Outline
A Novel
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2.8 • 23 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Outline is a novel in ten conversations. Spare and lucid, 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 dinner. 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 Rachel Cusk’s finest work yet, and one of the most startling, brilliant and original novels of recent years.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
If you’re someone who cranes your neck to hear the conversation going on at the next table, Outline will delight you. Written in spare, beautiful prose, British author Rachel Cusk’s novel shimmers like a mirage. It invites you to be the fly on the wall as Faye, a blocked writer, travels to Athens to teach a summertime creative writing course. Each chapter charts the contemplative, drifting heroine’s interactions with characters she meets along the way—a swarthy businessman deflated by his failed marriages, a jittery Greek author celebrated for her autobiographical novel about a bored wife and mother, and a room full of anxious and imaginative aspiring writers. We loved every moment of this elegant fiction.
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."
