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très bien écrit, mais pas de story telling

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ManofWords

Enjoyably inconsequential

Commenté au Royaume-Uni le 13 août 2020

The third novel in Rachel Cusk's 'Outline' trilogy. Another unsatisfying but pleasurable novel with a strangely disorientating sense of inconsequentiality. This final book in the series is set abroad, somewhere in southern Europe (though neither the city nor country is ever named), where the narrator, Faye attends another literary festival. The novel begins, like Outline, on an aeroplane, where once again the man sitting next to Faye unburdens himself of his life story. The exchange is contrived. Within no time, the man is recalling weeping helplessly as he listened to his daughter playing the oboe at a concert. When Faye asks him why he had cried, he says that he’d always been worried that there was something wrong with his daughter. “I said it seemed to me people often found it easier to entertain that idea about their children than about themselves,” Faye tells us. Even though her fellow passenger goes on to articulate a pronounced masculine anger, he is positively reserved, really quite taciturn, in comparison with the testimonies offered to Faye at the other end of her journey. While most of the characters in the trilogy have been blessed with an unnaturally eloquent talent for personal revelation, in Kudos the confessions attain a level of intellectual abstraction that makes them confusingly indistinguishable from one another. Everyone – a youthful city guide, a ski instructor, even Faye’s young son – speaks like George Steiner in therapy. In one episode Faye is interviewed by several journalists in turn, all but one of whom spend their allotted time talking about themselves.

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wangfujing

Rather dull

Commenté au Royaume-Uni le 14 juillet 2018

This book got a lot of good reviews but I must be missing something as I found it extremely tedious and very self indulgent.

A middle class writer goes to a literary festival and the book is just all about the people she meets and what they say . Problem is that what they say would be the equivalent of a 1 hour conversation.Everyone she meets ( and they are all the same type of person ...middle class ) start to tell her about aspects of their lives even the people who are supposed to be interviewing her . Some of the stories are interesting and very insightful but I think I prefer more of a plot than a series of very similar essays.

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Roman Clodia

Closing part of a trilogy that tells a story in formally novel ways

Commenté au Royaume-Uni le 6 octobre 2019

As the third part of Cusk's Outline trilogy, this is still interesting and absorbing but we have lost the hit-you-in-the-face innovation of the first part where Cusk's experiment with an occluded narrator was so novel. In terms of form, this is more of the same as Faye remains only a slightly more filled in character, an outline whose contours are created, like radar (I think), when others' narratives 'bounce' off her, rendering her there and not there simultaneously.

By this stage, what Cusk has achieved is something which is both intimate and personal, while also asking questions which are more universal: about marriage and its failures, about gender, about bringing up children. This is also feels the most engaged with the female artist of the three books: there is discussion about writing, about literature, about the publishing industry and the tension or balance between commercial fiction which sells and something more weighty.

Cusk is always readable and weaves her themes with deftness. Her humour, albeit sharp and snarky, is more on show here than I remember in the previous volumes.

So with an emphasis on change and progression, on what is left behind as life moves forward, this moves beyond Transit in the way it implies Faye does. Clever, engrossing - but impossible to be as radical as the first book in the trilogy which set out a new way of telling a story.

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Rachel D

Unusual and interesting

Commenté au Royaume-Uni le 24 août 2021

This book is made up of monologues by anyone the author meets at a book fair. These include other authors, a passenger on the aeroplane, various hotel staff and guides. Most of the monologues with other authors are dry and intelligent - the kind of people who use the word ‘constructs’ as a noun.

One bit of light relief was her TV interview. The interviewer thought she should come and live in his country and get a bit of a tan. She obviously had no high opinion of interviewers.

This was the first book I had read by this author and I may try another.

Florence Donovan

Wonderful

Commenté au Royaume-Uni le 11 janvier 2019

A wonderful wonderful trilogy. Every sentence contains a truism as the narrator slowly disappears and we only see her through what other people choose to tell her. All three books are extremely well written with a choice of language that puts most top 10 authors to shame. I would put CUSK on the same planet as Stefan Zweig. Both tell stories where facets of human nature are contained in every sentence.

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