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Summary
Summary
New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2018 * Amazon Editors' Top 100 of 2018
Rachel Cusk, the award-winning and critically acclaimed author of Outline and Transit , completes the transcendent literary trilogy with Kudos, a novel of unsettling power.
A woman writer visits a Europe in flux, where questions of personal and political identity are rising to the surface and the trauma of change is opening up new possibilities of loss and renewal. Within the rituals of literary culture, Faye finds the human story in disarray amid differing attitudes toward the public performance of the creative persona. She begins to identify among the people she meets a tension between truth and representation, a fissure that accrues great dramatic force as Kudos reaches a profound and beautiful climax.
In this conclusion to her groundbreaking trilogy, Cusk unflinchingly explores the nature of family and art, justice and love, and the ultimate value of suffering. She is without question one of our most important living writers.
Author Notes
Rachel Cusk was born on Feb 8, 1967 in Canada. She spent much of her childhood in Los Angeles and finished her education at St Mary's Convent, Cambridge. her education at St Mary's Convent, Cambridge. In 2003, Rachel Cusk was nominated by Granta magazine as one of 20 'Best of Young British Novelists'. That year she published The Lucky Ones (2003), her fourth novel, which was shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel Award. Since then she has published four more novels; her latest is Outline (2014). She has also written several non-fiction books. A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother (2001) is a personal exploration of motherhood. The Last Supper: A Summer in Italy (2009) is a memoir about time in southern Italy. In 2015 she made the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction shortlist with her title Outline.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Cusk's final book in a trilogy (after Outline and Transit) expertly concludes the story of protagonist Faye, a British author, as she travels Europe to speak at writers' conferences and give interviews. Since the events of the previous book, Faye has remarried and her sons have grown into teenagers, one of whom is preparing to leave for university to study art history. Yet the novel, like its predecessors, eschews chronicling Faye's life via traditional narrative, instead filling each page with conversations with and monologues by the many writers, journalists, and publicists she meets during her travels. Shifting away from the last book's focus on life's journey, Cusk now places Faye in a series of back-and-forths on duality in family, art, and representation. In Germany, Faye talks to an interviewer about jealousy. Later, a young tour guide explains his thoughts on education, gender, and rewarding intelligence (it is here where the novel receives its title); at another stop, Faye is audience to a series of journalists who discuss honesty and workplace inequality. As always, Cusk's ear for dialogue and language is stunning. The author ends Faye's trilogy with yet another gem. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* In this final book in the Outline trilogy (Outline, 2015; Transit, 2017), Cusk's seemingly invisible protagonist, Faye, is attending a literary conference in Germany. There she describes settings and conversations in great detail, but as the conference draws to a close, we find that once again she herself has had little to say. Those who interview her have come with their impressions already formed, or with so much of their own lives to convey, Faye's story her remarriage, the nature of her recent work, the new security in her relationships with her sons remains hidden, waiting for readers to discover it between the lines. Cusk starkly contrasts Faye's new personal evolution with the anonymous, dispirited writer we met at the series' start, but she is surrounded by repeating tales of bitter divorces, physical tragedies, and career strains. Set against the political backdrop of Brexit, Cusk's dramatization of the ongoing struggle for feminine identity in a traditional and patriarchal world is burdensome and bleak, even as rare moments of tenderness shine through. Brilliantly aware without being indulgent or preachy, this novel has the intense beauty of form that has marked Cusk's trilogy from the beginning, and the final installment does not disappoint.--Ophoff, Cortney Copyright 2018 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THE PISCES, by Melissa Brodér. (Hogarth, $25.) In Broder's charmingly kooky debut novel, a depressed Ph.D. student chances upon her dream date - and he's half fish. Brodér approaches the great existential subjects as if they were a collection of bad habits. That's what makes her writing so funny, and so sad. KUDOS, by Rachel Cusk. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26.) As she did in the first two volumes of this spare, beautiful trilogy, Cusk illuminates her narrator's inner life via encounters with others. The novels describe in haunting detail what it's like to walk through the world, trailing ashes after your life goes up in flames. SHE HAS HER MOTHER'S LAUGH: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity, by Carl Zimmer. (Dutton, $30.) Zimmer does a deep dive into the question of heredity, exploring everything from how genetic ancestry works to the thorny question of how race is defined, biologically. The book is Zimmer at his best: obliterating misconceptions about science in gentle prose. FRENEMIES: The Epic Disruption of the Ad Business (and Everything Else), by Ken Auletta. (Penguin Press, $30.) Advertising has lost its luster in recent decades - in part because of the dependency and competition between ad agencies and Silicon Valley, one of many "frenemy" relationships Auletta details. BAD BLOOD: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup, by John Carreyrou. (Knopf, $27.95.) Elizabeth Holmes and her startup, Theranos, perpetrated one of the biggest scams in the history of Silicon Valley, raising millions for a medical device that never really existed. Carreyrou's account reads like a thriller. REPORTER: A Memoir, by Seymour M. Hersh. (Knopf, $27.95.) In Hersh's long, distinguished and controversial career he exposed brutality, deception, torture, illegal surveillance and much else. His memoir about knocking on doors in the middle of the night and reading documents upside down can be considered a master class in the craft of reporting. THE GIRL FROM KATHMANDU: Twelve Dead Men and a Woman's Quest for Justice, by Cam Simpson. (Harper/ HarperCollins, $27.99.) Simpson, an investigative reporter, retraces the journey of 12 laborers from their Nepal homes to their deaths by terrorists in Iraq while en route to an American military base. THE PERFECTIONISTS: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World, by Simon (Harper/HarperCollins, $29.99.) This eclectic history celebrates feats of engineering while asking if imperfection might have a place. THE DEATH OF DEMOCRACY: Hitler's Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic, by Benjamin Carter Hett. (Holt, $30.) Hett's sensitive study of Germany's collapse into tyranny implies that Americans today should be vigilant. The full reviews of these and other recent books are on the web: nytimes.com/books
Guardian Review
Faye, the artful listening presence in Outline and Transit, is back ¿ but this time there¿s a self-consciousness to the narrative voice In Outline, the novel she published in 2014, Rachel Cusk found herself a new sort of protagonist. Her narrator, Faye, is neither an autobiographical fiction, struggling with disguises, nor a memoirist even more embarrassed by the facts. Faye is a woman like Cusk ¿ middle-aged, a writer, a mother, recently divorced ¿ but not Cusk: she is the mother of sons, not daughters, and she meets and talks only with people who have been through the thorough fictionalising that is required to make them breathe on the page. In doing so, Cusk not only joined the ¿autofiction¿ avant garde of Karl Ove Knausgaard and Sheila Heti but solved many problems particular to her own writing. In her novels, Cusk had never been comfortable with complex, long-form plots, but at the same time was doggedly intellectual, intent on foregrounding ideas: earlier the strain, in the queasy satire of Arlington Park and essay-like stasis of The Bradshaw Variations, had been showing. Now she dispensed with all of that: Faye apparently imposed nothing on the world; she listened to others talking and presented their monologues linked only by the power of imagery and voice. Cusk had only ever had one, highly wrought, arch style, which could easily seem mannered (¿assuages the fear of complexity by showing everything on its surface¿ she once wrote, of pizza), and had never produced easy, natural dialogue: now, as Faye reported page after page of speech in that same rapid, surmising style we not only heard the conversations but received a powerful sense of feelings muted and talked over. In her memoirs, Cusk had puzzled away at the problems of existence in a way that sometimes seemed haughty, as when in 2009¿s The Last Supper she attributed her restlessness as a young mother in Bristol to her sensitivity to the legacy of the slave trade. She struggled with self-disclosure, veering between over-frank revelations that got The Last Supper sued and coy, high-minded lacunae. In contrast, Faye spoke rarely but directly about herself and even told stories about pets and children. Cusk¿s fine feminist anger had always contended with alienating, visceral spasms of horror at other women ¿ ¿witches¿ with ¿grey¿ teeth, older mothers with ¿fat, freckled arms¿: but Faye sat with and talked with as many women as men. Cusk had never, even in her memoir of birth, owned up to an awkward female body of her own; Faye had no reflection, either, but seemed merely unselfconscious. Cusk was always armoured, barbed, rebarbative: Faye let us see what a brave, gleamingly truthful writer she could be. Transit, published in 2016, was even better. It continued Faye¿s artful/artless listening but took on Cusk¿s intellectual and feminist concerns too, delivering memorable accounts of a literary festival where Faye is talked over by male writers and groped by the chairman, yet retains a cool, forlorn integrity; and of a funny, sad, posh dinner party where Faye observes the febrile modern family. In Transit she also falls, reluctantly, in love. This was thrilling because Cusk allows us so near to Faye; because we feel we almost are her, seeing from her dark centre. It¿s addictive, sharing such a strange, bright vision of the world; and Kudos, this final part of the Faye trilogy, has been eagerly awaited. Contentedly, we snuggle in beside Faye, off in a plane to a book event, as in the beginning of Outline ; a little anxiously we observe the man sitting next to us. Is he going to oblige us with a searing monologue about his dying marriage, as everyone did in Outline, or perhaps a living pet, like those fabulous salukis in Transit? Or has everyone here heard of Faye now, just as, surely, no one bookish in our world would ever confide in Cusk while travelling? We exhale as we realise the seatmate is garrulous, unliterary, unhappy and, hurrah, has a (large, shaggy) dog story. It¿s a good story, but still, something is different, and it is to do with Faye. She¿s talking back. Talking back at length, too, the way she so rarely did in the other books. ¿The question of whether to leave or remain was one we usually asked of ourselves in private, to the extent that it could constitute the innermost core of self-determination,¿ she pronounces, apparently out loud. ¿If you were unfamiliar with the political situation in our country, you might think you were witnessing not the machinations of a democracy but the final surrender of personal consciousness into the public domain,¿ she continues, recasting the man¿s sweet story about taking ¿Leave¿ and ¿Remain¿ signs personally into something elaborate in a high register. This does not sound like Faye. This sounds like Cusk, authoritatively introducing us to the themes of her novel: leaving and remaining. These themes recur, in connection with families and marriages as well as with Britain and Europe. So does the Rachel Cusk voice. Outline opened with an account of Faye taking lunch with a billionaire who is playing with the idea of starting a literary magazine. Faye said, powerfully, nothing. Now, she has no sooner landed than she sets about a German publisher with similar commercial notions: ¿Whether or not he believed that Dante could look after himself it seemed to me he ought to defend him at every opportunity.¿ Minutes later she is picking on a ¿tall, soft, thick-limbed woman¿ for her ¿matted-looking hanks¿ of hair. Soon, an older woman will be ¿reptilian¿. Cusk-style problems of disclosure manifest themselves too. Outline took us to Athens and we explored the sights with Faye and her neighbour from the plane, invisible as any tourist; Transit trailed us round London, often in the company of migrant builders. Kudos takes us to two European cities, into closed-off spaces with writers and journalists who are also à clef. Almost all Faye¿s conversations are with people who are also interested in writing down stories, or indeed are in the act of writing Faye down for an interview, and there is a self-consciousness to all this, a riddling, hall-of-mirrors element that is the reverse of the radical humility of the first two books. Almost all Faye¿s conversations are with people who are also interested in writing down stories And it creates, simply, distance. Faye keeps secrets from us now: where she is, what has happened in the ¿ seemingly considerable ¿ time that has passed since the last book, where she lives, what has become of her house renovations and the terrible neighbours. Once, we felt her lover¿s hand ¿moulding¿ her arm, felt her loneliness in the pits of our stomachs; now she lets us hear from a journalist that she has married again, and from her reply to another that her son has left to live with his father; and she won¿t elaborate. It feels like a betrayal, or a snub. In each novel of the trilogy, Faye is named once. In Outline it is in passing by a mortgage adviser and is a moment of crushing loneliness; in Transit it is piercingly, by her lover; in Kudos, it is by her son in a phone conversation. It is a strong idea ¿ the child not naming his mother as such ¿ but it comes in the middle of a conversation where the boy calls his father Dad, and where he is lovingly confiding in Faye and treating her emphatically as a mother; it doesn¿t ring quite true. Then Faye ends the novel by going for a swim off a nude beach and having a staring match with a man pissing in the sea. ¿The water bore me up, heaving, as if I lay on the breast of some sighing creature, while the man emptied himself into its depths. I looked into his cruel, merry eyes and I waited for him to stop.¿ Again, there is something a little stagey about the moment, a little summative and forced, and besides, she¿s mixed her metaphors. Or perhaps it just seems so because Cusk has set the bar so high. There are many remarkable moments in Kudos ; it is a fine novel that deserves to receive ¿ and probably will, given the limping nature of literary kudos ¿ a heap of awards in recognition of the vast achievement of the trilogy. Nevertheless, I was sorry it ended here, and not with the peerless moment in Transit where Faye, leaving that terrible dinner party, feels ¿change far beneath me, moving deep beneath the surfaces of things, like the plates of the earth blindly moving in their black traces¿. - Kate Clanchy.
Kirkus Review
Brexit provides the sociopolitical background for Cusk's existential investigation into the nature of freedom and the construction of identity, the concluding volume to her brooding trilogy begun with Outline (2015).Narrator Faye has married again since her excursions in Transit (2017), but almost everyone she meets at a literary festival in an unnamed European country is either bitterly divorced or painfully ambivalent about family life. Even pets become the source of power struggles with spouses and children in some of the seething personal narratives people share with Faye. Cusk also paints a sardonic portrait of the literary life via the monologues of a philistine salesman-turned-publisher, a first novelist disenchanted by a pretentious writers' retreat, and an arrogant journalist who's supposed to be interviewing Faye but barely lets her get a word in. Despite the brilliantly detailed descriptions of these characters and the locations through which they uneasily pass, this is not conventionally naturalistic fiction; conversations reveal unrecorded lapses of time within the narrative, and people examine their experiences in highly abstract language not intended to reproduce vernacular speech. Physical reality is as mutable and subject to question as the identities people carefully create and then later reject. One man, who connects his new success as an author with the radical loss of half his body weight, speaks for many when he concludes that, "The person he'd always beenlived in a prison of his own making." Many of the broken marriages described were shattered by one partner's desire for freedom, but that too may be an illusion: "When they thought they were free," says one man of some friends, "they were in fact lost without knowing it." Faye's tender telephone exchanges with her two sons remind us there is love in the world, too (though we never learn more about her new marriage than that it exists). Nonetheless, a jarring and ugly final scene confirms an overall impression that Cusk's views of human nature and personal relationships are as bleak as ever.Brilliantly accomplished and uncompromisingly dark. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.