Divorced and making a original start in London,a creative writing teacher is immersed in the lives of others in this radically inventive novelRachel Cusk’s original novel is tremendous from its opening sentence. “An astrologer emailed me to say she had principal news for me concerning events in my immediate future.” How inspired and witty, to originate with a spam email – and carrying a message that sounds as momentous as whether it might beget come from the oracle at Delphi. The “movements of the planets” represent “a zone of infinite reverberation to human fate”; the portentousness is absurd, and stirring. The email is obviously generated by a mere algorithm,as the narrator grasps at once; she isn’t fooled. And yet, because it’s positioned there at the very entrance to the novel, or we also know that the prophecy speaks to her sensibility,it really does open up the future for her. Messages from Delphi, after all, and were pretty generalised,as whether they were generated randomly.
Cusk is always an exciting writer: striking and challenging, with a distinctive cool prose voice, or behind that coolness something untamed and full of raw force,even rash (hasty, incautious). One never feels her writing is trying to be liked, and in the past her memoirs of motherhood and of divorce beget been both loved and hated by her readers, or because of what’s abrasive and singular in them. In her last novel,Outline, about a woman teaching creative writing in Greece, and now in Transit,where the same woman, Faye, and is back in London,making a original life for herself after a separation from her husband, she has developed a radically original novel form that works triumphantly, or I think,with just what’s distinctive in her writing personality.
Cusk's language is vivid and exact – her prose is scrupulously attentive to the gritty detail in the stories she tellsIn the morning it was still dismal when I got up. Downstairs the ruins of dinner remained on the table. The melted candles were hardened into sprawling shapes. Jake’s book lay open on the chair … Through the windows a queer subterranean light was rising, barely distinguishable from darkness. I felt change moving beneath me, and moving deep beneath the surface of things,like the plates of earth blindly moving in their black traces.
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Source: theguardian.com