70 — Rachel Cusk
Unlike her work, this might be a beach read
I was first introduced to Rachel Cusk’s work during one of my recurring perusals in those typical Berlin niche bookstores that also serve as art spaces, coffee shops, and reading spaces all at once. It wasn’t on the staff picks shelf but prominently placed on the table right before the entrance for anyone to see or bump into. I was not familiar with the author, who had been publishing books since 1993, but like hundreds of thousands of people, I picked up Outline (first published in 2014) because of its cover design (the graphic designer Rodrigo Corral has been behind so many of the most recognizable books to date). The clean, sharp, generous, white borders, paired with the vibrant close-up image of a seashell, stood up from a mountain of full-bleed images, traditional of book cover designs.
Outline was the first Rachel Cusk book I read, and soon after, as part of a trilogy, I acquired the remaining titles of the series, and as the acquisition grew, those spines, placed next to one another, also continued to grow turning her section into a monumental one and every other book I owned into an anonymous croud. Even for the most absentminded partner, seeing those books was a clear signal that I must be into her writing, so, slowly, Cusk’s titles had become the perfect gift to receive at any Christmas or birthday. (That should have been enough of a clue that that relationship was not going to last.)
In a time when Apartamento was the IT-publication (just as much as Kinfolk was) and displaying a copy out in the open was a statement of someone’s understanding of culture, I now understand that Cusk’s books had very much the same allure. It was cool to own them, but reading them?
The breezy designs had fooled me into imagining a smooth, dictionary-free reading experience, but I remember being met with a formality of language resembling the one of an academic title as if I was a student of a fictitious English literature course and Cusk’s books were part of the mandatory reading list for the semester. I did not anticipate the depth and unconventional storytelling her work would provide, nor the ability for the same author to constantly reinvent themselves.
I left those books be, hidden on my newly built bookshelves, in my newly built life, almost as if they were part of a past I was trying to forget (after all they were almost all gifted) until recently when in researching the roles of women in art, I landed on ‘Parade’, Rachel Cusk’s latest published work deepening her lifelong interest in the relationship between art and life in a narrative form. Soon after, I started reading the book and proceeded to learn and understand more about her as a writer through interviews and lectures that focused on her creative process.
“When I was an emerging writer, I suppose, copying was an amazing way of learning how to write, and I still think that’s the way to learn a practice, to imitate others; the problem with that was how to switch off that influence when you need to.” She still remembers how painful it was - learning how to write, and how she got into reading from an early age because her oldest sister was a bookish type.
Don’t they say that reading is half the work of writing?
When I reflect on my history as a reader, I approached the activity as a form of entertainment or research, either trying to learn something or to escape to an imaginative world. I would often earmark pages because of paragraphs that I found particularly moving or underline the sentences that I wanted to remember in case of non-fiction material, but made notes only when reading the latter. I didn’t read with the intention of reflecting on form and language, as an observer of the craft; I’d rather get lost in the storytelling, but since I started this Substack, I have been finding myself paying more attention, taking notes, and reflecting on what I read with a critical eye.
I notice how, in her narrative work, there’s a way in which Rachel Cusk describes the inner working of the characters; succinct, yet fiercely expansive. I notice how in a debut novel, a contemporary author goes out of their way to use a few pompous words here and there, departing from their low-key style of narration established right from the get-go, reminding me of that scene in Friends when Joey, in an attempt to sound smarter, switches every word in his colloquial and down to earth recommendation letter with synonyms from the Thesaurus. I pay attention.
“There had been a mirror in that apartment, ornate and gilded, that was so large it reflected the looker not as the centre of the image but as part of a greater scene. To look in it was to be seen in proportion to other things. The loss of the mirror was like the loss of a compass or navigation point. It was surprising how deeply it had bestowed a feeling of orientation.
She had cultivated an image, perhaps, of her old life in the apartment that had drawn her away from the new life she had established elsewhere. But the apartment, when she got there, did not contain the old life. The old life had become the new life that she was already living.”1
I started feeling what I can only call a newfound admiration for the layered work of Rachel Cusk’s writing, away from the misleading interpretations of her books covers. I grew to enjoy pausing, translating unknown words (I am not a native English speaker), expanding my vocabulary, and being forced to reflect on the deeper meaning of a particular paragraph or page. I can take my time and see how that’s part of the joy of noticing. I can say that my experience with Rachel Cusk has not been a straightforward one, just like the one with my writing. It’s been a relationship of false expectations and painful lessons, of reconsideration, of learning out in the open while I leave these words out for public judgment - not in a courtroom, but in a classroom, where you and I are paying attention to each other as I carefully observe what sparks my interest.