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Outline 9780571233625 Books

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Outline 9780571233625 Books

The reviews and comments I've seen have in various ways missed the point of the book, identified in its title. On page 239 of this 249-page novel, she notes that when people describe themselves (the book consists almost entirely of these), they are describing what the listener is not. "This anti-description...had made something clear to her by a reverse kind of exposition: while he talked she began to see herself as a shape, an outline, with all the detail filled in around it while the shape itself remained blank. Yet this shape, even while its content remained unknown, gave her for the first time since the incident a sense of who she now was." The book consists in ten conversations with people about themselves, interrogated by the Narrator who is seeking her own identity, which they succeed in outlining.

This is a brilliantly conceived and executed book—beautifully written, capturing so many insightful details of human life that speak for themselves as she describes them. I read it at almost one sitting, and now intend to read it again, not because I'm afraid I missed anything, but simply to savor it all.


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Outline 9780571233625 Books Reviews

The narration is clipped and without feeling, which is an interesting contrast to the frailty of the humanity depicted in each storyline...though I’m beginning to have a better sense and understanding of the format and perhaps the author’s intention, I will have to see with the next two in this trilogy if it will evolve into something more meaningful to me...
While I was drawn by the premise of this book and by the narrator's ability to listen to people explaining who they are to her (which people seem to have a need to do), I was ultimately disappointed by it. As I see it, the main problem with the book is that absolutely nobody in the world talks the way 99% percent of the characters in the book talk. The more serious problem is that all of the characters here talk in exactly the same way, to the point that there is little differentiation between one and the next. I began to feel I was just listening to the author ruminating--not to say preaching-- through these cardboard masks she had created. Half way through the book I found myself skimming, which for me means I've grown unable to suspend my disbelief long enough to feel engaged by the narrative. I did finish the book but can't say I'd recommend it.
An amazing, original piece of intricate deep storytelling - compelling! All is seen through the eyes of the main character, but every character with whom she converses is wonderfully brought forth and articulated. Not sure I've ever read anything quite like this - almost Proustian, I'd say.
The most interesting novelist since Richard Powers

On the one hand the thesis of this novel is that we are all novelists struggling to name the meaning of our lives, and doing so through our interactions with others and with other objects. On the other hand, the deck is stacked against us, as it were, because others almost never recognise us as we recognise ourselves and our recognitions are always changing. The outline that is the governing metaphor of the book is the best we can hope for the intelligibility of our selves, but even here the outline resists both the security of embodiment and the stasis of knowledge, even as it is shaped by desire and fantasy, without which even it threatens to dissipate.
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.
What happens when a novelist travels from Britain to Greece to teach a week-long summer course on writing? Not a whole hell of a lot, yet this is the breadth of Rachel Cusk's Outline, the first part of a prospective trilogy of introspective novels. Fear not, there is a quite a lot packed in these pages. The narrator, Faye, is a very good listener and we are treated to all she takes in from her neighbor, an older gentleman, on the plane; from fellow workers, friends, students in her class. All have interesting stories to tell. A chorus of sorts.

As far as the narrator's own story goes we only superficially learn that something has befallen her (divorce?, horrible accident?). Her children are mentioned, a husband, but it's all clouded in so much London fog. Not until we begin to see Faye's experience revealed through other peoples stories - perspectives - and her reactions to them does the reader get the sense that Faye is lost; not so much holding back as not knowing how to portray herself any longer.

One night, she dines out with a colleague and one of his clients, a newly successful novelist named Angeliki. Faye soon gets an earful on the subject of women's identities in the family structure

"‘For many women,’she said, ‘having a child is their central experience of creativity, and yet the child will never remain a created object; unless,’ she said, ‘the mother’s sacrifice of herself is absolute, which mine never could have been, and which no woman’s ought to be these days. My own mother lived through me in a way that was completely uncritical,’ she said, ‘and the consequence was that I came into adulthood unprepared for life, because nobody saw me as important in the way she did, which was the way I was used to being seen. And then you meet a man who thinks you’re important enough to marry you, so it seems right that you should say yes. But it is when you have a baby that the feeling of importance really returns,’ she said, with growing passion, ‘except that one day you realise that all this –the house, the husband, the child –isn’t importance after all, in fact it is the exact opposite you have become a slave, obliterated!'"

We start to get the idea, a hint, of the shape of Faye's life as she tentatively befriends the older gentleman, her neighbor on the plane trip over. He invites her out for an excursion on his small motor boat (downsized from a yacht, post divorce). While swimming she spies a family on another nearby vessel; children diving into the water, the mother in a sunhat reading a book, the husband pacing on the deck speaking into his cell. Faye reflects

"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. When I looked at the family on the boat, I saw a vision of what I no longer had I saw something, in other words, that wasn’t there. Those people were living in their moment, and though I could see it I could no more return to that moment than I could walk across the water that separated us. And of those two ways of living – living in the moment and living outside it – which was the more real?"

Though part of a cycle, Cusk does not leave Outline open-ended, rather she pulls it together, closes gaps and circles back. Faye meets the woman who will replace her at the summer school and will be staying in the same time-shared apartment Anne. Anne relates an incident of her own, and in so doing reveals an experience similar to Faye's in which she strikes up a conversation with her neighbor, a diplomat stationed in Athens, on the flight to Greece

"He was describing, she realised, a distinction that seemed to grow clearer and clearer the more he talked, a distinction he stood on one side of while she, it became increasingly apparent, stood on the other. He was describing, in other words, what she herself was not in everything he said about himself, she found in her own nature a corresponding negative. This anti-description, for want of a better way of putting it, had made something clear to her by a reverse kind of exposition while he talked she began to see herself as a shape, an outline , with all the detail filled in around it while the shape itself remained blank. Yet this shape, even while its content remained unknown, gave her for the first time since the incident a sense of who she now was."

Thus the author forces Faye to blatantly confront her own malaise, that which can only be revealed through other's stories, borne vicariously through other's lives; mirrored by how other's see the world, leaving an outline to be completed.
The reviews and comments I've seen have in various ways missed the point of the book, identified in its title. On page 239 of this 249-page novel, she notes that when people describe themselves (the book consists almost entirely of these), they are describing what the listener is not. "This anti-description...had made something clear to her by a reverse kind of exposition while he talked she began to see herself as a shape, an outline, with all the detail filled in around it while the shape itself remained blank. Yet this shape, even while its content remained unknown, gave her for the first time since the incident a sense of who she now was." The book consists in ten conversations with people about themselves, interrogated by the Narrator who is seeking her own identity, which they succeed in outlining.

This is a brilliantly conceived and executed book—beautifully written, capturing so many insightful details of human life that speak for themselves as she describes them. I read it at almost one sitting, and now intend to read it again, not because I'm afraid I missed anything, but simply to savor it all.