Outline
A Novel
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3.7 • 27 Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
#14 in the New York Times '100 Best Books of the 21st Century'
The first in Rachel Cusk's landmark trilogy, shortlisted for the Folio Prize and the Goldsmith Prize and longlisted for the IMPAC Prize.
'A work of stunning beauty, deep insight and great originality.' Monica Ali, New York Times
'One of the most daringly original and entertaining pieces of fiction I've ever read.' Observer
'A perfect synthesis of form and content.' Deborah Levy
Outline is a novel in ten conversations. Spare and lucid, it follows a novelist teaching a course in creative writing over an oppressively hot summer in Athens. She leads her student in storytelling exercises. She meets other writers for dinner. She goes swimming in the Ionian Sea with her seatmate from the place. 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 great a great loss.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
On an airplane to Athens, Greece, where she plans to teach a summer school course, English writer Faye strikes up a conversation with the passenger sitting next to her, a verbose elderly gentleman. The two chat for the entire flight, and days later, Faye allows the man to take her swimming aboard his boat, where she learns about his multiple marriages and troubled children. Thus begins this brilliant novel from Cusk (The Bradshaw Variations),who shuns fictional convention and frills in favor of a solid structure around a series of dialogues between Faye and those she encounters on her travels. While dining with old friends on two separate occasions, she hears tales of literary stalkers and near-death experiences. And within her classroom, students recount their own histories: from family pets to daily routines. Though Faye often functions as the sounding board, the reader nevertheless comes to know her divorc e, mother through her interjections and inquiries. These 10 remarkable conversations, told with immense control, focus a sharp eye on how we discuss family and our lives. As Faye bounces from one happenstance to the next, the words of one of her students echo on the page: " story might merely be a series of events we believe ourselves to be involved in, but on which we have absolutely no influence at all."
Customer Reviews
Second look
3.5 stars
Author
Canadian born, lived in LA briefly. Her family settled in England when she eight, which makes her British. She read English at Oxford, and his since written two memoirs, two other books of non-fiction, and ten novels including the Outline trilogy (Outline 2014, Transit 2017, and Kudos 2018). She has won a Whitbread award, the Orange Prize, been short listed for the Folio Prize, the Goldsmith's Prize and the Bailey's prize among others, and longlisted for even more including the Booker. In 2003, she was named one of the 20 'Best of Young British Novelists' by Granta magazine, a list that also included Zadie Smith, Andrew O'Hagan, Sarah Waters, A L Kennedy, Nicola Barker, David Mitchell, and Rachel Seiffert.
In the trilogy, Cusk began "working in a new form that represented personal experience while avoiding the politics of subjectivity and literalism and remaining free from narrative convention." Make of that what you will. Hint: Think Klaus Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle series except much shorter. Much, much shorter, thank God.
The NY Times review of Outline went along these lines: "While the narrator is rarely alone, reading Outline mimics the sensation of being underwater, of being separated from other people by a substance denser than air. But there is nothing blurry or muted about Cusk’s literary vision or her prose: Spend much time with this novel and you’ll become convinced she is one of the smartest writers alive." I don't recall Outline having had quite that effect on me, but thought I'd give it another go.
In brief
Unnamed-until-the-very-end first person narrator, who is a female author, surprise, surprise, jets off from dreary old England to teach a summer writing course in sunny Greece. There follow a series of interconnected vignettes based on her conversations with various individuals she encounters, starting with the guy in the seat next to her on the plane. Transit and Kudos are more of the same. Ms Cusk's first husband, with whom she shares two daughters, and from whom she split in 2011, cops a bit of Taylor Swift treatment.
Writing
The blurb describes this as "a novel about writing and talking, about self-effacement and self-expression, about the desire to create and the human art of self-portraiture in which that desire finds its universal form." Which pretty much sums it up, or not as the case may be. Ms Cusk does write well. To what end is less clear to this boring old white guy.
Bottom line
While I appreciated the craft involved better second time around, I prefer Sigrid Nunez (see my reviews of The Friend and What You Are Going Through.)
Lesson in how to consider life
Deftly woven voices in conundrums. For the process of writing Outline for me is a lesson in possibilities, fluidly compact, intricate human circuitry.