When There’s Nothing Left to Burn, Set Yourself on Fire: On Rachel Cusk’s ‘Kudos’
The third and last installment of Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy opens on familiar ground—in the air, where the first book began. Again our narrator Faye finds herself seated next to a man. He’s just as chatty as the first guy (as if any of her characters aren’t born soliloquists), but he’s far less comfortable. In fact, he’s struggling to get his long legs to fit in front of him. This is how it must have felt to write the book’s teaser copy.
A woman writer visits a Europe in flux, where questions of personal and political identity are rising to the surface and the trauma of change is opening up new possibilities of loss and renewal.
A woman writer? A Europe in flux? them. The word is Cusk’s actually, and not even her own oeuvre is spared.
