Literary
![Rachel Cusk - [object Object] author](https://res.cloudinary.com/readsomnia/image/upload/authors/a_B000AQ4VN6.jpg)
Outline: A Novel (Outline Trilogy, 1)
A Finalist for the Folio Prize, the Goldsmiths Prize, the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction
One of The New York Times' Top Ten Books of the Year. Named a A New York Times Book Review Notable Book and a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker, Vogue, NPR, The Guardian, The Independent, Glamour, and The Globe and Mail
Chosen as one of fifteen remarkable books by women that are shaping the way we read and write in the 21st century by the book critics of The New York Times
Rachel Cusk's Outline is a novel in ten conversations. Spare and lucid, it follows a novelist teaching a course in creative writing over an oppressively hot summer in Athens. She leads her students in storytelling exercises. She meets other visiting writers for dinner. She goes swimming in the Ionian Sea with her neighbor from the plane. 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.
One of The New York Times' Top Ten Books of the Year. Named a A New York Times Book Review Notable Book and a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker, Vogue, NPR, The Guardian, The Independent, Glamour, and The Globe and Mail
Chosen as one of fifteen remarkable books by women that are shaping the way we read and write in the 21st century by the book critics of The New York Times
Rachel Cusk's Outline is a novel in ten conversations. Spare and lucid, it follows a novelist teaching a course in creative writing over an oppressively hot summer in Athens. She leads her students in storytelling exercises. She meets other visiting writers for dinner. She goes swimming in the Ionian Sea with her neighbor from the plane. 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.
Editorial Reviews
"[A] lethally intelligent novel . . . reading Outline mimics the sensation of being underwater, of being separated from other people by a substance denser than air. But there is nothing blurry or muted about Cusk's literary vision or her prose: Spend much time with this novel and you'll become convinced that she is one of the smartest writers alive." ―Heidi Julavits, The New York Times Book Review
"Outline is a poised and cerebral novel that has little in the way of straightforward plot yet is transfixing in its unruffled awareness of the ways we love and leave each other, and of what it means to listen to other people . . . While little happens in Outline, everything seems to happen. You find yourself pulling the novel closer to your face, as if it were a thriller and the hero were dangling over a snake pit." ―Dwight Garner, The New York Times
"[Outline] is mesmerizing; it makes a sharp break from the conventional style of Cusk's previous work . . . Outline feels different, its world porous and continuous with ours, though not for the reasons we might expect." ―Elaine Blair, The New Yorker
"[A] quietly radical new novel . . . The result, which recalls Karl Ove Knausgaard in its effort to melt away the comforting artifice of fiction, is a kind of photonegative portrait of a women who resists concessions in life and art." ―Megan O'Grady, Vogue
"There are dozens of observations in Outline unexpected enough to stop you on the page . . . Outline has a terribly charged atmosphere, the kind very few novels achieve." ―Charles Finch, The Chicago Tribune
"[A] remarkably original novel . . . [which] offers a bracing indictment of the sentimentality that surrounds the making of art and artistic identity." ―Emily Rapp, Boston Globe
"[Outline] teems with provoking, fascinating ideas expressed in fine, apothegmatic prose." ―The Wall Street Journal
"Cusk's restrained, almost experimental prose is really not so much a novel as a meditation on identity, illusion, and the erausre of self that can occur during a marriage." ―Isabella Bledenharn, Entertainment Weekly (A-)
"Outline, in the most seemingly effortless way imaginable, winds up being completely captivating: the conversations are autobiographies in miniature, with all the holes, lies and self-deceptions lurking in that wily form . . . As you'd expect in a novel so obsessed with language, Cusk's own writing is a pleasure to read -- unfailingly precise and surprising . . . The ultimate and undeniably cerebral pleasure of Outline is it nudges you into being a more attentive reader and listener, more alert to the cracks in sentences and the messier realities that words c...
"Outline is a poised and cerebral novel that has little in the way of straightforward plot yet is transfixing in its unruffled awareness of the ways we love and leave each other, and of what it means to listen to other people . . . While little happens in Outline, everything seems to happen. You find yourself pulling the novel closer to your face, as if it were a thriller and the hero were dangling over a snake pit." ―Dwight Garner, The New York Times
"[Outline] is mesmerizing; it makes a sharp break from the conventional style of Cusk's previous work . . . Outline feels different, its world porous and continuous with ours, though not for the reasons we might expect." ―Elaine Blair, The New Yorker
"[A] quietly radical new novel . . . The result, which recalls Karl Ove Knausgaard in its effort to melt away the comforting artifice of fiction, is a kind of photonegative portrait of a women who resists concessions in life and art." ―Megan O'Grady, Vogue
"There are dozens of observations in Outline unexpected enough to stop you on the page . . . Outline has a terribly charged atmosphere, the kind very few novels achieve." ―Charles Finch, The Chicago Tribune
"[A] remarkably original novel . . . [which] offers a bracing indictment of the sentimentality that surrounds the making of art and artistic identity." ―Emily Rapp, Boston Globe
"[Outline] teems with provoking, fascinating ideas expressed in fine, apothegmatic prose." ―The Wall Street Journal
"Cusk's restrained, almost experimental prose is really not so much a novel as a meditation on identity, illusion, and the erausre of self that can occur during a marriage." ―Isabella Bledenharn, Entertainment Weekly (A-)
"Outline, in the most seemingly effortless way imaginable, winds up being completely captivating: the conversations are autobiographies in miniature, with all the holes, lies and self-deceptions lurking in that wily form . . . As you'd expect in a novel so obsessed with language, Cusk's own writing is a pleasure to read -- unfailingly precise and surprising . . . The ultimate and undeniably cerebral pleasure of Outline is it nudges you into being a more attentive reader and listener, more alert to the cracks in sentences and the messier realities that words c...
Readers Top Reviews
Sandra DaviesRoman C
I bought this on the strength of a review of the recently-published third novel in this trilogy, remembering that I have four others of hers and, while rarely tempted to re-read, did enjoy them. Reading this suggested that one of the reasons why was that I found her characters less than believable insofar as their conversations, their willingness to discuss their lives and their mistakes, so very articulately, never rang true. Throughout the book I was aware of reading a novel - a very well-observed and beautifully-written novel - written by someone who revels in doing so, but whose failure to create believable scenarios forever felt like an exercise in doing so, rather than creating a world her characters inhabited.
FiMorganlefayC H
Truly dreadful, dull and boring. Having read the recent praise heaped on the third book of Cusk’s trilogy, like another reviewer I too bought this as I wanted to start from the first. I read it on holiday and hated it. I persisted but it really put me in a bad mood. I found myself getting wound up by minor things like Cusk’s repeated use of the word ‘bitterer’ instead of ‘more bitter’ for example, and she also seems to think Ireland is part of the British Isles, which wound me up further. The characters have little to redeem them, there is no plot and it comes across as quite vain and narcissistic. I really wanted to like this, given the number of recommendations in the papers and on Twitter, but I can only assume that the author’s friends have written them.
L. YoungRichard Weem
I had a difficult time choosing a title for this review as so many seemed apt. 'Boring', Torture', 'Huge Waste of 'Time'. Finally I settled on 'Self-Absorbed Navel Gazing'. This is just about the worst piece of literary fiction I have ever read. Its 250 pages seemed like 950 pages. I was drawn to it by its setting in Athens. Big mistake. Our narrator, a British writing teacher, has taken a brief job in Athens teaching creative writing. On the plane from London to Athens her seat mate, a sixtyish Greek man who has grown up in England launches into a monologue about his life, his marriages, his children. Is there a conversation with our narrator? No. Just a boring monolgue. It's a good thing the flight wasn't from London to Hong Kong. Next we see our narrator having lunch with a colleague in Athens. Another boring monologue with no interaction. More complaints about his wife and children. Next up our narrator's friend brings along a woman writer. More monologue about her gender oppression. I guess you get the point. One boring monologue after another. No plot just self-absorbed navel gazing. Avoid this novel at all costs. Spare your eye-sight.
E. Howard
The title is perhaps misleading, or at least has 2 meanings, the Outline of a Novel or the Outline of Ourselves (that we compose by our conversations with others). There is also a 3rd theme in this book: what is the truth, our interpretation or a concrete set of facts? Great read, many, many insights.
