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Outline: A Novel

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Outline: A Novel by Rachel Cusk

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By Rachel Cusk

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8 reviews

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.

Reviews

27 May 2015

From Terri of the V-60 Book Group, Devon:

This one was a frustrating read. I admire the ideas behind the novel, and sentence by sentence I admire Rachel Cusk's writing, but her characters, especially the all-but-invisible main character here, leave me cold at best...and annoy the crap out of me at worst. Cusk has extremely insightful things to say about the way women are ignored and erased, but there's so little...generosity...in her writing that I found it hard to finish the novel. She has great ideas, but her manner of expressing them is so peevish that I simply didn't give a damn by the end, even though I ought to be the ideal reader for such a book.

Disappointed.

26 May 2015

Outline by Rachel Cusk

Many thanks for being allowed to shadow the Bailey's prize, the only annual literary prize in the UK to focus solely on female writers. It is a great honour to give our humble opinions. I just wish I had liked this book more.....

On page 167 of this novel a character says ".....I discovered that a life with no story was not, in the end, a life that I could live." As a reader I discovered that a book with no story is not, in the end, a book I could enjoy. Rachel Cusk has been fairly upfront about her disenchantment with novels as a writing format and has become more autobiographical of late. I am sure there is more gratification for the author in this method but where is the gratification for the reader?

That isn't to say that this is a bad book, it is fabulously written with a spare and economical style. She has a way with words that, when put to descriptive use is marvellously engrossing and pages fly by. Athens and its environs are brought effortlessly to life and each character jumps off the page. But ultimately, nothing happens. We are introduced to so many characters, so quickly, all of whom seem to have appalling stories to tell. But they never seem to be given space to grow and develop in your imagination.Some I would have liked to know more about, Elena and Melete for example. Others left me utterly cold, Ryan comes to mind as an example. The members of the writing group are particularly interesting and I would have liked to know more of their background stories. How had they come to be at the group, what were they hoping to gain? Standing back from this book now, I celebrate that it is so very well written and deserving of being on the shortlist but I just don't truly like any of the people in it.

The narrator Faye is somewhat of an enigma. For the vast majority of the book she is not Faye at all but simply an un-named receptacle of monologues. She strikes me as a cipher, a nonentity, without meaning, value or importance. An absence of a character. But she is also a cipher in that she is the key to understanding the other characters. Because she is so lacking in personality herself we imbue her with presumed honesty as though she really is just a narrator of facts. However, her view of the other characters could be as flawed as their own view of themselves. They tell her one-sided stories of their lives that we are invited to judge because we have an objective chronicler. But who is judging the chronicler's veracity? If Faye had a voice, if we felt her disapproval, these monologues would be challenged.

All the people Faye has conversations with seem to be unhappy, many with failed relationships in their past. They are all liars, some only to themselves, but some to the people they profess to love. All seem to go in for navel gazing in a deeply dull way. There is much intellectual discussion and self analysis but it left me feeling disconnected and not clever enough to follow their thoughts. I know of nobody who talks or thinks in this manner. These discussions are mired in language that exhausts far sooner than it edifies. At least the writing group students have more recognisably flawed lives. I was far more able to empathise with their difficulties and shortcomings and there are some wonderfully comic moments.

Eventually, this book feels like a sad comment on women in modern society. We have come a long way, but are still somehow, brought up to be polite to others, often at our own expense. Why is it that we fail to say......"I'm so sorry, but this conversation is terribly boring and one sided and life is too short to spend more time listening to you politely!" Impolite maybe, but how many of us have truly thought this whilst smiling courteously and counting down the time till we can escape? I truly believe that everyone, without exception, has an interesting tale to tell but I'm not sure that marital woes are ever of interest to third parties......and as far as conversations go, reciprocity is a wonderful thing.

Jenny
Woodley Library Evening Bookgroup

26 May 2015

I opted for the audio version as I spend some time on long journeys and use audio books to make it pass quickly. I do not recommend this as a way forward with this book as you might end up having an accident! So I listened in the safety of my own home.

It is a book where every description is intense and needs to be concentrated on. The ‘narrator’ has exceptional listening skills and adds to the narrative by giving the reader a well-described location so the reader can safely put them selves in the room with her.

When I found out her name was Faye I was surprised that we had not been told that before as all the other details had been so precise so this must be deemed unimportant information for the reader.

There is a member of our book group who recommends reading books twice and I have never seen the point until I came across this book, it needs a second reading in my opinion.

26 May 2015

The book is written as a series of conversations between the narrator and the people she meets when on a teaching trip to Greece. I say narrator, as the main character taking part in all the conversations, was nameless until most of the way through the book, and we were told only a limited amount of facts about her.

The whole book was written with the voice and point of view of the narrator, flitting from thoughts, to speech, to observations. I was at times unsure which parts of the conversation were spoken aloud and which were the narrator’s thoughts. I was often thrown when the other person made a counter argument to what I had assumed were thoughts, and had to read back to check my understanding.

The writing really drew me in and captivated me from the onset – I got caught up in the descriptions of the scenery, the streets, the heat, and especially the people. I loved the way she wrote about the faces and mannerisms of the people she was conversing with – I could clearly visualise how they looked, especially the neighbour.

As the book progressed and the conversations unfolded I began to understand more of the interlinking connections and themes. However, I am not sure how realistic the conversations are, seeing as the topics were all about their personal lives, marriages and problems; topics that you would not usually share with someone you have just met. Likewise if someone I hardly knew was telling me their life story, I don’t think I would voice my opinions so openly or challenge their decisions/opinions as forcefully as the narrator did.

The first time I read the book I found I was waiting for something to happen, but now I have read parts of the book for a second time, I find that I appreciate the book much more for what it is – a series of conversations sharing a common theme, rather than as a whole interlinking story.

Lacey - Woodley Library Evening Book Group

25 May 2015

In the heat of an Athens Summer, Outline’s narrator meets with complete strangers, old friends, new acquaintances and a class of disparate writing students. Through their conversations and stories we experience what life has to give and moreover, what it can take away.
Ms Cusk’s writing is superb, every word vital, her descriptions so clear and strong that you become totally immersed in place and character. There is humour – it catches you out of the corner of your eye that so that you have to take a second look – but oh yes, it is there.
Some of my fellow readers ventured that there was no plot, that nothing really happened, that the story didn’t develop –my response would be that life is often like that and rather that everything and nothing happens. I am immensely grateful for Ms Cusk’s honesty in reflecting that, whilst there is a a theme woven through the conversations and stories we hear, she thankfully felt no need to tie off the loose ends but left them frayed and raw.
This novel raises so many talking points, particularly, although not exclusively, that of how women define themselves. We are all an “outline” and the stories that we write ourselves as well as those of others who come alongside us, for no matter how brief a time, provide our light and shade, our texture, our contours; occasionally we go over the line, rub a bit out, start again.
I would clear the shelves of all self-help guides and replace them with copies of Outline ( I apologise if Ms Cusk finds this idea abhorrent, I certainly mean no disrespect as she is now at the top of my must-read list) Read Outline, read it again and never let it far from your bookshelf; yes, we read of deceit, guilt, loss and disappointment, but we also read of mindfulness, charity, love and hope.

Lesley - Woodley Library Evening Bookgroup

25 May 2015

There were mixed feelings about the book within the group, ranging from loving it through to really disliking it, however whilst we were discussing the book, the feeling was, in general, positive.

We all agreed that the book was exceptionally well written allowing the pages to fly by. The descriptions in the book were intense and we could feel the heat, the beach and we were effortlessly transported to Athens. The descriptions of the characters were brilliant – the characters jumped right off the page.

However, other parts of it were felt to be confusing, and included too much intellectual discussion and self-analysis, leaving the reader feeling disconnected and not clever enough to follow their thoughts. The use of so many quotes, did not add anything to the book, and there was confusion as to whether the narrator was thinking or speaking. All of this meant that we often had to go back and re-read sections again to check our understanding.

Although we had been given information very early on about the fact that the narrator had split from her partner many years before and had children and a life in London, we did not find out that her name was Faye until very late into the book. This led us to discussing whether we really show who we truly are, or do we play a role and take our importance from the fact that we are mothers / wives etc? Her name was not deemed important enough to be told to us until nearly the end. Perhaps her name is only thing that reflected who she truly was? This idea was verbalised when the narrator was conversing with Angeliki who said “she had discovered that her husband and son could manage without her far better than she might have imagined, so that when she got up and returned to normal life she found that her role in the household had diminished.” “For some women, she said, it would be the realisation of their greatest fear, to discover that they were not needed, but for her it had had the opposite effect.” The author is a great biographical writer, so it was questioned whether there was an element of the authors own story vailed under the often bitter conversations.

We all agreed that the conversations seemed to be unrealistic as they mostly consisted in recounting their experiences in great detail relating to love, marriage and its fidelities and infidelities to a person whom they have never met before. We also only got to hear one side of their stories, told through the narrator, a cipher, often involving lies to either themselves or to the person they say they love. It could be that nobody was telling their story truthfully; only showing their outline, not who they truly are.

We toyed with the idea that the book may have worked better to have been written as a series of short stories, but decided that the author must have chosen to write the book in this particular way for a reason – perhaps to challenge our preconceptions of how a book should be written? Maybe to draw us away from the idea that a book must have a story and something needed to happen in a book to make it a good book? Those of us who read the book for a second time went on to really enjoy it mainly because we read it for what it is – a very well written, highly descriptive book based on a series of conversations with an interlinking theme. The beauty of the book is in the fact that nothing happens.

Woodley Library Evening Book Group - Group Review

24 May 2015

Rachel Cusk seems to have a history of clashes with a lot of the population. When she wrote about motherhood in A Life's Work she was castigated and the media warned women not to read it lest they choose not to get pregnant. She wrote the following about the public reaction:

"As writers go, I have a skin of average thickness. I am pleased by a good review, disappointed by a bad. None of it penetrates far enough to influence the thing I write next. This time, it was different. Again and again people judged the book not as readers but as mothers, and it was judgment of a sanctimoniousness whose like I had never experienced."

"Despite the number of people who had praised and admired it, and the letters I received to that effect from readers, I regretted, constantly, the fact that I had written A Life's Work."

A Life's Work was republished in 2008.

In 2009, she published the Last Supper where she was accused of sneering at Bristolians. She couldn't forget their slavery past, their bigotry and lack of understanding of social justice. She writes:

"Something of the hard-heartedness of that imperial past seemed to live on in the people I met and spoke to every day. Man, woman and child, they found sensitivity intolerable. Nothing irked them more than the liberal conscience, unless it was an outspoken sense of injustice. These things impinged on their free bigotry, and on the sense of humour that depended on it.” In Clifton, she "encountered notions of Christian charity that might have come from the pages of a Victorian novel, so ignorant did they seem of the concept of social democracy...".

When she hated her own characters in the fictive Arlington Park - a thinly disguised Clifton - Bristolians disliked her a bit more. There is a Mumsnet forum called If you loathe Rachel Cusk, you'll love this (http://www.mumsnet.com/Talk/adult_nonfiction/703381-If-you-loathe-Rachel-Cusk-you-39-ll-love-this/AllOnOnePage).

Well, Cusk seems to have finally decided enough is enough, at least in terms of writing, and in her latest novel, Outline, which is on the shortlist for the Bailey's Women's Fiction Prize, she nearly completely extricates herself from the story. Unfortunately, she has such trouble realising that the story doesn't have to be about her that she leaves us with barely any narrator at all. At least none to be of interest.

She has been hounded so much for sneering and hating her characters that, perhaps in response, she refuses to judge these ones at all. Plots in past books have been seen to be so closely linked to her own life that she gets rid of the one in Outline.

What we're left with is barely a novel but instead, a set of characters telling small parts of their own stories.

At times her writing seems overwritten just for the sake of it. Here's an example of how she describes her older daughter's hair in the Guardian when writing about her regret over A Life's Work: "and her sister, older by 15 months, whose abundant hair exactly matched the electrifying palette of autumn in the pleasure gardens that year."

If the hair or autumn or the colours or the metaphor had been relevant then it would have been a well-executed description.

Metaphors and similes when done well can be just the right shortcut for the reader to feel the experience the writer is describing and at times her writing has been like magic with its ability to transfer experiences. Note the difference between the following description which clearly evokes the appropriate emotions on the appropriate narrative arc compared to the description of her daughter's hair which ultimately seems without purpose and frivolous:

"When I was a child the night seemed as big as an ocean to me, deep and static: you rowed across it for hour after hour and sometimes got so lost in time and darkness that it seemed as if the morning might never be found. Now it was a mere vacuum, filling up with human activity as a dump is filled with discarded objects. It was an empty space in which the overcrowded world was extending its outskirts, its sprawl."

Bristol was the dump. It was the overcrowded world that was extending into her nights. The Last Supper is one of her three non-fiction works but her fiction works seem to carry her reality in them as well.

So world, what do we think of Cusk's writing now? Well, here are some of our replies:

“I'm still not sure what the point of it is. I didn't mind it, but it wasn't quite interesting enough to be a really readable novel, so I feel like I'm missing something and there must be some hidden cleverness,” writes Katharine from Bristol24/7 Reads.

“I'm not gripped by this book, perhaps because there is no consistent plot underlying each story. The writer is very descriptive of the environment and I find it very easy to imagine the physical, but there seems to be no emotion, very little is given away,” says Lydia.

“My impression, which is perhaps unfair, is that it is because it is a slightly pretentious overwritten book,” says Katharine.

I agree, in a way, with all three.

Outline reads like a story without a context. As if facts can ever just be facts without someone to put them in order and help us make sense of the world.

Cusk tries a different approach. As she writes in Outline, trying to give us a clue: "in everything he said about himself, she found in her own nature a corresponding negative. This anti-description, for want of a better way of putting it, had made something clear to her by a reverse kind of exposition: while he talked she began to see herself as a shape, an outline, with all the detail filled in around it while the shape itself remained blank."

It's not difficult, with Cusk's history, to see this work as a reaction to past criticism. Outline is like an abrogation of the author's purpose and right to tell us what to think and what to feel. Cusk seems to be saying 'I give up. If you think you know so much about me then go ahead and figure out what I'm doing this time around too'.

Her attitude reminds me of when my eldest daughter was three and she started getting cross with her cartoons, which these days seem to be more interactive. "Count with us to 10," Mickey Mouse would ask of her and she would shout, "No! Do it yourown" (she used to get 'yourself' muddled with 'yourown'). Now that she's four and is a big girl she no longer sulks at being asked to take part, perhaps because she can now count effortlessly.

Well, Cusk is still sulking and wants us to do it - discover who she is - 'ourown'.

I can do that. I don't mind logic puzzles and a mystery but it's hard to discover the truth through the writing of someone who is so busy focusing on herself and her exposition that she fails to get the important details right. Our narrator spends two weeks in Athens but fails to note the Greek names correctly: her friend's name 'Paniotis' is more likely to be the Greek name Panagiotis and Georgiou is a surname not a first name. While it is possible that she rents the apartment from an Italian, because Italy is the provenance of Clelia, I am just as likely to believe that she got that one wrong too.

Some members of our group weren't interested enough to finish Outline but one who has, has written an excellent review (http://www.noseinabook.co.uk/2015/05/22/paused-in-an-atmosphere-of-extraordinary-pallor-and-thickness/).

I personally am not convinced by her attempt to hide behind others' stories and tell us that we don't know her. We know you, Rachel. We just don't believe your point of view.

21 May 2015

Becky U

I'm there in Athens in that heat, in the stranger's apartment, walking the hot streets, listening to everyone else's stories, because doesn't everyone like to talk about themselves best? Interesting comparison between the cool observation of our narrator, and the readiness of the other characters to share intimate tales of themselves. Will we get to know the narrator's own story? Again has me thinking about the significance of the title. - Caroline

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