Outline: A Novel (Outline Trilogy, 1)
A Finalist for the Folio Prize, the Goldsmiths Prize, the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction
One of The New York Times' Top Ten Books of the Year. Named a A New York Times Book Review Notable Book and a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker, Vogue, NPR, The Guardian, The Independent, Glamour, and The Globe and Mail Chosen as one of fifteen remarkable books by women that are shaping the way we read and write in the 21st century by the book critics of The New York Times Rachel Cusk's Outline is a novel in ten conversations. Spare and lucid, it follows a novelist teaching a course in creative writing over an oppressively hot summer in Athens. She leads her students in storytelling exercises. She meets other visiting writers for dinner. She goes swimming in the Ionian Sea with her neighbor from the plane. The people she encounters speak volubly about themselves: their fantasies, anxieties, pet theories, regrets, and longings. And through these disclosures, a portrait of the narrator is drawn by contrast, a portrait of a woman learning to face a great loss.BUY THE BOOK
Community Reviews
I loved this book mostly because I loved the ideas and the sentences. There was nearly no plot to speak of. The main character kind of wanders around talking to people in Greece. Mostly they tell each other stories about their pasts. She's in Greece to teach a writing class so there's also a brief scene in her class.
Here are some ponderous sentences I enjoyed nonetheless:
"The person she was involved with now, she said - a man named Konstantin- had given her for the first time in her life a cause to fear these tendencies in herself, for the reason that - unlike, if she was to be honest, any other man of her experience- she judged him to be her equal. He was intelligent, handsome, amusing, an intellectual: she liked being beside him, liked the reflection of herself he gave her. And he was a man in possession of his own morality and attitudes, so she felt for the first time, as she had said - a kind of invisible boundary around him, a line it was clear, though no one ever said as much, she ought not to cross."
The story about the dog is horrifying. And we're adopting a puppy on Sunday!
Here are some ponderous sentences I enjoyed nonetheless:
"The person she was involved with now, she said - a man named Konstantin- had given her for the first time in her life a cause to fear these tendencies in herself, for the reason that - unlike, if she was to be honest, any other man of her experience- she judged him to be her equal. He was intelligent, handsome, amusing, an intellectual: she liked being beside him, liked the reflection of herself he gave her. And he was a man in possession of his own morality and attitudes, so she felt for the first time, as she had said - a kind of invisible boundary around him, a line it was clear, though no one ever said as much, she ought not to cross."
The story about the dog is horrifying. And we're adopting a puppy on Sunday!
See why thousands of readers are using Bookclubs to stay connected.