione senza stop.
Ma tutte queste voci hanno il suono di una sola voce: quella dell’oggi, quella del mondo che è, che conosciamo e viviamo. È le nostre voci.
Ascoltiamole.
Ma tutte queste voci sono al contempo quanto di meno realistico mi sia capitato di leggere da molto tempo a questa parte, sono una magnifica invenzione letteraria.
E, se pur frammentate nelle voci delle persone che Faye incontra, si fa presto a percepire che in fondo è solo la stessa Faye a parlare.
A parlare di cosa? Di tante piccole e grandi cose, soprattutto quest’ultime, di intimità, di cose vicine all’anima, vuoi la morte del proprio cane, la separazione dal coniuge, il figlio che cresce.
Sul più bello, però, le voci si fermano: per scelta o perché interrotte. Ma non prima di avere trasmesso la solitudine e il dolore che ci fa tutti umani
In questo terzo e ultimo capitolo si torna soprattutto a parlare di scrittura e letteratura, un po’ come succedeva nel primo, e per me il risultato ne risente positivamente, torna la mia quinta stella.
Cusk chiama la sua protagonista per nome solo una volta – è il figlio a chiamarla così, invece che dire ‘mamma’: Faye è un’ottima ascoltatrice, sa quando e come fare la domanda giusta, e sa ascoltare, qualcosa in lei stimola e agevola la confidenza, l’aprirsi, il raccontare.
Di sé ci dice quello che si può leggere dietro le sue domande e dentro rare risposte.
Ma come dicevo, per me, la voce è unica: genialmente Faye/Cusk parla attraverso gli altri.
Ciao Faye, mi sa che questo è l’ultima volta. Mi mancherai.
June 26, 2022
5 "immaculate, disconcerting, enlightening" stars !!
Tie - The Bronze Award Read of 2021 (third favorite read)
This is the third in Cusk's Outline trilogy. Cusk has moved from the pristineness of thought (book 1) to the meandering dialogues of others (book 2) and now has moved down to the womb. She has skipped both the heart and soul and moved deep down into the wisdom and wretchedness of womanhood. Faye (our observant mirrored author) goes to a literary festival in the Mediterranean and I am uncertain if it is Italy, Spain or perhaps Portugal (my guess is Spain). Here, she interacts with others, as is her wont, and reflects on the nature of art, urbanization, literature, marriage but most of all womanhood.
Cusk has taken a stand on the difficulties her sisters face in the more patriarchal South and the challenges women face with career, family, tradition, men and art. Faye, does not opine or judge but simply listens and reflects others' experiences whether they be wealthy crones, grandiose ogres, manipulative maidens or wise swain. None of these experiences change Faye as she goes about her days but these truths, philosophies, ideas, narratives and myths swirl around the reader; sometimes as a warm breeze, other times a cool grey wind or at times stagnant nothingness that discomforts.
Cusk has completed her trilogy and although we do not get to know Faye, through her, we solidify,
reconstruct or let die our own ideas about life, living and the nature of art, love and destiny.
Ms. Cusk your trilogy has thrilled, titillated, challenged and reconfigured me in small but important ways. Thank you ever so much !
Tie - The Bronze Award Read of 2021 (third favorite read)
This is the third in Cusk's Outline trilogy. Cusk has moved from the pristineness of thought (book 1) to the meandering dialogues of others (book 2) and now has moved down to the womb. She has skipped both the heart and soul and moved deep down into the wisdom and wretchedness of womanhood. Faye (our observant mirrored author) goes to a literary festival in the Mediterranean and I am uncertain if it is Italy, Spain or perhaps Portugal (my guess is Spain). Here, she interacts with others, as is her wont, and reflects on the nature of art, urbanization, literature, marriage but most of all womanhood.
Cusk has taken a stand on the difficulties her sisters face in the more patriarchal South and the challenges women face with career, family, tradition, men and art. Faye, does not opine or judge but simply listens and reflects others' experiences whether they be wealthy crones, grandiose ogres, manipulative maidens or wise swain. None of these experiences change Faye as she goes about her days but these truths, philosophies, ideas, narratives and myths swirl around the reader; sometimes as a warm breeze, other times a cool grey wind or at times stagnant nothingness that discomforts.
Cusk has completed her trilogy and although we do not get to know Faye, through her, we solidify,
reconstruct or let die our own ideas about life, living and the nature of art, love and destiny.
Ms. Cusk your trilogy has thrilled, titillated, challenged and reconfigured me in small but important ways. Thank you ever so much !
Read
August 21, 2019In the comments section of my review of Transit, the second book in Rachel Cusk's trilogy, I found myself recklessly reassuring a reader (who had chosen not to pursue the trilogy) that it wasn't essential reading. Afterwards, I wondered what I'd meant by 'essential reading', and George Eliot popped into my head. Had I meant the classics then? But no, I don't think I'd box the so-called 'classics' together under the label 'essential'. So what kind of book would I place in my essential box, were I to make one up, and might Rachel Cusk have earned a place in it, now that I've completed the three books narrated by her writer character, Faye?
Having given the question a little more thought, I feel an essential book is one that stimulates me so much that I pause frequently while reading, and continue to think about it long after I've finished it. Finishing such a book isn't even the point; I don't seek to finish it at all, and when I reach the last page, I'm often tempted to turn to the first page and start all over.
Another aspect of such a book is that it echoes as a bell does across a stretch of countryside. And the echo reverberates so that I'm suddenly aware of not one bell but ten, a hundred bells, all jogging my reading memory about passages here, images there, so that the glorious landscape of my reading history spreads out before my eyes.
Speaking of bells, it isn't only the ringing that I'm interested in. I also like to think about how the reverberation happens in the first place, how the metal used in the bell plus the weight of the clapper influence the tone of the peal. And I like to think about how, when a series of such bells are rung together, they can sing out an entire song.
So I think I'm saying, if you're still listening, that an essential book will be one that interests me, a) for what it says, b) for how it says it, and c) for the connections it makes with what I've read before — and with what I read in the future. An essential book will reverberate long after it is laid on the shelf.
How does all that relate to Rachel Cusk's trilogy, Outline, Transit and Kudos.
The trilogy (which I now think of as one complete book) began to intrigue me initially for the way it was written — I hadn't ever read a book constructed almost entirely out of reported speech. And although the content of the reported speech didn't appeal at first, later I began to see that there were important things being said here about the human condition. The author doesn't pronounce any universal truths as a philosopher or a psychologist might, instead she allows her characters to analyse their own individual lives and draw conclusions about how and why they act the way they do. Of course their analysis is often skewed because of who they are and the issues they had in the first place, so if there is a truth here, it's that even inside the group, we are individuals to the last.
The more of Cusk's skewed scenarios I read about, the more I was reminded of books I'd read in the past. I thought about Pereira Maintains quite often, and Thomas Bernhard's Correction came to mind (I think it was even mentioned). I was reminded of the quirky characters in A.L. Kennedy's books and the unresolved nature of their stories. William Gass's Omensetter's Luck popped into my head once or twice as did George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss. There were echoes of other books too, and when I think of all the books I haven't yet read, some of whose echoes must surely be hidden in Cusk's books though I'm not able to pick them up yet, I realise her trilogy hasn't finished reverberating.
So I think I'm saying that her books have made it into my 'essential' box after all.
Having given the question a little more thought, I feel an essential book is one that stimulates me so much that I pause frequently while reading, and continue to think about it long after I've finished it. Finishing such a book isn't even the point; I don't seek to finish it at all, and when I reach the last page, I'm often tempted to turn to the first page and start all over.
Another aspect of such a book is that it echoes as a bell does across a stretch of countryside. And the echo reverberates so that I'm suddenly aware of not one bell but ten, a hundred bells, all jogging my reading memory about passages here, images there, so that the glorious landscape of my reading history spreads out before my eyes.
Speaking of bells, it isn't only the ringing that I'm interested in. I also like to think about how the reverberation happens in the first place, how the metal used in the bell plus the weight of the clapper influence the tone of the peal. And I like to think about how, when a series of such bells are rung together, they can sing out an entire song.
So I think I'm saying, if you're still listening, that an essential book will be one that interests me, a) for what it says, b) for how it says it, and c) for the connections it makes with what I've read before — and with what I read in the future. An essential book will reverberate long after it is laid on the shelf.
How does all that relate to Rachel Cusk's trilogy, Outline, Transit and Kudos.
The trilogy (which I now think of as one complete book) began to intrigue me initially for the way it was written — I hadn't ever read a book constructed almost entirely out of reported speech. And although the content of the reported speech didn't appeal at first, later I began to see that there were important things being said here about the human condition. The author doesn't pronounce any universal truths as a philosopher or a psychologist might, instead she allows her characters to analyse their own individual lives and draw conclusions about how and why they act the way they do. Of course their analysis is often skewed because of who they are and the issues they had in the first place, so if there is a truth here, it's that even inside the group, we are individuals to the last.
The more of Cusk's skewed scenarios I read about, the more I was reminded of books I'd read in the past. I thought about Pereira Maintains quite often, and Thomas Bernhard's Correction came to mind (I think it was even mentioned). I was reminded of the quirky characters in A.L. Kennedy's books and the unresolved nature of their stories. William Gass's Omensetter's Luck popped into my head once or twice as did George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss. There were echoes of other books too, and when I think of all the books I haven't yet read, some of whose echoes must surely be hidden in Cusk's books though I'm not able to pick them up yet, I realise her trilogy hasn't finished reverberating.
So I think I'm saying that her books have made it into my 'essential' box after all.
August 8, 2018
Wow. What power this author has. I’d not read anything by Cusk before this, though part of her trilogy had been noted on my to-read list. She is another thoroughly unique and powerful Canadian voice now hailing from the British Isles. What about that last scene? Is that a statement completely in tune with the state of the world today? Or not?
I cannot speak to what the book means in the larger trilogy, and can’t even speak to what this book means outside of the trilogy. It is just a fantastic read, the language so streamlined and uncluttered, and one can go back to it again and again and pick out pieces which lead to a theory. Finally, female voices to face off more well-known male authors…and I think of Americans, John Updike and Philip Roth, writers of the male experience.
The narrator in this novel, an author also, did not speak, so far as I could tell—well, only to answer questions. Her observations are internal. We just get someone who answers a question the long-way-round, with a heartfelt saga that moves the air in the room and subtly changes us.
Cusk made me laugh. What about the gaunt man at the literary soirée who looked as though he’d undergone a failed surgery? He’d only stopped eating so much and was now exercising. He was trim in fact, not gaunt at all. His hair, which had looked so windblown and as though he’d just risen from his hospital bed and rushed to the party, was in fact artfully arranged with spikes and whorls like a young man’s. His suit was the baggy style popular now, in an expensive lightweight fabric--a type of silk maybe--that looks well in a boxy cut. He was having the time of his life.
Our narrator was doing a book tour, undergoing a series of interviews, some back-to-back. One interviewer came armed with only one question: “What did you notice on your way here?” I laughed because I had done the same thing once, though I rarely interview authors. The author was Nigerian first, British second, and American third and was feted in all three countries. I’d read every interview I could find in all three continents and over a period of thirty years. I was prepared…I was over-prepared...I had nothing original to ask. I could only ask questions about what he was noticing now about his life in Chicago. He never answered. Maybe one day he will write a book in response.
It is not hard to imagine what Cusk thought of the Brexit vote. An author at the literary soirée has an opinion: “It was a bit of a case of turkeys voting for Christmas,” he said. Indeed. And of the reviewer who wanted to be a writer himself? He couldn’t stand the mediocrity of successful writers. He’d never begin a work without knowing exactly where it was going, anymore than he would leave the house without his wallet and keys. Of course. People preferred his savage reviews to his fiction. I guess everyone could see where he was going.
Cusk says so much about the state of the world without saying a thing about it, just by reminding everyone of Louise Bourgeois—how she was discounted and ignored for so long and how really, the worst possible thing to be in today’s world is an average white male of average talent and intelligence. Surely they feel the pressure, and can imagine the abyss that faced so many of us in the past…the looking-past, the discounting of one’s lived experience, the so-whatness of it all. What goes around comes around.
Consider this characterization:
This is ravishing, mature, adult, female, intelligent writing. Now suddenly I am thinking of Julian Barnes and Ian McEwan, both of whom are terribly amusing while sharing truths we can all recognize. This is literature. Go there.
I cannot speak to what the book means in the larger trilogy, and can’t even speak to what this book means outside of the trilogy. It is just a fantastic read, the language so streamlined and uncluttered, and one can go back to it again and again and pick out pieces which lead to a theory. Finally, female voices to face off more well-known male authors…and I think of Americans, John Updike and Philip Roth, writers of the male experience.
The narrator in this novel, an author also, did not speak, so far as I could tell—well, only to answer questions. Her observations are internal. We just get someone who answers a question the long-way-round, with a heartfelt saga that moves the air in the room and subtly changes us.
Cusk made me laugh. What about the gaunt man at the literary soirée who looked as though he’d undergone a failed surgery? He’d only stopped eating so much and was now exercising. He was trim in fact, not gaunt at all. His hair, which had looked so windblown and as though he’d just risen from his hospital bed and rushed to the party, was in fact artfully arranged with spikes and whorls like a young man’s. His suit was the baggy style popular now, in an expensive lightweight fabric--a type of silk maybe--that looks well in a boxy cut. He was having the time of his life.
Our narrator was doing a book tour, undergoing a series of interviews, some back-to-back. One interviewer came armed with only one question: “What did you notice on your way here?” I laughed because I had done the same thing once, though I rarely interview authors. The author was Nigerian first, British second, and American third and was feted in all three countries. I’d read every interview I could find in all three continents and over a period of thirty years. I was prepared…I was over-prepared...I had nothing original to ask. I could only ask questions about what he was noticing now about his life in Chicago. He never answered. Maybe one day he will write a book in response.
It is not hard to imagine what Cusk thought of the Brexit vote. An author at the literary soirée has an opinion: “It was a bit of a case of turkeys voting for Christmas,” he said. Indeed. And of the reviewer who wanted to be a writer himself? He couldn’t stand the mediocrity of successful writers. He’d never begin a work without knowing exactly where it was going, anymore than he would leave the house without his wallet and keys. Of course. People preferred his savage reviews to his fiction. I guess everyone could see where he was going.
Cusk says so much about the state of the world without saying a thing about it, just by reminding everyone of Louise Bourgeois—how she was discounted and ignored for so long and how really, the worst possible thing to be in today’s world is an average white male of average talent and intelligence. Surely they feel the pressure, and can imagine the abyss that faced so many of us in the past…the looking-past, the discounting of one’s lived experience, the so-whatness of it all. What goes around comes around.
Consider this characterization:
“She was a tiny, sinewy woman with a childlike body and a large, bony, sagacious face in which the big, heavy-lidded eyes had an almost reptilian patience, occasionally slowly blinking.”I had to read that description several times before I could put together all the seemingly-disparate features. Which is how one feels when one enters a big city: it is confusing and unfamiliar and how does it manage to work?
This is ravishing, mature, adult, female, intelligent writing. Now suddenly I am thinking of Julian Barnes and Ian McEwan, both of whom are terribly amusing while sharing truths we can all recognize. This is literature. Go there.
June 18, 2019
A slight dip from the trilogy's high point, TRANSIT, and in many ways a return to the more oblique, far-off storytelling of book one, OUTLINE. Here, plot is stretched to the very limit of inaction (we find, very, very obliquely, that the lead has been re-married, we never resolve any of the threads of parts 1 and 2), and the conversations increasingly dwell on the nature of fame, literature, and gender. It was, perhaps, just a bit too far for me, and I found myself missing the suspense and character beats of Books 1 and 2 - this is a very bold book, but it is also lacking just a bit of what made the first two parts so special. Not that it shouldn't be read! It's still Cusk, and still insightful and great.
The ending though - the ending is fantastic.
The ending though - the ending is fantastic.
July 1, 2021
“No puedes contar tu historia a todo el mundo dije. Quizá solo puedas contársela a una persona.”La misma idea de novela, la misma forma indirecta, fría, distante, irónica, mordaz, despiadada e incisiva, que sus dos predecesoras, “A contraluz” y “Tránsito”; los mismos temas —relaciones de pareja, ma/paternidad, literatura, identidad— tratados a través del testimonio de personas que en confianza le relatan su vida a Faye, una mujer con indudables dotes de confesora, a la que en esta ocasión le abren su alma autores, editores, periodistas que, como ella, asisten a un festival literario al que ha sido invitada para presentar su libro. Como ya habrán intuido, en esta tercera entrega la balanza se inclina claramente hacia el mundo del libro.
Nuevamente me encuentro con una de esas casualidades a las que ya me he referido en otros comentarios acerca de la cadena de libros que a veces se produce: tras leer a Bolaño en su “Nocturno de Chile”, no es menor el escepticismo literario que he encontrado aquí: la pereza del lector, incluso del más versado, que solo quiere una versión reformada y moderna de modos antiguos; escritores preciosistas más preocupados por ser originales que por decir cosas; el Prestigio que la gente otorga a lectores y escritores por su supuesta inteligencia, virtud y superioridad moral; la preocupación por la Literatura que todo el mundo cree frágil y necesitada de defensa; lectores atraídos por la idea de que no puede haber arte sin sufrimiento; escritores “que se habían dedicado a escribir libros como otros se levantaban por las mañanas para ir a trabajar”, vanagloriándose de sus éxitos y culpando a los otros de sus fracasos; la desigualdad y el agravio contra la mujer en la literatura y en el arte en general (y aquí la novela conecta con otra de mis lecturas recientes, “Otoño”, en la reivindicación del Prestigio que no les concedieron en su día a figuras como Louise Bourgeois, Sylvia Plath o Joan Eardley, de igual forma que en la novela de Ali Smith se resaltaba el trabajo de Pauline Boty).
“Había contratado una socia para escribirlo, una exalumna suya, casualmente, y decidieron hacer un anagrama con los nombres de los dos, pero como él era el líder, por así decir, parecía lógico que este autor ficticio fuese un hombre… Sara, su socia, se alegró de que fuera él quien hiciera el viaje (al festival), porque tenía que cuidar a sus hijos… El origen del libro era la tesis doctoral de Sara, y él, como supervisor de su trabajo, se sorprendió dándole excelentes consejos comerciales… Por eso le parecía de justicia convertirse finalmente en coautor del proyecto.”Pero no solo de libros, escritores y lectores vive la novela de Cusk. Tampoco faltan los episodios humorísticos con su buena dosis de mala leche, ni esas historias dramáticas y conmovedoras que, a modo de cuentos relatados por sus protagonistas nos hablan del mundo en el que vivimos. Todo ello con el brexit como telón de fondo.
“En el caso de los ingleses, su poder era un simple recuerdo, y sus intentos de seguir ejerciéndolo, un espectáculo tan ridículo como el del perro que sueña que está cazando un conejo.”En cuanto a esas historias, me gustaría destacar dos, que en realidad son cuatro: la de una familia en torno a su enorme perro, que páginas más tarde tendrá su correlato humorístico con un pequeñito hámster; y la de un matrimonio que resiste gracias a la necesidad que ambos tienen de mostrar a los demás su idílica relación, que también tiene su historia paralela al final de la novela con otra familia que necesita al hijo de Faye como testigo de su felicidad.
Como ven, todo rebosa negatividad, algo de lo que la autora sale al paso con un comentario entre paródico y sincero al respecto del uso temerario de la honestidad por escritores que parecen no tener interés en la vida (se cita a Bernhard) y se sienten libres para contar una verdad cuánto más cruda mejor. Un comentario hecho por un periodista que se abre a la posibilidad de una aceptable honestidad negativa que “es capaz de describir el mal con la misma objetividad que la virtud, sin desviar el rumbo hacia lo uno o hacia lo otro, que es pura y reflectante como el agua o el cristal.” Un periodista que…
“… tardaba muchísimo en decidirse a hacer una pregunta y, cuando por fin la hacía, llegaba a la conclusión de que la mejor respuesta era la suya… En familia es muy educado y muy simpático (…) y también el único dispuesto a hablar con las abuelas, que lo escuchan durante horas y horas.”Me hubiera gustado terminar la trilogía dándole cinco estrellas, tipo el Oscar con el que premiaron a la última película de la trilogía de El Señor de los anillos, pero tendrá que conformarse nuevamente con cuatro: aunque la primera mitad me ha parecido de lo mejor de la serie, tiene un par de bajones que desmerecen, algo que, por otra parte, es normal en cualquier libro de relatos, como en el fondo es cada una de estas tres novelas.
“Cuestiona todo, aprende algo, pero no esperes ninguna respuesta.” Eurípides. (cita con la que la editorial cierra su edición del libro y que, como a ellos, me parece muy bien traída)
October 25, 2023
in my cool girl rachel cusk era
full review to come.
⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻
pre-read
live laugh love rachel cusk and the feeling of your brain being fed
full review to come.
⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻
pre-read
live laugh love rachel cusk and the feeling of your brain being fed
February 27, 2021
I gave ‘Outline’ 4 stars and ‘Transit’ 3.5 stars. I was so disappointed in this last book of her trilogy. I guess the one thing in common with the others, actually two, is that the book consisted of dialogues of her talking with another person, with quite often the other person doing most of the talking, and the setting was either a class or workshop she was teaching or in this case her attendance at a literary festival with other authors. The other books had a number of chapters. This one only had two ‘chapter’s…she seemed to put a break about halfway through the book — it seemed to me to be pretty arbitrary where she put it.
This book was so boring to me. I could hardly wait for it to end. If I had to meet 90% of the pretentious people she met in this book I would have…. I don’t know what I would have done but I would have wished I was somewhere else. And she herself—Faye—did not hold my attention. Her younger son made a brief appearance in a phone call, her older son made a briefer appearance, and we learn in just one sentence she got remarried.
The conversations that she had with other people were long and drawn out and boring for the most part and that’s all I have to say about that—and that was the gist of the book. I will focus on something that I noticed in the first book, Outline, and it was also apparent in ‘Transit’, and that was her predilection to describe people in the most godawful unflattering ways. I am clueless as to why she did it. By the end of the trilogy, I cannot say that endeared me to Faye. As I said in my review of ‘Outline” I would not want to meet Faye in person under any circumstances because something about what I looked like would be described in disgusting and gross detail. Here are examples in this book:
• He was a delicate-looking man…and his pale-pink mouth was as small and as soft as a child’s mouth.
• She was a tiny, sinewy woman with a childlike body and a large, bony, sagacious face in which the big, heavy-lidded eyes had an almost reptilian patience, occasionally slowly blinking.
• He crinkled his forehead, apparently in an effort to remember the last occasion. His skin hung so loosely on his face that it formed clown-like folds that accentuated his changes of expression, and the room’s harsh light gave it a ghastly, almost ghoulish cast.
• After some hesitation he sat down in the only remaining seat, beside Sophia, smiling warily to show his narrow yellow teeth.
• …he grimaced with his rather plump pale mouth…
• He paused, searching for something in his notes, while I observed the extraordinary pallor and tenderness of his hairless head bent over the pages.
Nuff said. This woman would judge me as a trollish troglodyte teetering on two matchsticks for legs with an oversized head with spittle dripping down my craggily pitted face. 😧
Reviews:
• https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-...
• https://www.theguardian.com/books/201...
• https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/21/bo...
• https://www.npr.org/2018/06/05/613465...
This book was so boring to me. I could hardly wait for it to end. If I had to meet 90% of the pretentious people she met in this book I would have…. I don’t know what I would have done but I would have wished I was somewhere else. And she herself—Faye—did not hold my attention. Her younger son made a brief appearance in a phone call, her older son made a briefer appearance, and we learn in just one sentence she got remarried.
The conversations that she had with other people were long and drawn out and boring for the most part and that’s all I have to say about that—and that was the gist of the book. I will focus on something that I noticed in the first book, Outline, and it was also apparent in ‘Transit’, and that was her predilection to describe people in the most godawful unflattering ways. I am clueless as to why she did it. By the end of the trilogy, I cannot say that endeared me to Faye. As I said in my review of ‘Outline” I would not want to meet Faye in person under any circumstances because something about what I looked like would be described in disgusting and gross detail. Here are examples in this book:
• He was a delicate-looking man…and his pale-pink mouth was as small and as soft as a child’s mouth.
• She was a tiny, sinewy woman with a childlike body and a large, bony, sagacious face in which the big, heavy-lidded eyes had an almost reptilian patience, occasionally slowly blinking.
• He crinkled his forehead, apparently in an effort to remember the last occasion. His skin hung so loosely on his face that it formed clown-like folds that accentuated his changes of expression, and the room’s harsh light gave it a ghastly, almost ghoulish cast.
• After some hesitation he sat down in the only remaining seat, beside Sophia, smiling warily to show his narrow yellow teeth.
• …he grimaced with his rather plump pale mouth…
• He paused, searching for something in his notes, while I observed the extraordinary pallor and tenderness of his hairless head bent over the pages.
Nuff said. This woman would judge me as a trollish troglodyte teetering on two matchsticks for legs with an oversized head with spittle dripping down my craggily pitted face. 😧
Reviews:
• https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-...
• https://www.theguardian.com/books/201...
• https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/21/bo...
• https://www.npr.org/2018/06/05/613465...
May 7, 2022
Like the previous volumes of the Outline trilogy Kudos is set in a literary context. Outline was set at a writing workshop in Athens; Transit, set in Britain, changed the setting to a literary festival, which is used in the present book, though this time it occurs in Italy. This gathering of creatives talk with our narrator at length about their prestige, eccentricities, and fears. Some of these individuals are horrorific, like the journalist who meets our narrator for an interview. He then goes on about his own reputation and standing — an honest critic he’s made many enemies — and the limitations of those he’s practically forced to interview who presume to be his peers. So how human beings measure their happiness according to the success or failures of others is a prevelent theme. Moreover, I wonder if the first person confessions aren’t in some way a comment on the present fascination for memoir. Another motif, carried over from Transit, is the fraudulence of local architecture, much of which has been replaced by convincing fakes. Another is about power, the men who exploit it, and the women who are subject to it. The final scene here will set your hair on fire. I have to re-read these astonishing novels. They constitute an enormous achievement.
October 1, 2018
Shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize 2018
This is the third part of the trilogy that started with Outline and Transit, and was an obvious choice when I was asked for hardbacks I might like as a birthday present.
This has more in common with Outline, in that its settings are literary events abroad, and it starts with a conversation on a plane. Once again the narrator Faye only offers occasional glimpses of her own life, and the focus is largely on the people she talks to, who are mostly writers or literary journalists. There are oblique references to the trilogy itself and related references in the visual arts. There is more political content - many of the subjects allude to Brexit and feminist issues.
There is no definitive ending, but once again the language is a pleasure to read and many of the ideas discussed are interesting. It will be intriguing to see what Cusk does next.
This is the third part of the trilogy that started with Outline and Transit, and was an obvious choice when I was asked for hardbacks I might like as a birthday present.
This has more in common with Outline, in that its settings are literary events abroad, and it starts with a conversation on a plane. Once again the narrator Faye only offers occasional glimpses of her own life, and the focus is largely on the people she talks to, who are mostly writers or literary journalists. There are oblique references to the trilogy itself and related references in the visual arts. There is more political content - many of the subjects allude to Brexit and feminist issues.
There is no definitive ending, but once again the language is a pleasure to read and many of the ideas discussed are interesting. It will be intriguing to see what Cusk does next.
December 2, 2019
By the time I have come to the third volume of Cusk’s trilogy I am very comfortable with her self-effacing narrator, Faye, whose name is mentioned only once in each of the three novels. Faye is a writer who engages in teaching and participates in writer’s congresses and the like and who becomes an amanuensis to the various people (mostly in the world of publishing and writing) that she encounters as she travels (and indeed this third volume begins as her first, with a conversation with the neighbouring passenger in a plane) or meets in those conferences. And in those conversations, Cusk deliberates over a series of themes.
In this third volume I found Cusk goes deeper both in the exploration of those themes and in her playing with her covert narrator. In this volume Cusk creates a Baroque effect--deflected viewpoints that make the onlooker/reader question the relationship between the subject, reality and its representation. There is an unforgettable scene in which the narrator tells us how her interviewer has decided to apply the same technique in his interviewing of her, as she applies in her books. That is, make the interviewee--her, become the interviewer, and him--the interviewer, will become the interviewee. And this we read in Cusk’s writing which presents the viewpoint of a hiding Faye. And of course, this interviewer, when identifying Faye’s literary trademark, is identifying Cusk’s.
Some of the themes that Cusk likes to explore are, and all in relation to the powers and limitations of Fiction-making, are Identity, Gender, Truth, Morality and the world of art and literature. The exploration of these themes is a continuation of the previous two novels, but Cusk gets her Kudos because she goes deeper. I was particularly tickled by the idea that in the grooming of a dog, its owner could be transferring his own identity onto the animal, during his lifetime, not in a reincarnation. The relationships between the sexes and how that translates into Gender definition and identity is brought clearly to the fore in her very effective ending. This time I could also detect a certain irony on Cusk’s part when she presents a woman who defends feminist tenets acts in a submissive way to the male. I have had some difficulty however, in following the theme of Truth, since my own tendency is to be suspicious of absolutes, and I had a similar reaction to the treatment of Morality.
Her introducing art and painters, as she did in the previous novels, certainly caught my attention. I am fascinated by the way the various arts can cross each other and in particular by the very narrow confluence of text and image. I also give Kudos to Cusk for her discussion of Louise Bourgeois’s early drawings of spidery inspiration and for the astounding painting of a naked man by the, until now unknown to me, Joan Eardley.
During the reading a played a game with myself. As in the first volume, Faye has travelled to another country. In Outline it was identified as Greece, but in this final volume the country remains unidentified. So, I tried to follow the hints and the trail seemed to take me first to a Southern and Eastern European country but then my mind clicked, and I turned around and landed in Portugal. The jacaranda trees and the windy sea fit for surfing were my flying comet.
July 4, 2018
What's the problem here? After loving Outline, I wasn't super enthused about Transit, and I may have liked Kudos even less. The magical feeling I had wandering around Greece in Outline has definitely not been replicated in these later volumes in the trilogy. Is it the change of setting? The fact that some of the characters our protagonist, Faye, speaks with in Transit and Kudos are completely random and therefore it makes no sense that they would open up to her as extensively as they do? Is it the lengthy description of a random person's fitness routine that appears in Kudos? Is it just that the novelty wore off after Outline and this idea can't be credibly sustained over multiple volumes? Is it the fact that Faye finds it "unjust" for readers to criticize books on the internet, but will happily, cruelly mock other people's appearances, in fact seeming to think that lack of physical attractiveness somehow equals lack of character? Where's the justice in that? (That aspect did bother me a lot, obviously.)
Or is it just me? Have I changed? Do I just no longer have it in me to enjoy this kind of thing? What I used to find lovely do I now find self-indulgent, through no fault of the author herself?
I honestly don't know the answer, and here on Goodreads I seem to be alone in my feelings: Everyone else seems to either love all three books or be indifferent to all three. All I can say is, my enthusiasm for this trilogy was extremely high after Outline, but all I feel now is relief that it's over.
Or is it just me? Have I changed? Do I just no longer have it in me to enjoy this kind of thing? What I used to find lovely do I now find self-indulgent, through no fault of the author herself?
I honestly don't know the answer, and here on Goodreads I seem to be alone in my feelings: Everyone else seems to either love all three books or be indifferent to all three. All I can say is, my enthusiasm for this trilogy was extremely high after Outline, but all I feel now is relief that it's over.
July 21, 2018
This is my sixth Cusk novel, and completes the Outline ‘trilogy’
I have been enthusiastic enough about Rachel Cusk’s writing to greet a new release as an exciting prospect; furthermore many respected Goodreads friends rate Cusk very highly.
That said,I was starting to have some doubts when I read Transit
I didn’t enjoy Kudos one little bit, and my sense of foreboding set in early.
"He wore new-looking leather shoes on his feet”(3)
Where else would he wear his new (looking)leather shoes?!
Kudos is made up of eight or nine short stories. That’s eight or nine monologues whose impact depends largely on special insight; on life, on relationships, on gender, all as scrutinised by our author Faye/Rachel Cusk.
A couple of the monologues are thought provoking, but the majority are tired rehashes of gender dynamics, and of observations mostly covered in the first two parts of the ‘trilogy’.
The opening story revolving around Pilot, the large dog, is truly awful. I cannot believe, judging from the description, including death and burial, that Rachel Cusk has ever owned a dog.
Despite the fact, supposedly, that:
“People who didn’t know him were terrified of him, because he would have killed them without hesitation”(14), Pilot is allowed off the lead, and savages sheep and deer with impunity. The dog’s violence is seemingly matched by the owners subsequent battering of the dog.
It’s a wretched start to the book, and when Cusk later writes (in a different story, p. 152) about bringing the harvest home there’s a nasty, nasty, description of 'cowering' wild animals being butchered (by children) as part of an historical, seasonal ritual.
A psychologist would have a field day (pun intended) with this sort of stuff.
My personal opinion is that Cusk’s innovative use of the detached observer has gone beyond its sell-by date. There’s too much duplication of theme, and more worryingly, at the sentence level Cusk’s prose has visibly deteriorated. Too many of Cusk’s sign off axioms make little or no sense.
Given the two years it has taken to write Kudos it strikes me that Cusk 's creative and artistic inspiration has been inconsistent during that time. Too much is contrived, some is poorly written.
My personal response:
Disliked
• Cusk has a poor opinion of men; her own marital travails were widely debated in public. That will inform your world view, I understand that. But.... how many monologues does it need in a single collection to force home the point that men are lazy good for nothings whose selfishness is in marked contrast to the wives and partners who take on the burden of child rearing and support?
Cusk’s anger is getting more marked. Kudos has very little balance in matters concerning conflict between the sexes, and this is a departure from Outline parts 1 and 2.
Custody battles, male dysfunction (the offensive comments of her German publisher), absentee fathers, oedipal dependency.
• The supposed ‘trilogy’ concept. Better to write a single, narrator managed monologue collection, and edit out the duplicates.
(I have to assume that simple economics are at work and sales will be much greater for a series of separate, if similar, books).
• Brexit references. An increasing number of writers slip Brexit into their fiction. It’s an emotive subject, so the writer needs to be rather sharper than Cusk’s waffle:
You might think you were witnessing not the machinations of a democracy but the final surrender of personal conscience into the public domain(12)
The English came here in their hordes to lie tossing on the beaches. He had wondered whether out of tact or courtesy or just plain shame they might desist from this habit in the light of their recent rejection of European membership”(178)
Does Cusk mean the habit of sunbathing, or the habit of visiting (Portugal)?
• Too many of Cusk’s set piece sentences are actually meaningless. You can change the order of the words around and it makes little difference.
What is history other than memory without pain?(39)
Why not say: What is pain other than history without memory?
“He exuded an air of anonymous and slightly provisional manliness”(3)
I’ve re read this a few times, and still the meaning escapes me.
Suffering had always appeared to me as an opportunity, I said, and I wasn’t sure I would ever discover whether this is true and if so why it was, because so far I had failed to understand what it might be an opportunity for"(64)
So, is suffering an opportunity, or not?
“I’ve noticed that the people who love children the most often respect them the least"(137)
Please explain on what grounds, with what evidence, you draw this conclusion?
“Negative literature got much of its power through the fearless use of honesty”(182)
• Cusk writes some sentences that desperately need editing. In relation to his daughter’s oboe recital Cusk describes the father
“what he heard drew water from his eyes in such quantities that people began to glance round at him in their seats"(17)
I assume it was the sound of the ’water’ (i.e. sobbing), that elicited the reaction from his neighbours!
“Her description of the town where she lived-a place I had never been to, though I knew it wasn’t far from here-and of its beauty had been particularly tenacious”(62)
Surely the “and of its beauty” must precede the sentence division, just after “where she lived”?? At the very least put a comma after beauty if the original form is retained.
“Some aspects of the world seem”realer” and more important to them than others”(100) Hopefully this is tongue in cheek?
Liked
• It’s always interesting to read between the lines when authors snipe and gossip about their own industry and other writers. I assume that the Luis, Knausgaard, character portrayal is an in joke between Cusk and Knausgaard? The best selling Ryan appears to be a parody.
In her review, Meike provides some great background on the settings for the monologues, and some of the publishing house politics.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
• Some Of Cusk’s set piece sentences do resound, and are very quotable
“Behind every man is his mother, who made such a fuss of him he will never recover from it, and will never understand why the rest of the world doesn’t make the same fuss of him...(160)
I will be very surprised if Kudos gets a Booker 2018 listing. The style is definitive (of Cusk) rather than innovative. And in my opinion it’s by far her least impressive use of language.
My rating of Kudos matches that of Cusk’s Internet keyboard warriors (those of us apparently dressing up our more basic reading appetites with a veneer of intellectualism).
So it is the same as the unknown reviewers opinion of Dante’s Devine Comedy and ‘a single star out of five’(41)
******The rest of the "review" was written prior to reading the book, and consequent to Paul's teasing *****
It’s good to see that Paul hasn’t lost his sense of fun, and the joys of the wind-up.
“ Annihilated Perspective”
Google the phrase and the results are as follows
1. Rachel Cusk’s self penned term to describe her work
2.Rachel Cusk’s self penned term to describe her work
3.”Annhilation” A new Science Fiction film from Alex Garland
4.Aristides Baltas
In Peeling Potatoes or Grinding Lenses, contends that these works bear a striking similarity based on the idea of “radical immanence.
5.Mawson: The Ice, a journey to Antarctica
See Paul’s extract featuring Antarctic exploration and the photograper’s challenge
6. Walter Benjamin describes (separately) annihilation and perspective.
‘Whether one speaks of annihilation or salvation depends on the perspective from which one argues. (Strictly speaking, the concept of perspective is quite inappropriate here. It is used to distinguish two incompatible yet not entirely disparate perspectives’
Walter Benjamin was an esteemed literary critic and writer, so perhaps this is what Cusk draws from?
7.Annhilation, the Alex Garland film.
8.Annhilation, the Alex Garland film.
9.Physics in perspective: annihilating particles
10..Annhilation, the Alex Garland film.
11. Annihilate- definition
12. Rachel Cusk again:
“Readers of Outline (2014), Cusk’s previous novel, will recognize Transit as a continuation of the author’s writing from what she has called the “annihilated perspective”.
It’s a meaningless term. Throw any two verbs together and call this a new movement- but annihilate is so strong, so resonant; it doesn’t work as a putative literary genre.
“Detached perspective”. Maybe.
“Disconnected perspective”. Maybe.
“Connected perspective“. Maybe.
“Ambivalent perspective “. Maybe.
etc. etc.
The thing is, I generally like Rachel Cusk’s work. Of the four books of hers that I have read
A Life’s Work 4*, Aftermath 3*, Outline4*, Transit3*.
Cusk is an observer of life, she is a mother who recoils from neat and convenient stereotypes of the contented wife, home carer, child minder. Her work is quite waspish, and even cynical at times. Her prose is readily quotable, and has been written with an eye setting out to chronicle life’s realities.
I find some of her observations about parenting very accurate and insightful.
However, at times Cusk’s acuity is open to doubt, some observations contrived and trite. Her “annihilated perspective” mantra falls into the category of artifice.
I have been enthusiastic enough about Rachel Cusk’s writing to greet a new release as an exciting prospect; furthermore many respected Goodreads friends rate Cusk very highly.
That said,I was starting to have some doubts when I read Transit
I didn’t enjoy Kudos one little bit, and my sense of foreboding set in early.
"He wore new-looking leather shoes on his feet”(3)
Where else would he wear his new (looking)leather shoes?!
Kudos is made up of eight or nine short stories. That’s eight or nine monologues whose impact depends largely on special insight; on life, on relationships, on gender, all as scrutinised by our author Faye/Rachel Cusk.
A couple of the monologues are thought provoking, but the majority are tired rehashes of gender dynamics, and of observations mostly covered in the first two parts of the ‘trilogy’.
The opening story revolving around Pilot, the large dog, is truly awful. I cannot believe, judging from the description, including death and burial, that Rachel Cusk has ever owned a dog.
Despite the fact, supposedly, that:
“People who didn’t know him were terrified of him, because he would have killed them without hesitation”(14), Pilot is allowed off the lead, and savages sheep and deer with impunity. The dog’s violence is seemingly matched by the owners subsequent battering of the dog.
It’s a wretched start to the book, and when Cusk later writes (in a different story, p. 152) about bringing the harvest home there’s a nasty, nasty, description of 'cowering' wild animals being butchered (by children) as part of an historical, seasonal ritual.
A psychologist would have a field day (pun intended) with this sort of stuff.
My personal opinion is that Cusk’s innovative use of the detached observer has gone beyond its sell-by date. There’s too much duplication of theme, and more worryingly, at the sentence level Cusk’s prose has visibly deteriorated. Too many of Cusk’s sign off axioms make little or no sense.
Given the two years it has taken to write Kudos it strikes me that Cusk 's creative and artistic inspiration has been inconsistent during that time. Too much is contrived, some is poorly written.
My personal response:
Disliked
• Cusk has a poor opinion of men; her own marital travails were widely debated in public. That will inform your world view, I understand that. But.... how many monologues does it need in a single collection to force home the point that men are lazy good for nothings whose selfishness is in marked contrast to the wives and partners who take on the burden of child rearing and support?
Cusk’s anger is getting more marked. Kudos has very little balance in matters concerning conflict between the sexes, and this is a departure from Outline parts 1 and 2.
Custody battles, male dysfunction (the offensive comments of her German publisher), absentee fathers, oedipal dependency.
• The supposed ‘trilogy’ concept. Better to write a single, narrator managed monologue collection, and edit out the duplicates.
(I have to assume that simple economics are at work and sales will be much greater for a series of separate, if similar, books).
• Brexit references. An increasing number of writers slip Brexit into their fiction. It’s an emotive subject, so the writer needs to be rather sharper than Cusk’s waffle:
You might think you were witnessing not the machinations of a democracy but the final surrender of personal conscience into the public domain(12)
The English came here in their hordes to lie tossing on the beaches. He had wondered whether out of tact or courtesy or just plain shame they might desist from this habit in the light of their recent rejection of European membership”(178)
Does Cusk mean the habit of sunbathing, or the habit of visiting (Portugal)?
• Too many of Cusk’s set piece sentences are actually meaningless. You can change the order of the words around and it makes little difference.
What is history other than memory without pain?(39)
Why not say: What is pain other than history without memory?
“He exuded an air of anonymous and slightly provisional manliness”(3)
I’ve re read this a few times, and still the meaning escapes me.
Suffering had always appeared to me as an opportunity, I said, and I wasn’t sure I would ever discover whether this is true and if so why it was, because so far I had failed to understand what it might be an opportunity for"(64)
So, is suffering an opportunity, or not?
“I’ve noticed that the people who love children the most often respect them the least"(137)
Please explain on what grounds, with what evidence, you draw this conclusion?
“Negative literature got much of its power through the fearless use of honesty”(182)
• Cusk writes some sentences that desperately need editing. In relation to his daughter’s oboe recital Cusk describes the father
“what he heard drew water from his eyes in such quantities that people began to glance round at him in their seats"(17)
I assume it was the sound of the ’water’ (i.e. sobbing), that elicited the reaction from his neighbours!
“Her description of the town where she lived-a place I had never been to, though I knew it wasn’t far from here-and of its beauty had been particularly tenacious”(62)
Surely the “and of its beauty” must precede the sentence division, just after “where she lived”?? At the very least put a comma after beauty if the original form is retained.
“Some aspects of the world seem”realer” and more important to them than others”(100) Hopefully this is tongue in cheek?
Liked
• It’s always interesting to read between the lines when authors snipe and gossip about their own industry and other writers. I assume that the Luis, Knausgaard, character portrayal is an in joke between Cusk and Knausgaard? The best selling Ryan appears to be a parody.
In her review, Meike provides some great background on the settings for the monologues, and some of the publishing house politics.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
• Some Of Cusk’s set piece sentences do resound, and are very quotable
“Behind every man is his mother, who made such a fuss of him he will never recover from it, and will never understand why the rest of the world doesn’t make the same fuss of him...(160)
I will be very surprised if Kudos gets a Booker 2018 listing. The style is definitive (of Cusk) rather than innovative. And in my opinion it’s by far her least impressive use of language.
My rating of Kudos matches that of Cusk’s Internet keyboard warriors (those of us apparently dressing up our more basic reading appetites with a veneer of intellectualism).
So it is the same as the unknown reviewers opinion of Dante’s Devine Comedy and ‘a single star out of five’(41)
******The rest of the "review" was written prior to reading the book, and consequent to Paul's teasing *****
It’s good to see that Paul hasn’t lost his sense of fun, and the joys of the wind-up.
“ Annihilated Perspective”
Google the phrase and the results are as follows
1. Rachel Cusk’s self penned term to describe her work
2.Rachel Cusk’s self penned term to describe her work
3.”Annhilation” A new Science Fiction film from Alex Garland
4.Aristides Baltas
In Peeling Potatoes or Grinding Lenses, contends that these works bear a striking similarity based on the idea of “radical immanence.
5.Mawson: The Ice, a journey to Antarctica
See Paul’s extract featuring Antarctic exploration and the photograper’s challenge
6. Walter Benjamin describes (separately) annihilation and perspective.
‘Whether one speaks of annihilation or salvation depends on the perspective from which one argues. (Strictly speaking, the concept of perspective is quite inappropriate here. It is used to distinguish two incompatible yet not entirely disparate perspectives’
Walter Benjamin was an esteemed literary critic and writer, so perhaps this is what Cusk draws from?
7.Annhilation, the Alex Garland film.
8.Annhilation, the Alex Garland film.
9.Physics in perspective: annihilating particles
10..Annhilation, the Alex Garland film.
11. Annihilate- definition
12. Rachel Cusk again:
“Readers of Outline (2014), Cusk’s previous novel, will recognize Transit as a continuation of the author’s writing from what she has called the “annihilated perspective”.
It’s a meaningless term. Throw any two verbs together and call this a new movement- but annihilate is so strong, so resonant; it doesn’t work as a putative literary genre.
“Detached perspective”. Maybe.
“Disconnected perspective”. Maybe.
“Connected perspective“. Maybe.
“Ambivalent perspective “. Maybe.
etc. etc.
The thing is, I generally like Rachel Cusk’s work. Of the four books of hers that I have read
A Life’s Work 4*, Aftermath 3*, Outline4*, Transit3*.
Cusk is an observer of life, she is a mother who recoils from neat and convenient stereotypes of the contented wife, home carer, child minder. Her work is quite waspish, and even cynical at times. Her prose is readily quotable, and has been written with an eye setting out to chronicle life’s realities.
I find some of her observations about parenting very accurate and insightful.
However, at times Cusk’s acuity is open to doubt, some observations contrived and trite. Her “annihilated perspective” mantra falls into the category of artifice.
August 24, 2018
“The other day, he said, my son and I were talking about politics, and he observed that in the current situation the possibility of destruction seemed genuinely to be upon us, to the extent that he couldn’t see what move on the chess board would get us out at this corner. I replied that this was something all of us had felt in our turn, as we passed into adulthood and recognized the role of outside events in shaping history and their capacity to interfere in and change our lives, which until now had remained in the hermetic state of childhood. He said something which very much surprised me, which was that in any case he felt that destruction had by now been earned in full by humanity, and that even if it meant the lives of his generation weren’t allowed to run their full course, he believed it would be for the best. Every time he thought of the future, his son said, he had to remind himself that this sense of his own story was just an illusion, because not enough was left anymore for another story: enough time, enough material, enough authenticity. Everything has been used, he said, except I suppose, Eduardo added, the waves, which continue to pound on the shore and will still be pounding when we’re gone”.
I’m fulfilled, satiated, and spent.....having intensely been spellbound by Rachel Cusk in this trilogy series.
The above excerpt somewhat symbolizes how I’m left feeling having read all three books, “Outline”, “Transit”, and “Kudos” in order - without pause.
My *very* favorite— without question was “Transit”. If you had the experience I did... you might say the same. It was the most personal -
“Kudos” is my least favorite... the only book I’m giving 4 stars to instead of 5.
One of the conversations was about certain books no longer being popular to read.
Hermann Hesse was apparently not popular. I found the conversation ‘odd’ .. I never did quit get the point of it. - but the first story is great.... other wonderful moments with an interviewer..and the last story was moving: “an innocent mistake”, that one of Faye’s son’s tells her about.
I’ve heard other readers say - that these books can be read in any order.
I don’t agree. NOT FOR A FIRST TIME READ.
“Kudos” isn’t a book I’d ever recommend picking to read first. I ‘do’ suggest reading these books in order... for a first time run-through.
In “Kudos”, we come full circle.
Once again, Faye is the observer and listener. A few changes about Faye: Her two young sons, still living in London, are now teenagers..... and Faye is now re-married - having gone through a divorce.
We begin, ‘once again’, with Faye sitting next to a stranger on an airplane.... as we did in “Outline”. The conversation is very different - but equally has us hanging-on-like new born bunnies sucking on mama Bunny ...
As much as the babies want to be feed - that’s how much we want to be feed this story about a very tall male passenger traveling in ‘coach’. He can’t for the life of himself get comfortable in his seat. It’s kinda funny -but as funny as it is - it rings so much truth - I already ache for my husband’s long legs hurting next time we travel. Thank god for Business Seats - as our stranger himself so desired Business Class which is how he usually traveled. The airline stewardess was ruthless to this man.
Faye - who was traveling to Europe - for a writers festival conference, was sitting next to Mr. Tall.
Faye, with her few words, is priceless in this scene. The man... equally priceless.
Rachel Cusk’s books are beautifully written...
in gorgeous unique style ... inviting us to contemplate and reflect on our own life stories. Many of her sentences are to savior.
Sorrow, loss, suffering, and love,.... are themes that run through all of her books.
I’m fulfilled, satiated, and spent.....having intensely been spellbound by Rachel Cusk in this trilogy series.
The above excerpt somewhat symbolizes how I’m left feeling having read all three books, “Outline”, “Transit”, and “Kudos” in order - without pause.
My *very* favorite— without question was “Transit”. If you had the experience I did... you might say the same. It was the most personal -
“Kudos” is my least favorite... the only book I’m giving 4 stars to instead of 5.
One of the conversations was about certain books no longer being popular to read.
Hermann Hesse was apparently not popular. I found the conversation ‘odd’ .. I never did quit get the point of it. - but the first story is great.... other wonderful moments with an interviewer..and the last story was moving: “an innocent mistake”, that one of Faye’s son’s tells her about.
I’ve heard other readers say - that these books can be read in any order.
I don’t agree. NOT FOR A FIRST TIME READ.
“Kudos” isn’t a book I’d ever recommend picking to read first. I ‘do’ suggest reading these books in order... for a first time run-through.
In “Kudos”, we come full circle.
Once again, Faye is the observer and listener. A few changes about Faye: Her two young sons, still living in London, are now teenagers..... and Faye is now re-married - having gone through a divorce.
We begin, ‘once again’, with Faye sitting next to a stranger on an airplane.... as we did in “Outline”. The conversation is very different - but equally has us hanging-on-like new born bunnies sucking on mama Bunny ...
As much as the babies want to be feed - that’s how much we want to be feed this story about a very tall male passenger traveling in ‘coach’. He can’t for the life of himself get comfortable in his seat. It’s kinda funny -but as funny as it is - it rings so much truth - I already ache for my husband’s long legs hurting next time we travel. Thank god for Business Seats - as our stranger himself so desired Business Class which is how he usually traveled. The airline stewardess was ruthless to this man.
Faye - who was traveling to Europe - for a writers festival conference, was sitting next to Mr. Tall.
Faye, with her few words, is priceless in this scene. The man... equally priceless.
Rachel Cusk’s books are beautifully written...
in gorgeous unique style ... inviting us to contemplate and reflect on our own life stories. Many of her sentences are to savior.
Sorrow, loss, suffering, and love,.... are themes that run through all of her books.
November 30, 2018
I finished this and I'm still thinking about it. On the one hand, very little happens, but on the other hand, that's kind of my jam.
I found myself wishing I read it in paper instead of through the Libby app because I would have been able to better absorb it with better line breaks or other formatting, I think.
Amidst all the discussions seems to be a theme of freedom, how it's not what you think, how personal freedom is overrated because of what you give up, etc. I marked a few of those passages and am going to look back through them before writing a review.
There is also this whole page about jacaranda trees, and that's what has been following me through books this past year, so I had to laugh... and even with that passage it is about how to end UP with the beautiful luscious flowering jacaranda, you have to devote 30-40 years to it, and how most people aren't willing to wait that long for payoff like that. Interesting....
Still mulling over this one.
I found myself wishing I read it in paper instead of through the Libby app because I would have been able to better absorb it with better line breaks or other formatting, I think.
Amidst all the discussions seems to be a theme of freedom, how it's not what you think, how personal freedom is overrated because of what you give up, etc. I marked a few of those passages and am going to look back through them before writing a review.
There is also this whole page about jacaranda trees, and that's what has been following me through books this past year, so I had to laugh... and even with that passage it is about how to end UP with the beautiful luscious flowering jacaranda, you have to devote 30-40 years to it, and how most people aren't willing to wait that long for payoff like that. Interesting....
Still mulling over this one.
April 8, 2024
Here I am, finishing a trilogy that didn't really have a plot and was almost entirely made up of random encounters with strangers. In this one, there was a lot of talk about the publishing industry and literature in general. All the non-conversations that the protagonist author had with readers were an interesting commentary on how little control a writer has over his/her own work, but it couldn't compete with the imagery created by the more mutual interactions in the first books.
The end was disturbing. Rachel, tell me you don't hate your readers so much that you would compare them with that man.
The end was disturbing. Rachel, tell me you don't hate your readers so much that you would compare them with that man.
January 16, 2020
'Faye', he said fractiously, 'will you just listen?'
The final part of one of the most important series of novels of the 21st century to date and now shortlisted - as were the previous two in the trilogy - for the Goldsmiths Prize.
In 1911 the photographer Herbert Ponting joined Captain Scott's, ultimately ill-fated, Terra Nova Expedition, the first professional to join an Antarctic expedition.
He didn't go on to the later, fatal, part of the journey over the ice-fields to the South Pole since, as he explained in his book The Great White South: Traveling with Robert F. Scott's Doomed South Pole Expedition, there would be nothing to photograph but the level plain of boundless, featureless ice.
And in the photographs he took in in his time there, such as:
and
he had to resort to various ingenious techniques to overcome the challenges the landscape posed.
As Stephen J. Pyne puts it in The Ice: A Journey To Antarctica, light was either too brilliant or missing altogether. Foreground and background were difficult to establish, and there was often no horizon on which to organise perspective. The objects, scenes and symbols which normally populated a painting were absent.
Pyne summarises Ponting's view as needing to counter the fact that the natural landscape annihilated perspective.
103 years later, in 2014, with the publication of Outline (an excellent Mookse and Gripes review) Rachel Cusk instead of trying to counter annihilated perspective, embraced it as an innovative new literary form. The trilogy continued with Transit (my review) and is now completed by Kudos.
This new literary style was born out of necessity and as a way of overcoming a dead-end in her work, post Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation.
When Outline was first published, she told The Guardian that she felt fiction was fake and embarrassing. Once you have suffered sufficiently, the idea of making up John and Jane and having them do things together seems utterly ridiculous.
Yet my mode of autobiography had come to an end. I could not do it without being misunderstood and making people angry., referring to the aftermath (pun intended), including the bizarre Mumsnet backlash, to her previous book and in particular the problem that there was so much stuff in my own life that the divide [between life and the book] was completely breached.
She instead suggested Outline's annihilated perspective [might be the] beginning of something interesting ... I'm certain autobiography is increasingly the only form in all the arts. Description, character – these are dead or dying in reality as well as in art.
This all rather reflecting Karl Ove Knausgård's words in A Man in Love “Just the thought of a fabricated character in a fabricated plot made me feel nauseous.”
The previous novels weren't flawless. In Outline, I felt Cusk made what she was doing too explicit at times, as if she didn't trust the reader to get it, and Transit had an story about Faye's ongoing battles with her downstairs neighbours that simply didn't fit.
But they did present a fascinating new development - blending the autobiographical fiction that Knausgård took to one extreme, with the use of reported conversations (with clear debts to Sebald and Bernhard), and an unique narrative distancing of her own, to create an entirely new form, both novels being deservedly recognised by the Goldsmiths Prize for innovative fiction.
There was also a discernable line of development from Outline to Transit, perhaps befitting the respective titles, as the gaps in her narrator Faye's did seem to be slightly filled in, and Transit ended with the hint of a new relationship in the offing.
So to Kudos:
The novel is set around a book tour done by Faye around various cities in Europe, notably (although this can only be inferred, they aren't named, see Meike's review for the clues she followed) Cologne and Lisbon. Interestingly this combination of very specific descriptions but no actual place names seems very deliberate, to the extent that a country-specific reference was even removed just pre-publication.
ARC I reviewed: “I asked her where she’d been before coming to Germany”.
Final novel: "I asked her where she'd been before coming here"
And it opens as (a brief introduction aside) did the first novel, with Faye observing and then addressed by her male neighbour on a plane:
For a while he continued to smile self-consciously , like someone who has mistakenly wandered out onstage, and then, apparently to disguise his feelings of exposure, he turned to me and asked the reason for my trip to Europe. I was a writer, I said, and I was on my way to speak at a literary festival. Immediately his face assumed an expression of polite interest. ‘My wife’s a big reader,’ he said. ‘She belongs to one of those book clubs.’ A silence fell. ‘What kind of thing do you write?’ he said, after a while. I said it was hard to explain.
Stylistically this felt like a continuation of Transit: Faye (named once of course, in the, rather ironical, quote that opens my review, here from one of her sons) does (sometimes) offer her own views on her interlocutors thoughts , but we learn little about her direct.
We learn for example that she is married, but not from her, but rather from an 'interviewer' who, as happens several times in the novel to comic effect, does all of the talking and mostly about herself:
‘I think I have everything I need,’ she said. ‘In fact I looked up all the details before I came. It’s what we journalists do nowadays,’ she said. ‘One day they’ll probably replace us with a computer programme. I read that you got married again ,’ she added.
Faye's very lack of interjection into conversations causes those speaking to reveal more about themselves - but given that their words are reported to us by Faye we, the reader, can also see them as reflecting something on her. Her technique is in direct contrast to the flamboyant society hostess of a literary salon:
because she didn’t conceal herself the conversation was never real: it was the conversation of people imitating writers having a conversation.
The publishing world plays a large part in the novel, Faye's German publisher telling her that people want the feeling of having read a worthy literary novel but without the effort:
What all publishers were looking for, he went on –the holy grail, as it were, of the modern literary scene – were those writers who performed well in the market while maintaining a connection to the values of literature; in other words, who wrote books that people could actually enjoy without feeling in the least demeaned by being seen reading them. He had managed to secure quite a collection of those writers, and apart from the Sudoku and the popular thrillers, they were chiefly responsible for the upswing in the company’s fortunes. I said I was struck by his observation that the preservation of literary values –in however nominal a form –was a factor in the achievement of popular success. In England, I said, people liked to live in old houses that had been thoroughly refurbished with modern conveniences, and I wondered whether the same principle might be applied to novels; and if so, whether the blunting or loss of our own instinct for beauty was responsible for it.
Cusk also has some fun, using this publisher's words, at the expense of - well Goodreads and Amazon reviewers....
Sometimes, he said, he amused himself by trawling some of the lower depths of the internet, where readers gave their opinions of their literary purchases, much as they might rate the performance of a detergent. ... It was entertaining, in a way, to see Dante awarded a single star out of a possible five and his "Divine Comedy" described as "complete shit."
From there she goes to Lisbon, home of jacaranda trees and the pastel de nata:
The sweet little tart, by which the man’s hungry mouth was fobbed off and occupied, was perhaps nothing less than these women’s divested femininity, separated and handed over, as it were, on a plate; a method of keeping the world at bay as well as a sign, he liked to think, of the happiness of that state, for he didn’t believe that anything created in suffering and self-abnegation could taste quite so delicious.
In Lisbon, another attendee at the literary conference praises another author there:
‘Unusually for a man of this nation,’she said, ‘and perhaps for any man, he has been honest about his own life. He has written about his family and his parents and his childhood home in a way that makes them completely recognisable, and because this is a small country he worries he has used them or compromised them, though of course for readers in other parts of the world it is just the honesty itself that comes through.
Though of course if he were a woman,’she said, leaning more confidentially towards my ear, ‘he would be scorned for his honesty, or at the very least no one would care.’
the last perhaps a cheeky reference to the relative reception of Knausgård's novels vs. Cusk's own?
And it was great to see a nod to Thomas Bernhard, albeit from the lips of Cusk's interlocutor, not entirely complimentary:
He had always been compelled by provocative and difficult writing, he went on, because this at least proved the author had had the wit to unshackle himself from convention, but he had found that in works of extreme negativity – the writings of Thomas Bernhard were an example he had been considering lately – one nonetheless eventually hit an impasse. A work of art could not, ultimately, be negative: its material existence, its status as an object, could not help but be positive, a gain, an addition to the sum of what was. The self-destructive novel, like the self-destructive person, was something from which in the end you remained helplessly separated, forced to watch a spectacle – the soul turning on itself – in which you were powerless to intervene.
My favourite of her conversations - or rather received monologues - was with Hermann, a yong guide for the literary tour, highly intelligent and also on the autistic spectrum, and the novel's title comes from his lengthy explanation of an award at his college:
To return to the subject of the college’s award, he said, the name they had chosen for it was ‘Kudos’. As I was probably aware, the Greek word ‘kudos’ was a singular noun that had become plural by a process of back formation: a kudo on its own had never actually existed, but in modern usage its collective meaning had been altered by the confusing presence of a plural suffix , so that ‘kudos’ therefore meant, literally, ‘prizes’, but in its original form it connoted the broader concept of recognition or acclaim, as well as being suggestive of something which might be falsely claimed by someone else.
Although literature aside much of the work circles, as does the trilogy around relationships - most of those she meets seem to have undergone messy divorces - and identity, extended here at times to embrace national identity and Brexit. As one of the more perceptive interviewers notes of Faye's work:
The changing perspectives of identity, he went on, was a subject he sensed I had given some consideration to
And prompted by someone suggesting that if she moved from England to the better weather in Portugal perhaps her books would be less miserable (!), Faye, relatively unusually, interjects with her own credo, that one can't change one's fate by simply changing location:
I said I wasn’t sure it mattered where people lived or how, since their individual nature would create its own circumstances: it was a risky kind of presumption, I said, to rewrite your own fate by changing its setting; when it happened to people against their will, the loss of the known world – whatever its features – was catastrophic.
This in part a reference to the effect of her previous divorce on her son, ending the book on something of a sombre note, although actually much of the book is highly amusing.
So why not 5 stars given what I avow as its importance and innovation as well as its sheer entertainment. Well perhaps the trilogy as a whole does deserve that, but like the first 2 books this one is at times flawed. The parts of the novel that focus on Brexit jarred a little for me: yes there is a link to the theme of identity but the analysis was pretty superficial. And given what seemed a progression from Outline to Transit, I was expecting something more of a development in the concluding part, whereas it style this felt like a copy of Transit. I will be intrigued to read other reviews, particularly from those re-reading the whole trilogy as to whether there are threads running through that I missed.
Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC.
The final part of one of the most important series of novels of the 21st century to date and now shortlisted - as were the previous two in the trilogy - for the Goldsmiths Prize.
In 1911 the photographer Herbert Ponting joined Captain Scott's, ultimately ill-fated, Terra Nova Expedition, the first professional to join an Antarctic expedition.
He didn't go on to the later, fatal, part of the journey over the ice-fields to the South Pole since, as he explained in his book The Great White South: Traveling with Robert F. Scott's Doomed South Pole Expedition, there would be nothing to photograph but the level plain of boundless, featureless ice.
And in the photographs he took in in his time there, such as:
and
he had to resort to various ingenious techniques to overcome the challenges the landscape posed.
As Stephen J. Pyne puts it in The Ice: A Journey To Antarctica, light was either too brilliant or missing altogether. Foreground and background were difficult to establish, and there was often no horizon on which to organise perspective. The objects, scenes and symbols which normally populated a painting were absent.
Pyne summarises Ponting's view as needing to counter the fact that the natural landscape annihilated perspective.
103 years later, in 2014, with the publication of Outline (an excellent Mookse and Gripes review) Rachel Cusk instead of trying to counter annihilated perspective, embraced it as an innovative new literary form. The trilogy continued with Transit (my review) and is now completed by Kudos.
This new literary style was born out of necessity and as a way of overcoming a dead-end in her work, post Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation.
When Outline was first published, she told The Guardian that she felt fiction was fake and embarrassing. Once you have suffered sufficiently, the idea of making up John and Jane and having them do things together seems utterly ridiculous.
Yet my mode of autobiography had come to an end. I could not do it without being misunderstood and making people angry., referring to the aftermath (pun intended), including the bizarre Mumsnet backlash, to her previous book and in particular the problem that there was so much stuff in my own life that the divide [between life and the book] was completely breached.
She instead suggested Outline's annihilated perspective [might be the] beginning of something interesting ... I'm certain autobiography is increasingly the only form in all the arts. Description, character – these are dead or dying in reality as well as in art.
This all rather reflecting Karl Ove Knausgård's words in A Man in Love “Just the thought of a fabricated character in a fabricated plot made me feel nauseous.”
The previous novels weren't flawless. In Outline, I felt Cusk made what she was doing too explicit at times, as if she didn't trust the reader to get it, and Transit had an story about Faye's ongoing battles with her downstairs neighbours that simply didn't fit.
But they did present a fascinating new development - blending the autobiographical fiction that Knausgård took to one extreme, with the use of reported conversations (with clear debts to Sebald and Bernhard), and an unique narrative distancing of her own, to create an entirely new form, both novels being deservedly recognised by the Goldsmiths Prize for innovative fiction.
There was also a discernable line of development from Outline to Transit, perhaps befitting the respective titles, as the gaps in her narrator Faye's did seem to be slightly filled in, and Transit ended with the hint of a new relationship in the offing.
So to Kudos:
The novel is set around a book tour done by Faye around various cities in Europe, notably (although this can only be inferred, they aren't named, see Meike's review for the clues she followed) Cologne and Lisbon. Interestingly this combination of very specific descriptions but no actual place names seems very deliberate, to the extent that a country-specific reference was even removed just pre-publication.
ARC I reviewed: “I asked her where she’d been before coming to Germany”.
Final novel: "I asked her where she'd been before coming here"
And it opens as (a brief introduction aside) did the first novel, with Faye observing and then addressed by her male neighbour on a plane:
For a while he continued to smile self-consciously , like someone who has mistakenly wandered out onstage, and then, apparently to disguise his feelings of exposure, he turned to me and asked the reason for my trip to Europe. I was a writer, I said, and I was on my way to speak at a literary festival. Immediately his face assumed an expression of polite interest. ‘My wife’s a big reader,’ he said. ‘She belongs to one of those book clubs.’ A silence fell. ‘What kind of thing do you write?’ he said, after a while. I said it was hard to explain.
Stylistically this felt like a continuation of Transit: Faye (named once of course, in the, rather ironical, quote that opens my review, here from one of her sons) does (sometimes) offer her own views on her interlocutors thoughts , but we learn little about her direct.
We learn for example that she is married, but not from her, but rather from an 'interviewer' who, as happens several times in the novel to comic effect, does all of the talking and mostly about herself:
‘I think I have everything I need,’ she said. ‘In fact I looked up all the details before I came. It’s what we journalists do nowadays,’ she said. ‘One day they’ll probably replace us with a computer programme. I read that you got married again ,’ she added.
Faye's very lack of interjection into conversations causes those speaking to reveal more about themselves - but given that their words are reported to us by Faye we, the reader, can also see them as reflecting something on her. Her technique is in direct contrast to the flamboyant society hostess of a literary salon:
because she didn’t conceal herself the conversation was never real: it was the conversation of people imitating writers having a conversation.
The publishing world plays a large part in the novel, Faye's German publisher telling her that people want the feeling of having read a worthy literary novel but without the effort:
What all publishers were looking for, he went on –the holy grail, as it were, of the modern literary scene – were those writers who performed well in the market while maintaining a connection to the values of literature; in other words, who wrote books that people could actually enjoy without feeling in the least demeaned by being seen reading them. He had managed to secure quite a collection of those writers, and apart from the Sudoku and the popular thrillers, they were chiefly responsible for the upswing in the company’s fortunes. I said I was struck by his observation that the preservation of literary values –in however nominal a form –was a factor in the achievement of popular success. In England, I said, people liked to live in old houses that had been thoroughly refurbished with modern conveniences, and I wondered whether the same principle might be applied to novels; and if so, whether the blunting or loss of our own instinct for beauty was responsible for it.
Cusk also has some fun, using this publisher's words, at the expense of - well Goodreads and Amazon reviewers....
Sometimes, he said, he amused himself by trawling some of the lower depths of the internet, where readers gave their opinions of their literary purchases, much as they might rate the performance of a detergent. ... It was entertaining, in a way, to see Dante awarded a single star out of a possible five and his "Divine Comedy" described as "complete shit."
From there she goes to Lisbon, home of jacaranda trees and the pastel de nata:
The sweet little tart, by which the man’s hungry mouth was fobbed off and occupied, was perhaps nothing less than these women’s divested femininity, separated and handed over, as it were, on a plate; a method of keeping the world at bay as well as a sign, he liked to think, of the happiness of that state, for he didn’t believe that anything created in suffering and self-abnegation could taste quite so delicious.
In Lisbon, another attendee at the literary conference praises another author there:
‘Unusually for a man of this nation,’she said, ‘and perhaps for any man, he has been honest about his own life. He has written about his family and his parents and his childhood home in a way that makes them completely recognisable, and because this is a small country he worries he has used them or compromised them, though of course for readers in other parts of the world it is just the honesty itself that comes through.
Though of course if he were a woman,’she said, leaning more confidentially towards my ear, ‘he would be scorned for his honesty, or at the very least no one would care.’
the last perhaps a cheeky reference to the relative reception of Knausgård's novels vs. Cusk's own?
And it was great to see a nod to Thomas Bernhard, albeit from the lips of Cusk's interlocutor, not entirely complimentary:
He had always been compelled by provocative and difficult writing, he went on, because this at least proved the author had had the wit to unshackle himself from convention, but he had found that in works of extreme negativity – the writings of Thomas Bernhard were an example he had been considering lately – one nonetheless eventually hit an impasse. A work of art could not, ultimately, be negative: its material existence, its status as an object, could not help but be positive, a gain, an addition to the sum of what was. The self-destructive novel, like the self-destructive person, was something from which in the end you remained helplessly separated, forced to watch a spectacle – the soul turning on itself – in which you were powerless to intervene.
My favourite of her conversations - or rather received monologues - was with Hermann, a yong guide for the literary tour, highly intelligent and also on the autistic spectrum, and the novel's title comes from his lengthy explanation of an award at his college:
To return to the subject of the college’s award, he said, the name they had chosen for it was ‘Kudos’. As I was probably aware, the Greek word ‘kudos’ was a singular noun that had become plural by a process of back formation: a kudo on its own had never actually existed, but in modern usage its collective meaning had been altered by the confusing presence of a plural suffix , so that ‘kudos’ therefore meant, literally, ‘prizes’, but in its original form it connoted the broader concept of recognition or acclaim, as well as being suggestive of something which might be falsely claimed by someone else.
Although literature aside much of the work circles, as does the trilogy around relationships - most of those she meets seem to have undergone messy divorces - and identity, extended here at times to embrace national identity and Brexit. As one of the more perceptive interviewers notes of Faye's work:
The changing perspectives of identity, he went on, was a subject he sensed I had given some consideration to
And prompted by someone suggesting that if she moved from England to the better weather in Portugal perhaps her books would be less miserable (!), Faye, relatively unusually, interjects with her own credo, that one can't change one's fate by simply changing location:
I said I wasn’t sure it mattered where people lived or how, since their individual nature would create its own circumstances: it was a risky kind of presumption, I said, to rewrite your own fate by changing its setting; when it happened to people against their will, the loss of the known world – whatever its features – was catastrophic.
This in part a reference to the effect of her previous divorce on her son, ending the book on something of a sombre note, although actually much of the book is highly amusing.
So why not 5 stars given what I avow as its importance and innovation as well as its sheer entertainment. Well perhaps the trilogy as a whole does deserve that, but like the first 2 books this one is at times flawed. The parts of the novel that focus on Brexit jarred a little for me: yes there is a link to the theme of identity but the analysis was pretty superficial. And given what seemed a progression from Outline to Transit, I was expecting something more of a development in the concluding part, whereas it style this felt like a copy of Transit. I will be intrigued to read other reviews, particularly from those re-reading the whole trilogy as to whether there are threads running through that I missed.
Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC.
April 27, 2018
My five star rating is more for the entire trilogy as a whole, for after reading the three volumes back-to-back-to-back, I really consider it to be one book, since there are few distinguishing characteristics for the separate volumes. But this book, like Outline, is really more of a 4 star - I was slightly disappointed that there WAS no real epiphany - or even much of a conclusion - at the end, but then realized that would somewhat have defeated the purpose of the books' 'annihilated perspective'.
This volume, like parts of Transit, revolves around two literary festival/conferences that anti-protagonist Faye attends as a semi-celebrated author, and since my knowledge of such (and European geography in general) is negligible at best, it wasn't until after finishing the book, and reading the very fine reviews by my GR chums Meike and Paul, that I deciphered they were meant to be in Cologne and Lisbon. Many of the characters Faye encounters also appear to be based in reality - yet again those passed right over my head.
What I DID get - and appreciate - is how Cusk circles around (and around and around) her themes of identify, gender politics, family dynamics, life philosophies, etc. in a highly entertaining, and sometimes, enlightening fashion. Another GR pal, Jonathan, contends that Cusk is neither as clever or profound as she thinks she is (even comparing her works to - quelle horreur! - chick-lit!), but I think many of her observations - if not quite life-changing - were things that did make me stop and ponder life's bigger questions.
In conclusion, never having read any of Cusk's novels or autobiographical writings (and not so sure these left me crying out to do so), I can't say how these fit within her oeuvre - but the fact I was able to get through nearly 800 pages of her vignettes in less than 4 days counts for something!
My sincere thanks and gratitude to both Netgalley and FS & G for the generous gift of the ARC prior to publication, in exchange for this honest review.
This volume, like parts of Transit, revolves around two literary festival/conferences that anti-protagonist Faye attends as a semi-celebrated author, and since my knowledge of such (and European geography in general) is negligible at best, it wasn't until after finishing the book, and reading the very fine reviews by my GR chums Meike and Paul, that I deciphered they were meant to be in Cologne and Lisbon. Many of the characters Faye encounters also appear to be based in reality - yet again those passed right over my head.
What I DID get - and appreciate - is how Cusk circles around (and around and around) her themes of identify, gender politics, family dynamics, life philosophies, etc. in a highly entertaining, and sometimes, enlightening fashion. Another GR pal, Jonathan, contends that Cusk is neither as clever or profound as she thinks she is (even comparing her works to - quelle horreur! - chick-lit!), but I think many of her observations - if not quite life-changing - were things that did make me stop and ponder life's bigger questions.
In conclusion, never having read any of Cusk's novels or autobiographical writings (and not so sure these left me crying out to do so), I can't say how these fit within her oeuvre - but the fact I was able to get through nearly 800 pages of her vignettes in less than 4 days counts for something!
My sincere thanks and gratitude to both Netgalley and FS & G for the generous gift of the ARC prior to publication, in exchange for this honest review.
July 13, 2020
“Bazen bir şeyin kenarından aşağı düşmek üzereymişim ve beni yakalayacak kimse olmayacakmış gibi geliyor. O kadar yalnız hissediyorum ki kendimi, dedi, öte yandan da kendime ait bir alanım yok. İnsanlar sanki ben orada değilmişim gibi hareket ediyorlar. Her türlü şeyi yapıyor olabilirim, dedi. Bileklerimi kesiyor olabilirim ve bundan ne haberleri olur ne de aldırırlar. Bana bir şeyler soruyorlar, dedi, ama bunları birleştiremiyorlar. Bunları, onlara daha önce zaten söylediğim şeylerle ilişkilendiremiyorlar. Böyle ayrı ayrı anlamsız olgular var sadece.
Hikayeni herkese anlatamazsın, dedim. Belki yalnızca tek bir kişiye anlatabilirsin.”
Çerçeve üçlemesini, son kitap Övgü ile tamamladım. İlk iki kitapta, ilişkiler, çocuk vb konularda ilerlemişti. Bu sefer ise edebiyat ve yayıncılık dünyasında kadın olmak, dünyada kadın olmak konularına yoğunlaşıp açılarak; boşanma sonrası hayatlar, eski eşlerle ve çocuklarla yaşanan sorunlardan değişimlere, toplum içinde farklı olmaktan yalnızlığa çok geniş bir alanda içini döküyor. Hatta bir noktada Brexit sürecine de dokunuyor. Ana karakter Faye yine ana merkez olmaktan ziyade yansıtıcı rolünde. Avrupa’da-muhtemelen Portekiz- bir edebiyat festivalinde; yemek kuyruğunda, röportaj öncesinde, bir bekleme noktasında ya da uçakta yan koltuğundan dinlediği hikayeleri, monologları aktarıyor. Özellikle de bankta otururken gazeteci ile yaptığı konuşma bölümü en sevdiğim kısımlardan biriydi. Seri mükemmel bir kitapla sonlandı, benim için üçünü birbirinden ayırmak çok zor olsa da altını en çok çizdiğim, işaret koyduğum kitap bu oldu. Bütün seri zaman zaman tekrar sayfalarını açıp okuyup, üzerine düşüneceğim kitaplar arasınsa yerlerini aldılar.
“Belki de, dedi, artık kaçma vakti geçtiğinde anlıyoruz zaten hep özgür olduğumuzu.”
Hikayeni herkese anlatamazsın, dedim. Belki yalnızca tek bir kişiye anlatabilirsin.”
Çerçeve üçlemesini, son kitap Övgü ile tamamladım. İlk iki kitapta, ilişkiler, çocuk vb konularda ilerlemişti. Bu sefer ise edebiyat ve yayıncılık dünyasında kadın olmak, dünyada kadın olmak konularına yoğunlaşıp açılarak; boşanma sonrası hayatlar, eski eşlerle ve çocuklarla yaşanan sorunlardan değişimlere, toplum içinde farklı olmaktan yalnızlığa çok geniş bir alanda içini döküyor. Hatta bir noktada Brexit sürecine de dokunuyor. Ana karakter Faye yine ana merkez olmaktan ziyade yansıtıcı rolünde. Avrupa’da-muhtemelen Portekiz- bir edebiyat festivalinde; yemek kuyruğunda, röportaj öncesinde, bir bekleme noktasında ya da uçakta yan koltuğundan dinlediği hikayeleri, monologları aktarıyor. Özellikle de bankta otururken gazeteci ile yaptığı konuşma bölümü en sevdiğim kısımlardan biriydi. Seri mükemmel bir kitapla sonlandı, benim için üçünü birbirinden ayırmak çok zor olsa da altını en çok çizdiğim, işaret koyduğum kitap bu oldu. Bütün seri zaman zaman tekrar sayfalarını açıp okuyup, üzerine düşüneceğim kitaplar arasınsa yerlerini aldılar.
“Belki de, dedi, artık kaçma vakti geçtiğinde anlıyoruz zaten hep özgür olduğumuzu.”
August 21, 2018
3+ stars
Kudos started off really strong, but then it petered out. It is the third book in a trilogy. While I haven’t read the previous books, my understanding is that this isn’t a problem. The books are linked by concept rather than by plot. The narrator in Kudos is an author attending a writers’ event in Germany. The narrator recounts the numerous conversations she has on the way and at the event. The conversations are fairly one sided— the narrator reveals little of herself while absorbing gobs of personal information and musings from others. The conversations are intimate and revelatory. The first conversation is brilliant — the narrator recounts the conversation with her seat mate on the plane who tells her about his family dynamics and his last 24 hours caring for his ailing dog. The brilliance comes as much from what is said as from from what is left unsaid — I felt like I understood the seat mate in the same way one occasionally gets to know a stranger through serendipitous intense encounters. There’s another interesting conversation with the son of an event organizer who talks about his idiosyncratic interests — again I had an intense feel for his personality. But none of the other conversations really jumped out a me, and as the book progressed. it felt less and less engaging and increasingly gimmicky. Overall, I liked the concept but it felt uneven in its execution. I may still read the other books in the trilogy to see how the concept plays out in the earlier books — if it’s fresher. Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for an opportunity to read an ARC of Kudos.
Kudos started off really strong, but then it petered out. It is the third book in a trilogy. While I haven’t read the previous books, my understanding is that this isn’t a problem. The books are linked by concept rather than by plot. The narrator in Kudos is an author attending a writers’ event in Germany. The narrator recounts the numerous conversations she has on the way and at the event. The conversations are fairly one sided— the narrator reveals little of herself while absorbing gobs of personal information and musings from others. The conversations are intimate and revelatory. The first conversation is brilliant — the narrator recounts the conversation with her seat mate on the plane who tells her about his family dynamics and his last 24 hours caring for his ailing dog. The brilliance comes as much from what is said as from from what is left unsaid — I felt like I understood the seat mate in the same way one occasionally gets to know a stranger through serendipitous intense encounters. There’s another interesting conversation with the son of an event organizer who talks about his idiosyncratic interests — again I had an intense feel for his personality. But none of the other conversations really jumped out a me, and as the book progressed. it felt less and less engaging and increasingly gimmicky. Overall, I liked the concept but it felt uneven in its execution. I may still read the other books in the trilogy to see how the concept plays out in the earlier books — if it’s fresher. Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for an opportunity to read an ARC of Kudos.
August 16, 2019
cusk muhteşem bir finalle bitirmiş üçlemesini. ilişkiler, çocuklar üzerine yoğunlaşan ilk iki kitaptan sonra bu kez edebiyat dünyasında kadın olmaktan bu dünyada kadın olmaya savrulup duruyoruz.
kitap ilk ikisiyle aynı izlekte, faye’in konuşmasını çok az sadece verdiği bazı cevaplarda okuyoruz. gerisi hep karşılaştığı edebiyat yazar çevresi... anılar, anlar, anektodlar... ve bir dünya.
son sahne ise cusk’ın bize attığı bir kahkaha sanki. küfrederek bitiriyoruz kitabı yarım bir gülümsemeyle ama kalbimizin üstünde bir ağrı, bir yük... bu eşitsizlik bitecek mi?
bu arada lâle hanımın muhteşem çevirisine şapka çıkarıyorum.
* övgü’yle ilgili yazdığım yazı
https://oggito.com/icerikler/hayattan...
kitap ilk ikisiyle aynı izlekte, faye’in konuşmasını çok az sadece verdiği bazı cevaplarda okuyoruz. gerisi hep karşılaştığı edebiyat yazar çevresi... anılar, anlar, anektodlar... ve bir dünya.
son sahne ise cusk’ın bize attığı bir kahkaha sanki. küfrederek bitiriyoruz kitabı yarım bir gülümsemeyle ama kalbimizin üstünde bir ağrı, bir yük... bu eşitsizlik bitecek mi?
bu arada lâle hanımın muhteşem çevirisine şapka çıkarıyorum.
* övgü’yle ilgili yazdığım yazı
https://oggito.com/icerikler/hayattan...
February 21, 2022
I met a woman on the train. She was reading Kudos. I asked her had she read any others by Cusk. Yes, she said. The others in the trilogy, and the new one, myself? The same I said, plus the motherhood one. Ah yes, she said, while the baby pulled my hair and tried to grab the mobile of the woman beside me. That probably kept me sane at the time I said.
A Cusk-like conversation, in which we would reveal our deepest secrets and desires under the guise of a banal story, in elegant but abstract reported speech, should have ensued, would have ensued in a Cusk novel. But perhaps we were both too Cusk-like; we were prepared to hear the story, but not to speak it. So we sat rather awkwardly across the aisle from one another, smiling occasionally, and I watched her read the scene in which a man tells of burying the family dog.
We bid each other goodbye at the end and left, strangers still, secrets intact.
A Cusk-like conversation, in which we would reveal our deepest secrets and desires under the guise of a banal story, in elegant but abstract reported speech, should have ensued, would have ensued in a Cusk novel. But perhaps we were both too Cusk-like; we were prepared to hear the story, but not to speak it. So we sat rather awkwardly across the aisle from one another, smiling occasionally, and I watched her read the scene in which a man tells of burying the family dog.
We bid each other goodbye at the end and left, strangers still, secrets intact.
August 21, 2018
Déjà vu, with Gleams of Light
A writer sits on a plane on her way to a literary festival in Southern Europe. The man next to her has difficulty fitting into his seat. She switches with him, and soon is listening to him talk about problems with his family dog and his feelings about his daughter, who is playing the oboe in a concert where he is now headed. Wait a minute—is this not how Rachel Cusk began Outline, the first book in what one might call her "Absence Trilogy"? Yes indeed; I found the recurrence of themes somehow comforting. I suspect that had I also read Transit, the middle volume of the set, I might have recognized even more echoes, but I skipped that. Indeed, I had intended to stop with Outline, which I reviewed rather negatively. But I already had this third volume out of the library, and thought I would look quickly to see whether she might attract me more with her ending than her beginning. She did. I liked this a lot more, though still not enough to feel Cusk's approach working for me as a whole.
Why do I call this her "Absence Trilogy"? Because all three books take the unusual approach of painting the protagonist—a female writer very much like the author—more from the things that people say to her than from anything she says or does herself. Essentially, she is absent from her own story, or present only in that everything else creates a negative space in which we deduce her to be. It is only by accident, for example, that we learn she is called Faye—one casual mention occurring late in each of the two books. We piece together that she is divorced and the mother of two children. In this one, though, she allows herself to come through a little more. She has remarried, apparently. There is a moment towards the end when one of her sons calls her about a distressing incident, asking her when she is coming home: it is a little gleam of light in what was otherwise a deliberately misty narrative.
Nonetheless, as soon as I opened the book, I found myself reading eagerly for over 100 pages. There is something hypnotic about Faye's presence (or Cusk's voice) that makes people open up to her, and for the most part they have interesting things to say. The novel is not divided into chapters as Outline was, so it flows more naturally. I also felt it ventures further into the external world. The themes of marriage, divorce, and parenthood, which were the predominant subject of the first volume, are still present, but a lot of this book is about writing itself, the publishing business, and the rise of book sites like this one. There are also many references to the Brexit vote, which is recent news at the time in question. And I was heartened by the mention of several real figures: the writers Georges Bataille and Thomas Bernhard and, at greater length, the visual artists Louise Bourgeois (upper image below) and Joan Eardley (lower). These at least give real points of reference, in contrast to the cloud of unknowing surrounding the central character. Given this, it surprised me that the physical setting was left so vague; I deduced Portugal or Southern Italy, but nothing like the precise topography of Athens which helped to anchor Outline.
It had not occurred to me while reading the first book, but all these one-sided conversations reflect on Faye as more than a passive listener (and subsequent editor). I get the sense here that she is actively shaping the dialogue in much the way a good interviewer does, though removing herself from the conversation before it goes to press. Cusk even has fun with this idea, by turning the interview mode on its head. On at least three occasions, Faye meets reporters from the local media. In the first, the interviewer is a woman she has already met, who immediately launches into a story about the marriage of a third person. She eventually leaves without asking Faye anything at all, saying that she has already found all she needs on the internet! Similarly, we do not hear anything about the last of these interviews, which is for television, but the interviewer fills many pages with conversation about herself while the technicians adjust sound and light levels.
I mentioned that I read the first 100 pages of this in a single sitting. When I got back to it, many hours later, I had lost the momentum, and the last 130 pages were heavier going. In my earlier review, I pooh-poohed the suggestion of a Goodreads friend that one should read the entire trilogy back to back; even one volume was too much. But now I am not so sure. If I could stop myself asking questions as I went along, and just gave myself to the thing, falling under Cusk's hypnotic spell, putting down one book only to pick up the next, enjoying the rhythm of repeated themes and cross-references…. If I could read it in a single sitting (it would take less than a day), how much more might I get out of it? Too late now for me to try, so I'll never know. But others might.
January 25, 2021
Finally, I was able to finish up 𝙆𝙪𝙙𝙤𝙨, the last book in this trilogy. Starting the flight with 𝙊𝙪𝙩𝙡𝙞𝙣𝙚, on-air with 𝙏𝙧𝙖𝙣𝙨𝙞𝙩, and making a landing with 𝙆𝙪𝙙𝙤𝙨. The trilogy's writing was exceptional, a slight bend on the side of negativity, but sharp with observation. Faye again comes forth with her quietly and fearless approach embarking on a series of conversations with acquaintances and strangers while on her trip to Europe. A writer, divorced, remarried, with two children, Faye shared sophisticated thoughts on life's matters within the novel.
𝙆𝙪𝙙𝙤𝙨 is an account of journal stories collected during her trip. She notes down in detail and meticulously conjuring each narrative. Readers will find people mainly from the literary world, sharing personal awareness of mistakes, feelings, and thoughts trailing their past relationships' failure. The writing is a brilliant piece that deserved accolades of intellectual in the literary collection. 𝙆𝙪𝙙𝙤𝙨 and the previous two novels within this trilogy are mostly made up of plotless stories; becoming a page-turner is a delightful absurdity but a complaint of patchy execution of the anthology.
As mentioned earlier, 𝙆𝙪𝙙𝙤𝙨 confides with compelling negativity, which has started persuasive but somehow wobbled but didn't fall over. It is not a light read where one can tack on glances or pencil it after a brisk reading. The novel confides with compelling discussions about marriage, feminism, family, relationship, roles, and parenting.
Kudos bears many similarities to the storyline in the first volume, Outline, prompting a diminishing effect in this last volume. Nearing the end, individual stories mainlining broken marriage leading to divorce that cook up a thread of lengthy bitter conversation hit on a bottleneck in engagement. There are instances; women are innocent victims, the associates, and accomplices in their oppression.
As I bid farewell to the trilogy with the last volume, 𝙆𝙪𝙙𝙤𝙨 has been an intellectual and awakening read that leaves questions about the certainty one has on life and relationship.
𝙆𝙪𝙙𝙤𝙨 is an account of journal stories collected during her trip. She notes down in detail and meticulously conjuring each narrative. Readers will find people mainly from the literary world, sharing personal awareness of mistakes, feelings, and thoughts trailing their past relationships' failure. The writing is a brilliant piece that deserved accolades of intellectual in the literary collection. 𝙆𝙪𝙙𝙤𝙨 and the previous two novels within this trilogy are mostly made up of plotless stories; becoming a page-turner is a delightful absurdity but a complaint of patchy execution of the anthology.
As mentioned earlier, 𝙆𝙪𝙙𝙤𝙨 confides with compelling negativity, which has started persuasive but somehow wobbled but didn't fall over. It is not a light read where one can tack on glances or pencil it after a brisk reading. The novel confides with compelling discussions about marriage, feminism, family, relationship, roles, and parenting.
Kudos bears many similarities to the storyline in the first volume, Outline, prompting a diminishing effect in this last volume. Nearing the end, individual stories mainlining broken marriage leading to divorce that cook up a thread of lengthy bitter conversation hit on a bottleneck in engagement. There are instances; women are innocent victims, the associates, and accomplices in their oppression.
As I bid farewell to the trilogy with the last volume, 𝙆𝙪𝙙𝙤𝙨 has been an intellectual and awakening read that leaves questions about the certainty one has on life and relationship.
Read
June 6, 2018There are books that you get and books that you don't. But starting with Book 3 of 3 was probably not the smartest way to help me understand this book. I felt like I have just endured the longest conversations with people I don't know, am not invested in and quite frankly didn't give a damn about. The protagonist is an author, she flies out to another country for a literary conference. The guy next to her on the plane basically does not shut up the whole time. When she lands, I am not sure where? Germany maybe, she has conversations with a variety of people associated with the literary world, but she's not doing any of the talking, even when she is being interviewed. At the end . I really need help in understanding what I just read. I will go read some reviews now which might help me to apply a star rating to this.
Thanks to NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for the opportunity to review this book.
Thanks to NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for the opportunity to review this book.
December 21, 2023
My Two-Legged Human Pet (Sad Pet Story #3)
This is the story of a boy
Who owned a cat named Joue
The cat in question is myself
And all I say is true
This thing called life is odd you know
It goes by very fast
You think you’ve got tons of time left
When all of it is passed
But I ain’t no philosopher
And I don’t really care
I’m just like any other cat
A-purrin’ in his chair
It seems like only yesterday
I was a tiny kitten
Sucking hard at mama’s teats
In some big cozy kitchen
The boy who would become my friend
Directly fell in love
With my whiskers which were longer
Than the wings of doves
Most cats I know are beautiful
That’s just the feline way
But I was more than beautiful
I was a Main coon gray
The boy was nine-year-old Ulysse
And he seemed pretty nice
As far as human beings go
Who don't indulge in vice
He took me home with him one day
And here I've always stayed
My life's been full of juicy rats
And cat food piled on plates
I watched my boy Ulysse grow up
And go through many phases
From loving hockey and hating girls
And having shiny braces
To playing loud on his guitar
So that the girls would hear him
Till one day he discovered books
And read them with girls near him
Another day he disappeared
For an entire year
I was so sad when he was gone
And shed many a tear
For one year of Ulysse’s life
Was like seven of mine
(There is a strange discrepancy
Twixt various creatures’ time)
I hung out with raccoons all year
And told them of my woes
But not a single one of them
Would sympathise—the foes!
And the appeal of hunting birds
Had somehow gone away
I had lost my appetite
For food and fowl play
But he came back and once again
He held me in his arms
And frolicking among the birds
Regained all of its charms
Today I’m an old smelly cat
And he is gone again
I hear his mother speak with him
On the phone now and then
I try to tell her with a miaow
How much I really miss him
But humans speak another tongue
And hardly ever listen
Now lying purring in my chair
I know the end is near
Hey that’s ok my life’s been great
And death I do not fear
Translated from the original Miaowish.
Miaow miaow miaow miaow miaow miaow miaow miaow
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April 6, 2021
This third and final part of Cusk’s Outline trilogy builds on the previous parts. Again writer Faye is the patient listener to a procession of seemingly random people who open up their live and soul to her with disconcerting candidness, throwing all their misery on the table and hesitantly analysing themselves. Again we learn very little about Faye herself, although she occasionally makes a comment from which a tiny bit of information can be deduced (including that she has been remarried). This process frustrated and intrigued in the previous parts and so it does again in this one. So, you inevitably go looking for the common denominator, for the message behind those sometimes petty stories that people tell her.
There are, for example, a striking number of references to the Brexit in this book, and both the conversation partners and Faye herself regularly discuss the disruptive choice between staying or leaving, usually in a separation context (clearly a favourite theme of Cusk). Another theme, that of the vulnerable position of women, repeatedly returns. And somewhere halfway there seems to be a key: someone is talking about "Kudos," as a form of gratitude and appreciation". And so - given the title of this part - you involuntarily think that this is what it's all about in this trilogy: the need for recognition and appreciation, and how little we give or receive. But to be honest: I don't dare to put money on it, because the conversations go very broad.
I must say that I was initially very excited about this third part: the first conversation partners of Faye intrigue and touch a sensitive chord, even if what they say is sometimes pathetic or absurd. But gradually my irritation started to increase: more and more they talk about literature and writing (as a sign of weakness), and the literary scene (writers, publishers, media figures) is emphatically exposed and ridiculed (and that is unfortunately not compensated by a very recognizable Knausgard persiflage). I felt that Cusk had exhausted her take on things. Sometimes, the stylistic level was also below standard, with awkwardly crooked sentences.
But then there is the final scene. In part 2, this was an overwhelmingly chaotic dinner with friends, that was really sparkling, although you didn't get a clue what it was all about. Then I realized that Cusk deliberately releases fragmentary life experiences on you, stimuli that intrigue, especially because she deliberately leaves the questions you ask yourself unanswered. A key passage in this third part is perhaps where a writer talks about one of his novel characters (thanks to my GR-friend Katia for indicating it): “The character is sitting by this river just looking at the shapes the dark and light make on the water, and at the weird shapes of what might be fish beneath the surface, there for a second and then gone again, and he realises that he’s looking at something he can’t describe using the language. And he sort of gets the feeling that what he can’t describe might be the true reality”. True reality, and whether you can grasp it and deal with it or not, is that what it’s all about? In all parts of the trilogy, Cusk seems to suggest that you can only undergo that reality, just as Faye listens with endless patience to the stories of her conversation partners who in essence tell her how they are enduring the caprices of their life.
But then in the final scene of this part Cusk seems to take a different direction. Faye is going for an evening swim and is confronted with a challenging experience (I’m not going to spoil this), in which she literally looks into the flat, raw and confronting reality. It is a scene that repels and intrigues at the same time, but seems to suggest that Faye finally dares to confront reality and deal with it. And so the circle is round. Despite a somewhat lesser second half in this part, this trilogy remains a very special reading experience, which does not leave you indifferent and leaves room for interpretation. In this sense, this is a very successful whole.
My reviews of the earlier parts :
Outline: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Transit: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
There are, for example, a striking number of references to the Brexit in this book, and both the conversation partners and Faye herself regularly discuss the disruptive choice between staying or leaving, usually in a separation context (clearly a favourite theme of Cusk). Another theme, that of the vulnerable position of women, repeatedly returns. And somewhere halfway there seems to be a key: someone is talking about "Kudos," as a form of gratitude and appreciation". And so - given the title of this part - you involuntarily think that this is what it's all about in this trilogy: the need for recognition and appreciation, and how little we give or receive. But to be honest: I don't dare to put money on it, because the conversations go very broad.
I must say that I was initially very excited about this third part: the first conversation partners of Faye intrigue and touch a sensitive chord, even if what they say is sometimes pathetic or absurd. But gradually my irritation started to increase: more and more they talk about literature and writing (as a sign of weakness), and the literary scene (writers, publishers, media figures) is emphatically exposed and ridiculed (and that is unfortunately not compensated by a very recognizable Knausgard persiflage). I felt that Cusk had exhausted her take on things. Sometimes, the stylistic level was also below standard, with awkwardly crooked sentences.
But then there is the final scene. In part 2, this was an overwhelmingly chaotic dinner with friends, that was really sparkling, although you didn't get a clue what it was all about. Then I realized that Cusk deliberately releases fragmentary life experiences on you, stimuli that intrigue, especially because she deliberately leaves the questions you ask yourself unanswered. A key passage in this third part is perhaps where a writer talks about one of his novel characters (thanks to my GR-friend Katia for indicating it): “The character is sitting by this river just looking at the shapes the dark and light make on the water, and at the weird shapes of what might be fish beneath the surface, there for a second and then gone again, and he realises that he’s looking at something he can’t describe using the language. And he sort of gets the feeling that what he can’t describe might be the true reality”. True reality, and whether you can grasp it and deal with it or not, is that what it’s all about? In all parts of the trilogy, Cusk seems to suggest that you can only undergo that reality, just as Faye listens with endless patience to the stories of her conversation partners who in essence tell her how they are enduring the caprices of their life.
But then in the final scene of this part Cusk seems to take a different direction. Faye is going for an evening swim and is confronted with a challenging experience (I’m not going to spoil this), in which she literally looks into the flat, raw and confronting reality. It is a scene that repels and intrigues at the same time, but seems to suggest that Faye finally dares to confront reality and deal with it. And so the circle is round. Despite a somewhat lesser second half in this part, this trilogy remains a very special reading experience, which does not leave you indifferent and leaves room for interpretation. In this sense, this is a very successful whole.
My reviews of the earlier parts :
Outline: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Transit: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
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