Click on a thumbnail to go to Google Books.
|
Loading... Outline (original 2014; edition 2015)by Rachel Cusk
Work InformationOutline by Rachel Cusk (2014)
   No current Talk conversations about this book.  diveteamzissou | Apr 3, 2024 |    ) fmclellan | Jan 23, 2024 |  ) ellink | Jan 22, 2024 | It’s not a thriller by any sense, but it’s nonetheless thrilling to… sit passively, perhaps, and watch how Cusk skillfully deploys her prose with such rigor. The writing is exquisitely, superbly controlled; it’s also, surprisingly, quite dryly funny, though it’s never clear if the narrator is in on the joke herself. (I should put "joke" in quotation marks because much of the quiet tension of the book comes from the narrator being consistently ignored.) The plot, if it can be called that, is essentially a series of conversations between the narrator and her loquacious (and self-observed) interlocutors. But I hesitate to call them conversations, or dialogues, for she is consistently talked at; men (and some women) explain things to her. The novel illustrates the dynamic between speaker and listener (or rather, between male speaker and female listener), how Outline's female narrator is defined and given form by her interactions with other people. (  ) thewilyf | Dec 25, 2023 | ) MPerfetto | Dec 21, 2023 |
 Cusk uses unostentatious but immaculately chosen language to convey graspable ideas about marriage, divorce and personal identity that have no less an impact for being so. The novel is structured around a series of encounters between a rotating cast of characters.. The dust jacket calls Outline “a novel in ten conversations,” but that feels slightly inaccurate given that Kaye often acts more like a confessor than a participant. In fact, despite narrating in the first person, she reveals virtually nothing about herself. (Cusk has been more voluble about her own life: her eleven books include three memoirs, one of which created a kerfuffle overseas for its unromantic views about motherhood.)..Cusk is Canadian by birth but grew up in the UK, where she still lives (she has the accent to prove it). That’s a technicality, however, that shouldn’t stop us from trying to lay claim to some part of this beautiful, desolate novel. Rachel Cusk is better known in England than in America; her sharply satirical books about the tolls of family life play better across the Atlantic than here in our often puritanical culture, with its bias towards domesticity..Whereas Cusk's earlier books examined self-definition in the context of marriage and family, her latest ventures outside the home, intriguingly exploring the way people measure themselves in relation to other people's stories. Outline marks an impressive deepening of Cusk's work, and a bold step toward integrating her fiction and nonfiction. There's nothing empty or sketchy about it.  In this respect, Outline belongs to a strain of literature that runs from the Romantics, through Virginia Woolf, to the memoiristic novels of contemporaries such as Sheila Heti and Karl Ove Knausgaard. It's the hardest kind of fiction to bring off, always running the risk of narcissism and banality, but when it works, it feels paradoxically more miraculous than its artifice-dependent cousins. To my mind Outline succeeds powerfully. Among other things, it gets a great variety of human beings down on to the page with both immediacy and depth; an elemental pleasure that makes the book as gripping to read as a thriller..... I can't say that bothered me, but no doubt it will keep some readers from responding to the book as enthusiastically as I did. It didn't make the Man Booker longlist, for instance. But on the other hand it was serialised in its entirety by the Paris Review, a rare distinction, and a richly deserved tribute to what strikes me as a stellar accomplishment. AwardsDistinctionsNotable Lists
"Rachel Cusk's Outline is a novel in ten conversations. Spare and stark, it follows a novelist teaching a course in creative writing during an oppressively hot summer in Athens. She leads her students in storytelling exercises. She meets other visiting writers for dinners and discourse. She goes swimming with an elderly Greek bachelor. The people she encounters speak, volubly, about themselves: their fantasies, anxieties, pet theories, regrets, and longings. And through these disclosures, a portrait of the narrator is drawn by contrast, a portrait of a woman learning to face a great loss. Outline is Cusk's finest work yet, and one of the most startling, brilliant, original novels of recent years."-- No library descriptions found. |
Current DiscussionsNonePopular covers
 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)823.914Literature English & Old English literatures English fiction Modern Period 1901-1999 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage: (3.65)
Is this you?Become a LibraryThing Author. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Wikipedia in English
2
I'm not sure that the point of the novel is what most reviews seem to think it is, not that the point has any impact on the rich experience of reading this exceptional work. Conversations, and conversationalists like those of the novel simply do not exist except in extraordinarily rare cases, such as Cusk herself. It feels to me that Cusk is using the shells of memories of characters and filling them with her own musings on existence, marriage, children and relationships. It is simply not possible to randomly bump into so many individuals with existentialist leanings aligned to Cusks' own. This applies to both women and men, though some of the men are of a different type and may reflect her ex-husband more than her exploring what everything means. They all circle back to marriage and relationships and struggles that map to our narrators' own life. The wisdom, insight and wit was amazing, along with amazing writing quality. (