Cusk’s narratives - summarized cheerfully by her publisher as “following a British writer named Faye as she goes about her daily life and encounters a series of friends and strangers” - in fact elude easy description. The author ends Faye's trilogy with yet another gem.With “Kudos,” British author Rachel Cusk completes an extraordinary trilogy of novels that may have even forged a modern form (nodding to Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales,” Boccaccio’s “Decameron” and the fiction of W.G. As always, Cusk's ear for dialogue and language is stunning.
Later, a young tour guide explains his thoughts on education, gender, and rewarding intelligence (it is here where the novel receives its title) at another stop, Faye is audience to a series of journalists who discuss honesty and workplace inequality.
In Germany, Faye talks to an interviewer about jealousy. Shifting away from the last book's focus on life's journey, Cusk now places Faye in a series of back-and-forths on duality in family, art, and representation. Yet the novel, like its predecessors, eschews chronicling Faye's life via traditional narrative, instead filling each page with conversations with and monologues by the many writers, journalists, and publicists she meets during her travels. Since the events of the previous book, Faye has remarried and her sons have grown into teenagers, one of whom is preparing to leave for university to study art history.
She is without question one of our most important living writers.Ĭusk's final book in a trilogy (after Outline and Transit) expertly concludes the story of protagonist Faye, a British author, as she travels Europe to speak at writers' conferences and give interviews. 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 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. Within the rituals of literary culture, Faye finds the human story in disarray amid differing attitudes toward the public performance of the creative persona. 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.Ī 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. New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2018
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