“She showed us the life jacket with its little pipe, the emergency exits, the oxygen mask dangling from a length of clear tubing. It is very much like listening in on the confidences of strangers, or the confessions heard by a therapist, and it is hard to look away.Ĭusk’s writing is intelligent, but also very easy to read, although there are undercurrents in her work that take more effort to explore.Įarly on in the book, I noted Cusk’s observation about the safety information relayed by the air steward: Each touches upon a truth that is both in a way surprising and unexceptional. The book, and the trilogy, includes many such confessions and renditions, from friends and strangers. However, Faye intuits that his representation of his marriage is not the whole story.
As is typical of the trilogy, the neighbour pours out the story of his life and marriages, including intimate details of why they failed. On her way, she meets a stranger, referred to as her ‘neighbour’ as he sits on the plane beside her. In Outline, Cusk’s protagonist, Kaye, travels to Athens to teach a writing course.
Regardless, I found Cusk’s trilogy to truly original and compelling, revealing many truths about life, love and relationships. One day, I would like to read them consecutively, in the right order, uninterrupted by other books. I’m not sure whether the trilogy would have been improved by reading it in the correct order, but the fact that I read several other books between these, means that I struggle to remember what happened in the previous in the previous novel, so perhaps it wouldn’t be any different. She is without question one of our most important living writers.I read Rachel Cusk’s acclaimed trilogy out of order – first Kudos, then Transit, then Outline. In this conclusion to her groundbreaking trilogy, Cusk unflinchingly explores the nature of family and art, justice and love, and the ultimate value of suffering. She begins to identify among the people she meets a tension between truth and representation, a fissure that accrues great dramatic force as Kudos reaches a profound and beautiful climax. Within the rituals of literary culture, Faye finds the human story in disarray amid differing attitudes toward the public performance of the creative persona. Rachel Cusk, the award-winning and critically acclaimed author of Outline and Transit, completes the transcendent literary trilogy with Kudos, a novel of unsettling power.Ī 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. New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2018
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