A woman writer goes to Athens in the height of summer to teach a writing course. Though her own circumstances remain indistinct, she becomes the audience to a chain of narratives, as the people she meets tell her one after another the stories of their lives. Beginning with the neighbouring passenger on the flight out and his tales of fast boats and failed marriages, the storytellers talk of their loves and ambitions and pains, their anxieties, their perceptions and daily lives. In the stifling heat and noise of the city the sequence of voice begins to weave a complex human tapestry. The more they talk the more elliptical their listener becomes, as she shapes and directs their accounts until certain themes begin to emerge: the experience of loss, the nature of family life, the difficulty of intimacy and the mystery of creativity itself. Outline is a novel about writing and …
A woman writer goes to Athens in the height of summer to teach a writing course. Though her own circumstances remain indistinct, she becomes the audience to a chain of narratives, as the people she meets tell her one after another the stories of their lives. Beginning with the neighbouring passenger on the flight out and his tales of fast boats and failed marriages, the storytellers talk of their loves and ambitions and pains, their anxieties, their perceptions and daily lives. In the stifling heat and noise of the city the sequence of voice begins to weave a complex human tapestry. The more they talk the more elliptical their listener becomes, as she shapes and directs their accounts until certain themes begin to emerge: the experience of loss, the nature of family life, the difficulty of intimacy and the mystery of creativity itself. Outline is 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.
I started reading it and couldn't stop, the conversations, the characters and the settings seemed so real and... meaningful, maybe? But what do they mean? And does it matter?
Die meisten einzelnen Seiten im Buch habe ich gern gelesen, aber mit dem zugrundeliegenden Konzept "nacheinander treten viele Personen auf, die aus dem Stand alle im gleichen Tonfall von ausgefeilten Einsichten und Biografien berichten und dann wieder verschwinden" konnte ich nichts anfangen.
Kind of brilliant, kind of boring as hell.
I have never read a novel quite like this one. Cusk uses a daring narrative technique in service of an experiment in radical empathy. Faye, the narrator of her Athenian sojourn, acts as something like a Socrates, but one who engages not in dialogue but in drawing out monologues from many others. Extraordinary.
