Rachel Cusk's Outline is a novel in ten conversations. Spare and stark, 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 dinners and discourse. 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 Cusk's finest work yet, and one of the most startling, brilliant, original novels of recent years.
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.
