Outline
Ratings62
Average rating3.7
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.
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3 primary books4 released booksOutline
Outline is a 4-book series with 3 primary works first released in 2014 with contributions by Rachel Cusk.
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Read my review on my blog here: https://theconsultingbookworm.wordpress.com/2017/08/27/outline-rachel-cusk/
The main problem with this book wasn't that it's just some boring conversations with life stories which shouting feminism and a lot of the other isms from the very core. It is not a bad book, but too much of it was filled with excessively long-winded irrelevant details and sudden outbursts of emotions from the narrator herself which makes you grasp your head and wonder why. Another thing is that it's so full and it's so empty at the same time. As it's of typical Cusk, she me mentioned too much of marriage, divorce and feminism that you can only beam at some perturbations of side characters with younger and a more romantic perspective to life. To this, 3 stars. Although I love Cusk's prose, it's just not enough for a 4.
Brilliant. Such efficient, restrained use of language. A few days in the life of the protagonist yet so much of their life unfolded to, at times, devastating effect. Strongly reccommended.
