Outline

“...while he talked she began to see herself as a shape, an outline, with all the detail filled in around it while the shape itself remained blank.”

This line perfectly sums up Rachel Cusk's Outline. It is a book about connection, recognition, ambivalence; about the power of narrative and words; about the unshaped, the unstructured, the outlined self. I was very pleased by Cusk's experimental style, which is embodied by the characters themselves, actively avoiding order, rule, logic, shape.

“But the only hope of finding anything is to stay exactly where you are, at the agreed place. It's just a question of how long you can hold out.”

“The interesting ones are like the islands, he said: you don't bump into them on the street or at a party, you have to know where they are and go to them by arrangement.”

Let me give some personal context prior to reading Outline. I found this book in a second hand bookshop which every time I visited transported me to a sort of intimate, exclusive space where committed readers met. I wasn't looking for it, yet I had the feeling this particular book would terminate the long reading slump I wanted to get rid of (and I was right). I was also surprised to see that the previous owner of the book left a pamphlet about the rights of indigenous people in Brazil, which was probably used as a bookmark, and I immediately started to wonder what kind of person had read this book before me, what their interests and background were. Right before starting this book, I found myself doing the exactly same thing the characters did throughout this book: to connect with other people not wholly but in fragments and glimpses into multiple life stories and narratives. Another unexpected parallel I found was that both the narrator and I were travelling when the first chapter opened, and soon after I was completely immersed in the narrative.

“...but the trying – it seemed to me – was almost always a sign that one was crossing the currents, was forcing events in a direction they did not naturally want to go, and though you might argue that nothing could ever be accomplished without going against nature to some extent, the artificiality of that vision and its consequences had become – to put it bluntly – anathema to me.”

The narrative is formed through brief encounters which seem like character studies, outlines of a future novel; yet the novel already exists before it is formed. I have connected with the characters in a completely different and ambivalent way, deeply and intimately and yet vaguely and distantly.

I can't wait to put my hands on the other two works from Cusk's trilogy.