“… 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. Yet this shape, even while its content remained unknown, gave her for the first time since the incident a sense of who she now was.”
Outline by, Rachel Cusk, is a novel told in conversations. The unnamed narrator goes to Athens to teach a writing course over the summer. Through these conversations, some of the details of the narrator’s life unfold, as her current position in life is revealed through others.
It’s evident very early on in the novel that the narrator is dealing with marital issues. Her conversations mainly deal with marriages that have fallen apart, infidelity, motherhood, and how one’s identity is altered by marriage, both during and after. A lot of the conversations also highlight how unexpected life can be, as well as how it’s difficult to regroup after traumatic events.
The narrator conveniently leaves out certain details about herself, and these obvious exclusions speak rather loudly. The reader can read between the lines and piece elements together and interpret what she is actually saying through her omissions. In some cases, what she eludes to is vague and the reader is able to piece together those subjects in her life that are still uncomfortable for her to blatantly reflect on. Get it, an outline?
“… I had stayed to watch it become the grave of something I could no longer definitively call either a reality or an illusion.”
The narrator also focuses a lot on houses and describes other people’s living spaces. I really found this interesting, as a house/home for most people represent a safe, secure, reliable space. However, what happens that one’s house is no more?
“It is like walking past a house you used to live in: the fact that it still exists, so concrete, makes everything that has happened since seem somehow insubstantial. Without structure, events are unreal: the reality of his wife, like the reality of the house, was structural, determinative.”
It’s clear that when the narrator first arrives in Greece, she’s lost. She’s trying to piece together who she is now, as the life she used to have is changing. She’s trying to determine who she is as a mother, who she was as a wife, and who she will be after the deterioration of her marriage. Will she be able to piece herself back together, and still maintain her own essence?
“… it’s like looking at old photographs of yourself. There comes a point at which the record needs to be updated, because you’ve shed too many links with what you were.”
This leads nicely into how existential I found this novel. The conversations reveal that here is a lot of tension between what is happening in many of these people’s lives and what they wish was happening. The external is not responding to the internal. There is also a struggle to reconcile who one thinks people are, who they were believed to be and who they end up becoming.
“And those two ways of living - living in the moment and living outside it - which was more real?”
“… it was the very thing you don’t see, the thing you take for granted, that deceives you.”
As Outline concludes, it’s evident that the narrator is a bit rejuvenated from her stay in Greece, before returning back to London. She is not whole, but the foundation is being laid. From my interpretation, the narrator draws solace from having these conversations and doesn’t feel quite so alone. I found this novel to be a realistic portrayal of the human experience and how the stories we engage with are internalized to help us find comfort, understanding, identity, validation and affirmation in our own lives. Also, this novel has some well-constructed, evocative sentences that are a joy to read:
“At evening, with the sun no longer overhead, the air developed a kind of viscosity in which time seemed to stand very still and the labyrinth of the city, no longer bisected by light and shade and unstirred by the afternoon, appeared suspended in a kind of dream, paused in an atmosphere of extraordinary pallor and thickness.”
I really enjoyed Outline, which surprised me. I was curious to read it, wasn’t sure how I would get on with it, but I’m glad that I just went for it. It sounded intriguing to me, so I read it. Sometimes, it doesn’t have to be a complicated process to determine if you want to read a book or not. Is something piquing your interest? Yes? Then read the book. If you like it, then great and you may have just expanded your reading world. If you didn’t like it, then what did you really lose? Honestly, not much, other than continuing to explore literature, while fine-tuning your own reading tastes. Win-Win situation in my book (puns intended).
I look forward to reading the other two novels in this trilogy and I’m glad I went a bit out of my comfort zone with this reading choice.
Rating: 4/5
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