“Outline” by Rachel Cusk

This is the first novel in Cusk’s trilogy of so-called auto-fiction. It is a loose recollection of stories about others, yet, at heart, it is the story of the self. The protagonist is a writer, on her way to teaching an amateur writing workshop in Athens. “In my experience painters are far less conventional than writers. Writers need to hide in bourgeois life like ticks need to hide in animal’s fur: the deeper they’re buried the better.” Her life in London has fallen apart. She was recently divorced, on uncertain terms with her children, and in search of a second mortgage to pay the bills. “I wasn’t sure it was possible, in marriage, to know what you exactly 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: you might feel, in other words, as though there were some separate, autonomous self within you, but perhaps that self didn’t actually exist.”

Cusk’s novel is structured so that a great deal of the action is in the narrator’s listening to the travails of the others she meets while on her journey. Being a writer, much of the commentary revolves around the use of language. “The best way to confront our fears is to put them in costume, so to speak; to translate them, for the simple act of translation very often renders things harmless.” The creepiest interlocutor the narrator encounters is her first, a former shipping tycoon now down on his luck. “He spoke a refined and formal kind of English that did not seem wholly natural, as though at some point it had been applied to him carefully with a brush, like paint. I asked him what his nationality was…. ‘You might say I have the mannerisms of an Englishman but the heart of a Greek. I am told,’ he added, ‘it would be much worse the other way around.’” At one point the narrator makes a remark which might be emblematic of Cusk’s whole novel, “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.”