Second Place
Ratings28
Average rating3.9
A haunting fable of art, family, and fate from the author of the Outline trilogy. A woman invites a famous artist to use her guesthouse in the remote coastal landscape where she lives with her family. Powerfully drawn to his paintings, she believes his vision might penetrate the mystery at the center of her life. But as a long, dry summer sets in, his provocative presence itself becomes an enigma—and disrupts the calm of her secluded household. Second Place, Rachel Cusk’s electrifying new novel, is a study of female fate and male privilege, the geometries of human relationships, and the moral questions that animate our lives. It reminds us of art’s capacity to uplift—and to destroy.
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There was nothing stable, no actual truth in all the universe, save the immutable one, that nothing exists except what one creates for oneself. To realise this is to bid a last and lonely farewell to dreams.
Aptly titled as such to both mean the place in the novel and also the theme of inferiority/insecurity in oneself, in particular, from being a woman wanting to be free and to be seen, and thinking that the only way for that is through the eyes of men, sets out to do so only to find out that she does not have a place in that world at all. An exploration of art, truth, self, womanhood, male privilege, and more. Short but impressively dense in what it is able to say and not say. This is as literary as literary fiction can get.
I'm really surprised by how much I actually enjoyed this book, there isn't much actually happening and it's entirely told in the form of someone telling someone else about it, it shouldn't have worked so well for me but it did. There's just something about the writing and the character that drew me in and kept me reading.
