Outline - Rachel Cusk

Cusk’s elegant and unsettling novel takes the form of ten conversations, nine with people and one with an empty apartment. The transcriber is a recently divorced writer who feels she lost her identity along with her spouse; now “trying to find a different way of living in the world,” she observes people and places so closely that she disappears inside her detailed reports. On the rare occasions that she comments directly, her subjectivity is startling and intrusive; it changes all that has gone before and raises questions such as whether any of us is the same person alone that we are when with others. In Cusk’s artful hands these complicated existential matters gain fresh urgency and even profundity