Rachel Cusk

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

Outline

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.

She laughed. 'It feels good to be making that rude noise again.'

'And it strikes me,' she said to Elena, ' that your story about Konstantin is really a story about disgust, the disgust that exists indelibly between men and women and that you are always trying to purge with what you call frankness. As soon as you cease to be frank, you see a stain, you are forced to acknowledge imperfection, and you want only to run away and hide in shame.'

That is always a dangerous moment, he said, to make a big decision, when you are not sure of what you deserve.

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 [...]

Sometimes it has seemed to me that life is a series of punishments for such moments of unawareness, that one forges one's own destiny by what one doesn't notice or feel compassion for; that what you don't know and don't make the effort to understand will become the very thing you are forced into knowledge of. While I spoke Paniotis looked more and more aghast. That is a terrible notion that only a Catholic could have come up with, he said. 

It seems success takes you away from what you know, he said, while failure condemns you to it. 

The material reality of my neighbour, which up there had seemed so light, was concretised down here, and the result was that he seemed more of a stranger, as though context were also a kind of imprisonment.

hessensitive

She had found herself overwhelmed by the most extraordinary lethargy and- it didn't trouble her to admit it - by sadness, which she had supposed to be a sort of cumulative physical and emotional exhaustion from so many years abroad, and had spent six months more or less incapacitated in bed; months in which she had discovered, she said, that her husband and son could manage without her far better than she might have imagined, so that when she got up again and returned to normal life she found that her role in the household had diminished. Her husband and son had become used to doing much of what had been her work around the house - or to having it left undone, she said - and in fact had evolved new habits of their own, many of which she disliked; but she recognised, at that moment, that she was being given a choice, and that if she wanted to escape her old identity then this was her opportunity. For some women, she said, it would be the realisation of their greatest fear, to discover that they were not needed, but for her it had the opposite effect. 

His body, when we hugged, felt extremely light and fragile. He was wearing a threadbare lilac-coloured shirt, and a pair of jeans that hung from him in folds. He drew back and looked at me closely again. There is something of the cartoon character about Paniotis's face: everything about it is exaggerated, the cheeks very gaunt, the forehead very high, the eyebrows winging off like exclamation marks, the hair flying out in all directions, so that one has the curious feeling one is looking at an illustration of Paniotis rather than at Paniotis himself. Even when he is relaxed he wears the expression of someone who has just been told something extraordinary, or who has opened a door and been very surprised by what he has found behind it.

He remembered the feeling of estrangement from his own body, as it laboured in the damp, spore-ridden climate of the house; his clogged lungs and itchy skin, his veins full of sugar and fat, his wobbling flesh shrouded in uncomfortable clothing. As a teenager he was self-conscious and sedentary and avoided any physical exposure of himself. But then he spent a year in America, on a writing programme there, and had discovered that by effort of will he could make himself look completely different. There was a pool and a gym on campus, and food he had never heard of - sprouts and wholegrains and soya - in the cafeteria; and not only that, he was surrounded by people for whom the notion of self-transformation was an article of faith. He picked it up almost overnight, the whole concept: he could decide how he wanted to be and then be it. There was no pre-ordination; that sense of the self as a destiny and a doom that had hung like a pall over his whole life could stay, he now realised, behind him in Ireland. 

They were spending the summer on the island, and her parents - the armchairs - were there too. He was fonder of them than ever by now for he saw their flatness, sympathetically, as the evidence of their daughter's cyclonic nature. They were like a terrain forever being hit by tornadoes; they lived in a state of permanent semi-devastation. 

She was rolled out as an all-purpose villain, but what wrong, really, had she done? She had never pretended to be an intellectual, as for instance my neighbour had pretended to be rich, and since she had been valued entirely for her beauty, it was natural - some would say sensible - that she should want to put a price on it.

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 disinclined to mention it at all. 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.

In the world of his childhood, a son was already a disappointment; he himself, the last in a long line of such disappointments, was treated with a special ambivalence, in that his mother had wished to believe he was a girl. His hair was kept in long ringlets; he was clothed in dresses and called girl's names his parents had chosen in expectation of being given at long last an heir.

She led us through the possibility of death and disaster, as the priest leads the congregation through the details of purgatory and hell; and no one jumped up to escape while there was still time. Instead we listened or half-listened, thinking about other things, as though some special hardness had been bestowed on us by this coupling of formality with doom.

He still had to fight it in himself, that feeling of contaminated flesh; it was so hard to feel clean in Ireland, the way he'd felt in America, or the way you felt here.

Mariella

The memory of suffering had no effect whatever on what they elected to do: in the contrary, it compelled them to repeat it, for the suffering was that magic that caused the object to come back…

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

Shelby Doherty

It seemed incredible to me that at the age of fifty-one I was still capable of producing, in all innocence, a completely unrealizable hope. 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?

There is no such thing as an unblemished childhood, though people will do everything they can to convince you otherwise. There was no such thing as a life without pain.

What is fatal in that vision is its subjectivity: looking through the window the two of them see different things, Heathcliff what he fears and hates and Cathy what she desires and feels deprived of. But neither of them can see things as they really are.

It has a small cabin where one person could comfortably spend the night, 'or two people,' he said 'if they are very much in love.'

Ryan would always say "I might come along later" or "I might see you there" rather than commit himself to a time and place. He would only tell you what he was doing after he'd done it.

She could not be called upon to recognize him, and this was the most bewildering thing of all, for it made him feel absolutely unreal. It was with her, after all, that his identity had been forged: if she no longer recognized him, then who was he?

The memory of suffering had no effect whatever on what they elected to do: on the contrary, it compelled them to repeat it, for the suffering was the magic that caused the object to come back and allowed the delight in dropping it to become possible again.

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. 

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.

taylor miles hopkins

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. 

Sarah Christine Gill

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

Charlotte J. Ruth

Really good, although I think I would’ve gotten more out of it if I’d read it physically

SHORTLISTED FOR THE BAILEYS WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION A woman arrives in Athens in the height of summer to teach a writing course. Once there, 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 voices begins to weave a complex human tapestry: the experience of loss, the nature of family life, the difficulty of intimacy and the mystery of creativity itself. SHORTLISTED FOR THE FOLIO PRIZE, THE GOLDSMITHS PRIZE AND LONGLISTED FOR THE IMPAC PRIZE

Jenna

This is a book that I feel like in reading it by myself, on my own, without discussion, I missed out. I wish I had read this in English class. It’s so full.

This is an experimental book without plot. We don’t know much about the narrator, besides that she’s a writer from England teaching a summer course in Athens. We eventually learn her name (Faye), that she has two sons, and that she is no longer married. It’s a book in conversations. The narrator talks to colleagues, students, friends, and an older Greek man she sits next to on her flight, and then meets again to go swimming.

The conversations say so much about marriage and divorce, motherhood, and identity, and the ideas are often provocative and even radical, but they are said with such frank directness, it was almost uncomfortable at times to read. I found myself having to pause frequently to consider the words more carefully. I thought it was especially interesting when we’d get someone’s story, and then the narrator would push back against the one-sidedness of their perspective, or would openly disagree with their take.

It feels like there is so much packed into this book. It’s hard to say if I enjoyed it - this book defies a typical star rating system. It’s unlike books I typically reach for, as reading it demanded my full attention and effort. I am looking forward to picking up the remaining two books in this trilogy.

Outline A Novel

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