Saturday, September 24, 2016

Rachel Cusk, Outline ***

Outline recounts ten conversations that the narrator has during a visit to Athens to teach a summer writing course. We learn very little about the narrator herself -- by design, as we learn from the title and from one interlocutor's insight:
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. Yet this shape, even while its content remained unknown, gave her... a sense of who she now was.
Each chapter feels like a (very successful) writing exercise, with the author conveying ideas in an oblique fashion. Most of the conversations concern relationships between husbands and wives, or rather ex-husbands and ex-wives, and how those relationships affect a person's understanding of life.

I started Outline expecting monologues from a variety of characters, each in their own distinctive voice. However, the narrator describes most of the dialogue in the third person, which gives all the characters an unfortunate sameness.

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