Name: Outline
ISBN: 9780571346769

Rachel Cusk

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 student in storytelling exercises. She meets other writers for dinner. She goes swimming in the Ionian Sea with her seatmate from the place. 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 great a great loss. Outline is the first book in a short and yet epic cycle - a masterful trilogy which will be remembered as one of the most significant achievements of our times. 'Outline succeeds powerfully. Among other things, it gets a great variety of human beings down on the page with both immediacy and depth; an elemental pleasure that makes the book as gripping to read as a thriller... A stellar accomplishment.' James Lasdun, Guardian

Outline

Helen 

Sarah Christine Gill

I replied that I wasn't sure it was possible, in marriage, to know what you actually were, or indeed to separate what you were from what you had become through the other person. I thought the whole idea of a 'real' self might be illusory: you might feel, in other words, as though there were some separate, autonomous self within you, but perhaps that self didn't actually exist. My mother once admitted, I said, that she used to be desperate for us to leave the house for school, but that once we'd gone she had no idea what to do with herself and wished that we would come back. And she still, even now that her children were adults, would conclude our visits quite forcefully and usher us all off to our own homes, as though something terrible would have happened if we had stayed. Yet I was quite sure that she experienced that same sense of loss after we'd gone, and wondered what she was looking for and why she had driven us away in order to look for it. Angeliki began to rummage in her elegant silver bag and presently pulled out a notepad and pencil. Please excuse me,' she said. I just need to write that down.' 

Mari-Claire Parrin

lulu p :)

I felt that I could swim for miles, out into the ocean: a desire for freedom, an impulse to move, tugged at me as though it were a thread fastened to my chest. It was an impulse I knew well, and i had learned that it was not the summons trom a larger world I used to believe it to be. It was simply a desire to escape from what i had. The thread led nowhere, except into ever expanding wastes of anonymity

Grace McCarter

...a woman with an unsmiling face as round, hard and inscrutable as a coin.

He almost thinks that to remain a writer, he’d have to become one all over again, when he might just as easily become an astronaut or a farmer. It’s as if he can’t quite remember what drove him into words in the first place, all those years before. Yet, words are still what he deals in. 

“I suppose it’s a bit like a marriage,” he said. “You build a whole structure on a period of intensity that’s never repeated. It’s the basis of your faith, and sometimes you doubt it. But, you never renounce it because too much of your life stands on that ground.

This bizarre scene seemed quite acceptable to me, after the awful seaside town and the storm and the mad goats; and in fact one of the things that happened to me on that holiday, and that I believe has not changed since, was that I began to feel for the first time that l was seeing what was really there, without asking myself whether or not I was expect- ing to see it. When I think back to the time before, and especially to the years of my marriage, it seems to me as though my wife and I looked at the world through a long lens of preconception, by which we held ourselves at some unbreachable distance from what was around us, a distance that constituted a kind of safety but also created a space for illusion. 

'Returning to my children after this exchange,' Paniotis said, 'I felt the most extraordinary sense of in- security, almost like vertigo. I remember clutching the wooden edge of the table for what seemed like the longest time, while all around me the girl scouts sang. But then, after a while, I felt a distinct warmth at my back and looked up to see that great yellow beams of sunlight were coming through the leaded windows. The girl scouts rose from their chairs and packed away their instruments. The storm had passed; the innkeeper opened the door to let the sunshine through. And out we all went into the dripping, sparkling world, where I stood with my children beside the car, my whole body shaking, and watched the troop of scouts marching off down the road, whistling, until they disappeared from view. What struck me most about that sight was that they did not, evidently, consider themselves to be lost, and nor did they find anything frightening in the turn the weather had taken or even in the proclivities of the mountains themselves. They did not take any of these things personally. That was the difference between them and me, and at that time it was all the difference in the world.’

‘I myself was in the kitchen,’ she said, ‘squeezing oranges. I had just made myself the most delicious breakfast, with the ripest little melon I had found in the market and a slice of fresh cheese I bought from a woman who keeps beautiful goats on a hillside near Delphi, when I heard the sound of him singing. I knew immediately what it meant. The idiot, I thought - why does he have to holler it out so that I can hear it all the way in the kitchen? I, the only one who knows what could have caused that soap opera of betrayal to pop into his head, taking for himself the best part, just as he would always take the best part of whatever was on my plate, simply reach across and take whatever he liked the look of, even though I had saved it until last. Why couldn't he have kept his mouth shut? And all before I had had the chance to eat my beautiful breakfast, which now he would find waiting for him untouched on the counter when he came out of the shower: his happiness, I knew, would be complete.

fæ 

The human capacity for self-delusion is apparently infinite—and if that is the case, how are we ever meant to know, except by existing in a state of absolute pessimism, that once again we are fooling ourselves?

Kat Albanese

What I knew personally to be true had come to seem unrelated to the process of persuading others. I did not any longer want to persuade anyone of anything.

taylor miles hopkins

As it happened I was no longer interested in literature as a form of snobbery or even of self-definition —I had no desire to prove that one book was better than another: in fact, if I read something I admired I found myself increasingly dis- inclined to mention it at all…I did not, any longer, want to persuade anyone of anything.

And all the time he sees at a distance his home—his wife—standing there, essentially unchanged, but belonging to other people now.

And likewise I was beginning to see my own fears and desires manifested outside myself, was beginning to see in other people’s lives a commentary on my own.

A woman writer goes to Athens in the height of summer to teach a writing course. Though her own circumstances remain indistinct, she becomes the audience to a chain of narratives, as the people she meets tell her one after another the stories of their lives. Beginning with the neighbouring passenger on the flight out and his tales of fast boats and failed marriages, the storytellers talk of their loves and ambitions and pains, their anxieties, their perceptions and daily lives. In the stifling heat and noise of the city the sequence of voice begins to weave a complex human tapestry. The more they talk the more elliptical their listener becomes, as she shapes and directs their accounts until certain themes begin to emerge: the experience of loss, the nature of family life, the difficulty of intimacy and the mystery of creativity itself. Outline is a novel about writing and talking, about self-effacement and self-expression, about the desire to create and the human art of self-portraiture in which that desire finds its universal form.

I’ve spent months thinking about this book.

I really wanted to like it, and although I love a film that doesn’t rely on plot and allows the characters to show, not tell, you about themselves through mundane interactions, something about this book I can’t put my finger on didn’t quite do it for me.

I do really love that reading Outline pushed me out of my reading comfort zone and continues to challenge me to take a critical look at my literary likes and dislikes. I’m undecided if I want to continue with the rest of the trilogy, but I guarantee I will eventually circle back for another read of Outline to see if my feelings have changed.

katie h.

I’ve spent months thinking about this book.

I really wanted to like it, and although I love a film that doesn’t rely on plot and allows the characters to show, not tell, you about themselves through mundane interactions, something about this book I can’t put my finger on didn’t quite do it for me.

I do really love that reading Outline pushed me out of my reading comfort zone and continues to challenge me to take a critical look at my literary likes and dislikes. I’m undecided if I want to continue with the rest of the trilogy, but I guarantee I will eventually circle back for another read of Outline to see if my feelings have changed.

An innovative novel captures 10 conversations involving the narrator, a novelist teaching a course in creative writing during one oppressively hot summer in Athens.

A Novel

The author can brilliantly use the language to share what she sees. However, aren’t all subjects in this book quite boring?

Marek Hnatiak

Unbeknownst to me, I think I have been trying to write like Rachel Cusk my whole life. 

I loved Second Place so I had high expectations, but this book just felt so stagnant & flat. I was barely interested in it despite really wanting to love it. 

hessensitive

Mitch

I only found out that this novel was polarising shortly after I began, and then around Chapter 2 or 3 I began to understand why. Rachel Cusk’s 

trilogy. It tells the story of a female writer, recently divorced, on a trip to Athens from where she is to stay in a beautiful apartment and teach in a writing workshop. During this trip, alongside teaching her class, she meets several acquaintances—mostly other writers and poets—and develops a relationship with a Greek thrice-divorcee who happened to sit next to her on the plane from London, never named, always addressed as ‘her neighbour.’ 

The polarisation stems from the novel’s atypical structure and prose style; the story is told in first-person past tense but almost none of the narrator’s internal emotional state is ever conveyed. The novel also does not follow a conventional ‘beginning-middle-end’ structure. Instead, what you are given is a novel largely made of individual instances of long direct and indirect dialogues in which the narrator’s several interlocutors describe their life stories, often centred around the process of becoming middle-aged and divorced and undergoing several crises of identity—and in their telling of their stories you are given just the slightest amount of detail about the narrator herself, as it is implied in this intentional selection of stories there is something of the narrator reflected in kinship.

My main issue with this novel is that through this process of intentional selection there’s a large degree of artifice in the novel which, although I often turn a blind-eye to the vapid term ‘unrealistic’, definitely detracted from my enjoyment. I don’t mind if dialogue in a story is unrealistic (in my opinion fiction shouldn’t aim to be realistic) but in a story centred around different characters' long soliloquy-like dialogues, the resulting ‘sameness’ of the opposing voice displayed a real disinterest in actually delving into ‘people’ which, due to the infinite complexities of people and experiences, is what I look to from fiction. Instead, 

 is ironically self-centred, with the only person being actually explored is the narrator, which may be, for all intents and purposes, Cusk herself.

What you end up with, for better or for worse, is Cusk talking to a variety of people who, despite the mixes of genders and ages, represent really just different aspects of herself. It is not a coincidence that every character seemingly relates a tale of white middle-class banality, with diplomat husbands, artist wives, affairs, yachts, parties, readings, wine, and a navel-gazy introspection towards life.

Despite all of this, this ‘13-person person’ to whom the narrator dialogues with never ceased to enrapture me. This is because on the sentence and paragraph level Cusk is a very good writer. The way characters talk is given the same punchiness and composition of philosophical dialogues and, despite it feeling like the same moral was delivered over and over again, the story to which the moral attached was varied enough to keep me happily reading. Characters told genuinely interesting stories filled with evocative imagery, beautiful metaphors, and a serious sense of pathos. 

There are also little pockets of humour scattered throughout, a kind of dry, sneering, mocking humour, that was expertly executed. To me these separate characters telling their stories therefore felt less like a continuation of one novel and more like a collection of short stories, the conversationalist just its narrative frame, all linked around the author’s thematic fixation of divorce, midlife crises, and picking up one’s life when it is dashed to pieces.

Furthermore, there are also points in the novel where a character breaks free from its monolithic mould and presents a narrative so un-narrator-like (to me, the airplane neighbour in the second half of the novel and the ‘dog-story woman’ represent this) that was so entrancing that it made me kind of sad, in that it only made me think of how good the novel could be if this was the norm of the narrator’s conversations.

It is because of my almost singular obsession with prose-over-everything in regarding a work that my takeaway from the novel is mostly positive. This is a trilogy, though I wouldn’t be surprised if the trilogy is simply more stories told by more characters and keeps the same plotless-ness of Outline 1, so I’ll definitely give these a shot too, but it is not the highest on my list for now.

shain

I only found out that this novel was polarising shortly after I began, and then around Chapter 2 or 3 I began to understand why. Rachel Cusk’s Outline is Book 1 of her Outline trilogy. It tells the story of a female writer, recently divorced, on a trip to Athens from where she is to stay in a beautiful apartment and teach in a writing workshop. During this trip, alongside teaching her class, she meets several acquaintances—mostly other writers and poets—and develops a relationship with a Greek thrice-divorcee who happened to sit next to her on the plane from London, never named, always addressed as ‘her neighbour.’ 

The polarisation stems from the novel’s atypical structure and prose style; the story is told in first-person past tense but almost none of the narrator’s internal emotional state is ever conveyed. The novel also does not follow a conventional ‘beginning-middle-end’ structure. Instead, what you are given is a novel largely made of individual instances of long direct and indirect dialogues in which the narrator’s several interlocutors describe their life stories, often centred around the process of becoming middle-aged and divorced and undergoing several crises of identity—and in their telling of their stories you are given just the slightest amount of detail about the narrator herself, as it is implied in this intentional selection of stories there is something of the narrator reflected in kinship.

My main issue with this novel is that through this process of intentional selection there’s a large degree of artifice in the novel which, although I often turn a blind-eye to the vapid term ‘unrealistic’, definitely detracted from my enjoyment. I don’t mind if dialogue in a story is unrealistic (in my opinion fiction shouldn’t aim to be realistic) but in a story centred around different characters' long soliloquy-like dialogues, the resulting ‘sameness’ of the opposing voice displayed a real disinterest in actually delving into ‘people’ which, due to the infinite complexities of people and experiences, is what I look to from fiction. Instead, Outline is ironically self-centred, with the only person being actually explored is the narrator, which may be, for all intents and purposes, Cusk herself.

What you end up with, for better or for worse, is Cusk talking to a variety of people who, despite the mixes of genders and ages, represent really just different aspects of herself. It is not a coincidence that every character seemingly relates a tale of white middle-class banality, with diplomat husbands, artist wives, affairs, yachts, parties, readings, wine, and a navel-gazy introspection towards life.

Despite all of this, this ‘13-person person’ to whom the narrator dialogues with never ceased to enrapture me. This is because on the sentence and paragraph level Cusk is a very good writer. The way characters talk is given the same punchiness and composition of philosophical dialogues and, despite it feeling like the same moral was delivered over and over again, the story to which the moral attached was varied enough to keep me happily reading. Characters told genuinely interesting stories filled with evocative imagery, beautiful metaphors, and a serious sense of pathos. 

There are also little pockets of humour scattered throughout, a kind of dry, sneering, mocking humour, that was expertly executed. To me these separate characters telling their stories therefore felt less like a continuation of one novel and more like a collection of short stories, the conversationalist just its narrative frame, all linked around the author’s thematic fixation of divorce, midlife crises, and picking up one’s life when it is dashed to pieces.

Furthermore, there are also points in the novel where a character breaks free from its monolithic mould and presents a narrative so un-narrator-like (to me, the airplane neighbour in the second half of the novel and the ‘dog-story woman’ represent this) that was so entrancing that it made me kind of sad, in that it only made me think of how good the novel could be if this was the norm of the narrator’s conversations.

It is because of my almost singular obsession with prose-over-everything in regarding a work that my takeaway from the novel is mostly positive. This is a trilogy, though I wouldn’t be surprised if the trilogy is simply more stories told by more characters and keeps the same plotless-ness of Outline 1, so I’ll definitely give these a shot too, but it is not the highest on my list for now.

Brainy, thinly, floaty… conversations as negations of self. Negation of self as growing older. 

Andrew

Es war mein erstes Buch von Cusk, und ich war sehr gespannt. In 

 geht es um die Protagonistin Faye, die nach Athen reist, um einen Schreibkurs zu unterrichten. Wir erfahren nicht viel über sie, aber umso mehr über die Menschen, die sie trifft. Im Buch werden viele Lebensgeschichten der Figuren geschildert – ihre Gedanken, Ängste, Träume. Es sind viele interessante Geschichten dabei, doch was verborgen bleibt, ist die Geschichte der Protagonistin selbst.

Ich mochte das Setting – das heiße Athen im Sommer, das Meer – und die Dialoge haben mich mitgerissen. Das Buch scheint einen feministischen Unterton zu haben, und in den Gesprächen geht es viel um Ehe, Beziehungen, Scheidung, Kinder, Familie und das Frausein. Was ich allerdings bemängle, sind die Erzählstimmen der einzelnen Figuren, die relativ gleich wirkten und keinen persönlichen Touch hatten. Die Figuren unterscheiden sich zwar in ihrer Lebensgeschichte und ihrem Aussehen, aber nicht in ihrer Sprache find ich. Es fehlte ihnen an Individualität, was ich sehr schade fand.

Zainab 

Es war mein erstes Buch von Cusk, und ich war sehr gespannt. In Outline geht es um die Protagonistin Faye, die nach Athen reist, um einen Schreibkurs zu unterrichten. Wir erfahren nicht viel über sie, aber umso mehr über die Menschen, die sie trifft. Im Buch werden viele Lebensgeschichten der Figuren geschildert – ihre Gedanken, Ängste, Träume. Es sind viele interessante Geschichten dabei, doch was verborgen bleibt, ist die Geschichte der Protagonistin selbst.

Ich mochte das Setting – das heiße Athen im Sommer, das Meer – und die Dialoge haben mich mitgerissen. Das Buch scheint einen feministischen Unterton zu haben, und in den Gesprächen geht es viel um Ehe, Beziehungen, Scheidung, Kinder, Familie und das Frausein. Was ich allerdings bemängle, sind die Erzählstimmen der einzelnen Figuren, die relativ gleich wirkten und keinen persönlichen Touch hatten. Die Figuren unterscheiden sich zwar in ihrer Lebensgeschichte und ihrem Aussehen, aber nicht in ihrer Sprache find ich. Es fehlte ihnen an Individualität, was ich sehr schade fand.



Chris Dailey

Understated with deep introspection story loosely following a English writer in Greece through a series of cerebral conversations with friend, strangers and students. Beginning with a chat on flight from London to Athens, we follow the narrator as she moves from one discussion to the next as she draws out intimate details from her companions throughout her summer teaching a writing class. Throughout these conversations, infidelity, family, failure, solitude, success, violence and nihilism are all explore through clever and clear prose. It's a hard tale to capture and the plot is banal, but the writing and psychoanalysis are incredibly well executed in a very manageable 250 pages.

Clay Carey

i hated reading it in the beginning. it was infuriating and the characters felt vague. but later on, as i processed, something clicked inside me and i found myself wanting to know more about how their brain chemistry worked. 

it was extremely dry. the narrator took every actions so passively, she didn't contribute to the story line at all which in turn, made the entire story passive and i am absolutely all for active characters. 

the book reflects on how different encounters with people shape a person's lives. the idea that we are all actually just outlines, it was infuriating and yet i cannot stop myself from pondering over it every now and then. 

the truth is that this book can't be summarised. i just can't. the pace was annoyingly slow in the first chapter, i had considered dnf-ing more than five times but i am glad i pushed through because there are so many things that i did learn from this book. human complexities are nuanced and maybe, we, indeed, are just outlines.

sani

i hated reading it in the beginning. it was infuriating and the characters felt vague. but later on, as i processed, something clicked inside me and i found myself wanting to know more about how their brain chemistry worked. 

it was extremely dry. the narrator took every actions so passively, she didn't contribute to the story line at all which in turn, made the entire story passive and i am absolutely all for active characters. 

the book reflects on how different encounters with people shape a person's lives. the idea that we are all actually just outlines, it was infuriating and yet i cannot stop myself from pondering over it every now and then. 

the truth is that this book can't be summarised. i just can't. the pace was annoyingly slow in the first chapter, i had considered dnf-ing more than five times but i am glad i pushed through because there are so many things that i did learn from this book. human complexities are nuanced and maybe, we, indeed, are just outlines.

I like meta- writers reflecting on writing etc. Relaxed bood which I enjoyed but not particularly stayed with me

Orla Kilroy

azliana aziz

erika s

jess

The book that made you both in awe and lost in time with the writing style and the series of interactions over different circumstances and yes i have repeated most of the beautiful sentences she's written bazillion times; out loud. 
Tbh, i rarely felt compelled to keep reading. It's a brilliant, tremendous, exquisite book, but intentionally has no grip. This made me fascinated by it, but it also slowed me down. But eventually I finished, in awe, in love, infatuated, and it makes me wanna write and travel.

karol tang

observations what plot

writing is one of the best i’ve read yet, ideas are beautifully represented. i highly recommend taking the time to comprehend each word in this book

Jason Marder

I was hooked in the beginning, got lost in the middle, for some reason kept reading, and inhaled the end. Lovely writing, but it just felt like 5 long conversations in which the narrator barely participates. That must be the point? That people will take up all the space around you if you let them?

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 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.

Had this on my shelf for a while. Didn’t enjoy as much as I had hoped, as I’ve heard good things about Cusk’s work.

My biggest qualm is that I’m not convinced by everyone’s inclination to be totally and unfalteringly honest with the protagonist. Faye really sits in the background throughout the book (which is fine, although admittingly not my personal preference), but it feels overly optimistic to think so many strangers would completely—and poetically—open up to this character without much influence whatsoever. There are some lovey moments and themes throughout their stories, but it felt too convenient that every time a new subject was introduced it followed: “hi nice to meet you—here’s my life story along with every introspective and vulnerable thought that goes along with my overarching story.” I guess it digs into the final chapter of “summing up” everyone to their single story, but it does make this narrative seem meandering and inconclusive.

Some interesting ideas about relationships with personal identity when enmeshed with married partners, but became a bit on-the-nose when almost every character had a direct experience with divorce, infidelity, boredom, etc.

Not sure I’ll pursue other works by Cusk, but would maybe be open to it depending on the story.

Had this on my shelf for a while. Didn’t enjoy as much as I had hoped, as I’ve heard good things about Cusk’s work.

My biggest qualm is that I’m not convinced by everyone’s inclination to be totally and unfalteringly honest with the protagonist. Faye really sits in the background throughout the book (which is fine, although admittingly not my personal preference), but it feels overly optimistic to think so many strangers would completely—and poetically—open up to this character without much influence whatsoever. There are some lovey moments and themes throughout their stories, but it felt too convenient that every time a new subject was introduced it followed: “hi nice to meet you—here’s my life story along with every introspective and vulnerable thought that goes along with my overarching story.” I guess it digs into the final chapter of “summing up” everyone to their single story, but it does make this narrative seem meandering and inconclusive.

Some interesting ideas about relationships with personal identity when enmeshed with married partners, but became a bit on-the-nose when almost every character had a direct experience with divorce, infidelity, boredom, etc.

Not sure I’ll pursue other works by Cusk, but would maybe be open to it depending on the story.

Still not really sure what I thought about this. Loved the format: an (autobiographical?!) story told through conversations with strangers (or monologues they have at her) on a trip to Athens. Some I found very moving though I wasn’t rushing to finish the book and over all it left me a bit…empty. Maybe because her story is told in relief so it’s hard to build a connection with her?? Something about it felt special though! I’ll try another. 

wanted 2 like! but had to grit my teeth thru most of it, writing felt a little too in love w itself 

Sage

Amy Thibodeau

This book had beautiful sentences but I found it incredibly dull. I also found much of the dialog pretentious and striving for such depth that it wasn't recognizable as anything real humans say in their every day conversations.

Tess McMahon

I couldn’t put this book down and still can’t put my finger on why. It didn’t have a fast-moving plot line or even very deep character development. It was simply a collection of personal, mostly one-sided conversations about everything and nothing with ordinary people set in a languid, hot Greece, mediated by the passive protagonist. Rachel Cusk is stupidly talented and I can’t wait to read more of her work. Delightful.

Katie Chua

literally no one talks like the people in here talk but it's fine, i still enjoyed it and yearned for conversations like the ones in the book even though i knew they were all ... written