Rachel Cusk

From Rachel Cusk, her first collection of essays about motherhood, marriage, feminism, and art Rachel Cusk redrew the boundaries of fiction with the Outline Trilogy, three “literary masterpieces” (The Washington Post) whose narrator, Faye, perceives the world with a glinting, unsparing intelligence while remaining opaque to the reader. Lauded for the precision of her prose and the quality of her insight, Cusk is a writer of uncommon brilliance. Now, in Coventry, she gathers a selection of her nonfiction writings that both offers new insights on the themes at the heart of her fiction and forges a startling critical voice on some of our most personal, social, and artistic questions. Coventry encompasses memoir, cultural criticism, and writing about literature, with pieces on family life, gender, and politics, and on D. H. Lawrence, Françoise Sagan, and Elena Ferrante. Named for an essay in Granta (“Every so often, for offences actual or hypothetical, my mother and father stop speaking to me. There’s a funny phrase for this phenomenon in England: it’s called being sent to Coventry”), this collection is pure Cusk and essential reading for our age: fearless, unrepentantly erudite, and dazzling to behold.

Essays

Coventry

After the publication of Outline, Transit and Kudos - in which Rachel Cusk redrew the boundaries of fiction - this writer of uncommon brilliance returns with a series of essays that offers new insights on the themes at the heart of her life's work. Encompassing memoir and cultural and literary criticism, with pieces on gender, politics and writers such as D. H. Lawrence, Olivia Manning and Natalia Ginzburg, this collection is essential reading for our age: fearless, unrepentantly erudite, both startling and rewarding to behold. The result is a cumulative sense of how the frank, deeply intelligent sensibility - so evident in her stories and novels - reverberates in the wider context of Cusk's literary process. Coventry grants its readers a rare opportunity to see a mind at work that will influence literature for time to come.

audrey 🪐

Just a girlie writing about whatever the hell she wants.

Kat Albanese

i wrote in my journal yesterday that rachel cusk has different ways of seeing, because she is "there."

cusk has the special capacity to dig deep into the crevices of her and others' internal material, and later allow the reader to discover that this material is also rooted in the universal. i wrote earlier that in Coventry, cusk's minute details of life become interwoven with the larger world and its institutions, society, systems, emotions, heartwork. how she described edith wharton's ability to make the personal universal is something she also embodied in this book. it's a book that invites me to examine my inner and outer world and the lives of those around me. to uncover what this all means to me, and how i can liberate myself from these imposed constraints.

my favorite essays from this collection! driving as metaphor, louise bourgeois: suites on fabric, shakespeare's sisters (top 1), how to get there, and everything under classics & bestsellers.

• "ceasing to believe in the story of driving; how non-drivers seem essentially free; car not as "extension of self" but "its container"; "designed to protect the people inside it, not outside"; an aggressor; the "burden of driving" transferred to "those outside" the vehicle; houses – our homes – now "dwarfed by cars"

• "woman will devise its own form," a reality with its own values, and how this links to another essay about manning's work: described by cusk as "her grasp of the self and of its moral function in narrative, and her liberation from conventional literary form and from the structures of thought and expression"; chekhov's three sisters: "as children they did not recognize gender as destiny & limitation"; "a desire to write is a desire to live honestly"; "exteriorizing sensibility"; "narrative principle" as "too fused with our experience of living" and so must not abide by strict rules

• "woman as the sempiternal life-giver who through time and change is finally driven to give birth to herself"; "rouses creation from stasis of repetition"

Alyanna

i wrote in my journal yesterday that rachel cusk has different ways of seeing, because she is "there."

cusk has the special capacity to dig deep into the crevices of her and others' internal material, and later allow the reader to discover that this material is also rooted in the universal. i wrote earlier that in Coventry, cusk's minute details of life become interwoven with the larger world and its institutions, society, systems, emotions, heartwork. how she described edith wharton's ability to make the personal universal is something she also embodied in this book. it's a book that invites me to examine my inner and outer world and the lives of those around me. to uncover what this all means to me, and how i can liberate myself from these imposed constraints.


my favorite essays from this collection! driving as metaphor, louise bourgeois: suites on fabric, shakespeare's sisters (top 1), how to get there, and everything under classics & bestsellers.

i want to remember these: 

• "ceasing to believe in the story of driving; how non-drivers seem essentially free; car not as "extension of self" but "its container"; "designed to protect the people inside it, not outside"; an aggressor; the "burden of driving" transferred to "those outside" the vehicle; houses – our homes – now "dwarfed by cars"


• "woman will devise its own form," a reality with its own values, and how this links to another essay about manning's work: described by cusk as "her grasp of the self and of its moral function in narrative, and her liberation from conventional literary form and from the structures of thought and expression"; chekhov's three sisters: "as children they did not recognize gender as destiny & limitation"; "a desire to write is a desire to live honestly"; "exteriorizing sensibility"; "narrative principle" as "too fused with our experience of living" and so must not abide by strict rules


• "woman as the sempiternal life-giver who through time and change is finally driven to give birth to herself"; "rouses creation from stasis of repetition"

(thank you bea for the recommendation!)

loved it so much that i delved into cusk's interviews on youtube. when asked what truth meant to her when 'writing to expose truth', she had said that "truth is what the readers don't know that they know." reading this book felt very much like that statement. 

Audrey Kalman

DE review: https://www.dailyemerald.com/arts-cul...

Louise 

5 stars for the first half. 
faves: 'Driving as Metaphor','Coventry' and 'Making Home'.
didn't care much for the literary criticism essays.

Kylie Pace

Aftermath and Shakespeare's Sisters are the two essays in this collection that I will return to the most. 

"She knows that her womanhood is a fraud, manufactured by others for their own convenience; she knows that women are not born but made. So she stays away from it - the kitchen, the maternity ward - like an alcoholic stays away from the bottle." Shakespeare's Sisters elaborates more on that de Beauvoir reference. 

"What I lived as feminism were in fact the male values... the cross-dressing values of my father, and the anti-feminine values of my mother. So I am not a feminist. I am a self-hating transvestite."

"What today's women has gained in personal freedom she has lost in political caste. Hers is still the second sex but she has earned the right to dissociate herself from it."


I look forward to finishing the Outline trilogy and reading more of Cusk's non-fiction.

Jales

Linn 

i still am in love with cusk's writing but what she wrote in this was honestly mostly meh. the only really good one was essay titled coventry. 

(2.5/5)

Sila Baykal

Laura Leila Marta

Mari-Claire Parrin

Cassie B

Jacob Mishook

Audrey

A selection of her non-fiction writings that offer both new insights on the themes at the heart of her fiction and forge a startling critical voice on some of our most personal, social and artistic questions. Coventry encompasses memoir, cultural criticism and writing about literature, with pieces on family life, gender, politics, D.H. Lawrence, Francoise Sagan and Elena Ferrante. Named for an essay in Granta (“Every so often, for offences actual or hypothetical, my mother and father stop speaking to me. There’s a funny phrase for this phenomenon in England: it’s called being sent to Coventry”), this collection is pure Cusk and essential reading for our age: fearless, unrepentantly erudite and dazzling to behold.

Coventry: Essays

Arnav Shah

NPR's Favorite Books of 2019 Rachel Cusk redrew the boundaries of fiction with the Outline Trilogy, three “literary masterpieces” (The Washington Post) whose narrator, Faye, perceives the world with a glinting, unsparing intelligence while remaining opaque to the reader. Lauded for the precision of her prose and the quality of her insight, Cusk is a writer of uncommon brilliance. Now, in Coventry, she gathers a selection of her nonfiction writings that both offers new insights on the themes at the heart of her fiction and forges a startling critical voice on some of our most urgent personal, social, and artistic questions. Coventry encompasses memoir, cultural criticism, and writing about literature, with pieces on family life, gender, and politics, and on D. H. Lawrence, Françoise Sagan, and Kazuo Ishiguro. Named for an essay Cusk published in Granta (“Every so often, for offences actual or hypothetical, my mother and father stop speaking to me. There’s a funny phrase for this phenomenon in England: it’s called being sent to Coventry”), this collection is pure Cusk and essential reading for our age: fearless, unrepentantly erudite, and dazzling to behold.

Coventry Essays

Reviews

Highlights