Saturday, November 30, 2024
Friday, November 29, 2024
Thursday, November 28, 2024
What a discovery …
Tuesday, November 26, 2024
Monday, November 25, 2024
Sunday, November 24, 2024
Saturday, November 23, 2024
Friday, November 22, 2024
Claire-Louise Bennett
Thursday, November 21, 2024
Wednesday, November 20, 2024
Tuesday, November 19, 2024
Monday, November 18, 2024
Sunday, November 17, 2024
Saturday, November 16, 2024
Jon Fosse
Friday, November 15, 2024
Thursday, November 14, 2024
Wednesday, November 13, 2024
Sad …
Tuesday, November 12, 2024
Monday, November 11, 2024
Rachel Cusk
I've now finished the third of Rachel Cusk's "Faye" novels, Transit. And let me say at the start: this novel, like the others in the trilogy, is excellent: I mean absolutely excellent. (I read the novels out of order.)
Part of what I liked so much about Transit -- and Outline and Kudos -- is that it occupies a rare literary space: it auto-fiction without the narcissism. It is a book about questions: about how we pose them, and what we expect to hear or receive in response.
If Cusk is the main character in this experiment, that seems secondary: because her role in the novel is primarily to listen, and to endow conversations -- as I've written on the blog before -- with a universal quality. That is magic of Cusk: her ability to transcend the banal, to mold it into something great, with a lesson to impart.
What Transit is about exactly is not the point: you might say it is a novel about transitions, about spaces, about homes, about London, about loss. And all of these themes are indeed addressed. But they're explored less by way of character, and more by way of memory, discussion, and reconnection.
In Transit -- more than in Outline or Kudos -- Cusk orients her reader: she is in London; this is her builder; his name is X; he is this way or that. But now having read a few of Cusk's novel, I know that these details are less important than what the builder recounts to Cusk and how she structures those remembrances. This is a novel in which each section, each chapter, represents the transformation of the ordinary into something weighty, something transcendent.
It had been a while since a trilogy like this caught my attention, but these three novels are exceptional: they demand thought and reflection, and a new way -- it is no exaggeration -- of processing literature.