Consequently, Faye’s life and thoughts are eclipsed she is an omnipresent but largely effaced character - a prism through which we hear the concerns of others.Īs you read Cusk’s trilogy, you expect that, somewhere along the line, the contours of Faye’s character will be filled in - that she will wrestle the microphone from her interlocutors and give us her own take. The books advance through a series of encounters, as Faye meets strangers, friends, and colleagues, all falling over themselves to recount their own stories. Although written in the first person, the novels are made up primarily of the reported monologues of others. The narrator of the “Outline” trilogy is Faye, a middle-aged writer with two sons, bearing an uncanny resemblance to Cusk herself. Her recent “Outline” trilogy (“Outline” (2014), “Transit” (2016), and “Kudos” (2018)) saw the novelist on bestseller lists across the world and ignited fierce debate about her writing. Since her debut novel “Saving Agnes” won the Whitbread First Novel Award in 1993, Cusk has been a steady presence on the literary scene, with three autobiographical works and 10 novels to her name. Some herald her as a bona fide revolutionary, others cringe at her self-conscious literary style. Writing for the New York Times, Monica Ali described Cusk’s novel “Transit” as “nothing less than the reinvention of the form itself.” While the Sunday Times of London critic Camilla Long lambasted Cusk’s “Aftermath” as “poetic whimsy and vague literary blah, a needy, neurotic mandolin solo of reflections on child sacrifice and asides about drains.” These polarized opinions are representative of the two sides of Cusk’s reception. And the recent success of the British novelist Rachel Cusk seems to be part of the same phenomenon. The celebrity of authors like Michel Houellebecq or Karl Ove Knausgaard would attest as much. While writers who reap unanimous praise leave very little for readers and critics to disagree about, writers who split opinions - in terms of their ideas, politics or style - give us more to get our teeth into. The literary world has always liked a divisive figure.
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