Our discussion has begun and Tom has started us off with some initial thoughts:
"When I finally got to [reading
Kudos], I felt something all of us committed readers feel now and then, but rarely — a sense that I was in the presence of something strikingly different, something that was working at a formal level I had never seen before, something truly new under the sun. I read all three volumes in little over a week, binge reading, entranced. Who is this narrator? Why doesn't she say who she is? Why do we learn so few facts about her? Is it Cusk? — seems to be a writer roughly the same age and level of literary fame as Cusk, with very similar powers of observation and reflection, doing the kinds of things — going to teach a writing class, going to a writers' conference — that we assume Cusk does.... Okay, I decided at some point, okay, this is a version of Cusk, it's autofiction, but some askew version of it — never in the history of memoir or autobiography was the author so erased from her own text, and yet so present in some indefinable way."
Agree? Have thoughts on this and more?
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Don't forget, Rachel will join the conversation tomorrow, Tuesday, June 19, between 12 noon and 1pm PST. If you would like to discuss the work with her, please do so then.
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About KUDOS:
Rachel Cusk, the award-winning and critically acclaimed author of Outline and Transit, completes the transcendent literary trilogy with Kudos, a novel of unsettling power.
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. Within the rituals of literary culture, Faye finds the human story in disarray amid differing attitudes toward the public performance of the creative persona. She begins to identify among the people she meets a tension between truth and representation, a fissure that accrues great dramatic force as Kudos reaches a profound and beautiful climax.
In this conclusion to her groundbreaking trilogy, Cusk unflinchingly explores the nature of family and art, justice and love, and the ultimate value of suffering. She is without question one of our most important living writers.
