Outline

The Outline Trilogy, Book 1

By: Rachel Cusk

Narrated by: Kate Lock

Length: 7 hrs and 17 mins

Publisher's summary

A luminous, powerful novel that establishes Rachel Cusk as one of the finest writers in the English language.

A man and a woman are seated next to each other on a plane. They get to talking - about their destination, their careers, their families. Grievances are aired, family tragedies discussed, marriages and divorces analyzed. An intimacy is established as two strangers contrast their own fictions about their lives.

Outline is a novel in 10 conversations. Spare and stark, it follows a novelist teaching a course in creative writing during one oppressively hot summer in Athens. She leads her students in storytelling exercises. She meets other visiting writers for dinner and discourse. 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.

Outline takes a hard look at the things that are hardest to speak about. It brilliantly captures conversations, investigates people’s motivations for storytelling, and questions their ability to ever do so honestly or unselfishly. In doing so it bares the deepest impulses behind the craft of fiction writing. This is Rachel Cusk’s finest work yet and one of the most startling, brilliant, original novels of recent years.

©2014 by Rachel Cusk (P)2014 by W. F. Howes, Ltd.

Difficult and Better in Print

This is a tricky little novel. The narrator is extremely passive -- "I had come to believe more and more in the virtues of passivity, and of living a life as unmarked by self-will as possible" -- listening while others relate their stories and observations, and so there's a languid, discursive quality to the book. I found my mind wandering while I listened, as you might when sitting on a ferry, overhearing other passengers, tuning in and out of conversations. Sometimes a beautiful phrase or fascinating insight would catch my attention, and I'd find myself turning back to the text so I could reflect on the passage: "It was impossible, I said in response to his question, to give the reasons why the marriage had ended: among other things a marriage is a system of belief, a story, and though it manifests in things that are real enough, the impulse that drives it is ultimately mysterious." That kind of language is harder to catch on audio, and so I'd stop for a while and pick it back up when I had time to devote great attention, and even then I rarely felt motivated to dive back in. I also didn't care much for the reader, Kate Lock, who tries too hard with Greek accents, or overdramatizes a woman talking while she eats honey from a jar: Lock makes a constant smacking sound with her lips, sounding like Winnie the Pooh.

The tone of the narrator is perfect

This book is a beautifully constructed set of dialogues (really monologues) delving into questions of identity and consciousness as exhibited in male and female relationships. I thought the narrator did an excellent job of capturing the nuances of each character’s conversations.

Excruciating

This was a great disappointment. The writing is skilled. The narration is irritating and borderline intolerable. The characters are narcissistic selfish petty whiners whom I hoped would all meet a tragic end, hoisted on their own miserable complaints a la O Henry. But no, they just kept whining away. If it weren’t for my commitment to my book group to read the book I would have put it down well before halfway.

Not even an editor could help this one . . .

There were 2-3 small snippets that were interesting. Characters were boring, unlikeable or indistinguishable. Greece as the setting took no real part in the book. It was like an uninteresting acquaintance droning on and on.

Barely an outline

I read a piece by a huge fan of Rachel Cusk - had never heard of her so I wanted to give it a go. It didn't even leave me wondering. According to the Amazon snippet this novel was a finalist for the Folio Prize, the Goldsmiths Prize, the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction. It was, apparently, 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 ... the list goes on. Really?

This feels like a writing exercise the writer in the story gives her students. Yes, it is well written - but what's the point other than any number of disconnected and barely interesting musings about the lives and experiences and idiosyncrasies of people you will even remotely begin to care about? According to one snippet, the "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." Oh, please, that sounds as pretentious as the novel was flat.

Maybe I'm just not seeing it - someone help me, please - enlighten me. It's happened before. I initially hated Annie Proulx' The Shipping News. When reading it again years later, I absolutely loved it. Still, for the life of me, I cannot see anything that I might have missed here. Again, enlighten me.

Depressing and grim.

While it’s clear Cusk is a skilled writer, this book is a very depressing collection of encounters the main character has during the course of a week as she teaches a writing class in Athens. As the characters were brought to life, each one was worse than the next. Self-involved, almost heartless people who complain constantly about what it takes to raise children, along with some awful accounts of animal cruelty that honestly made me cringe because of the callousness. I basically hated every one of these navel-gazers and wished they would all go away. It’s all very pompous and the reader is very pompous and annoying, as well, making it even worse. I was close to finishing it because she is a good writer, but after many hours listening to them all complain about their lives, I couldn’t even finish the book.

The book is excellent - narration not so much

I loved the writing of this novel - so beautiful and interesting. The narration of the British characters' dialogue is great, but the voices of the Greek characters are horrendous. I can barely get myself to listen to the last 27 minutes that I have left. Admittedly, a Greek accent is very difficult and subtle, but it would have been so much better if someone Greek were reading the dialogue.