![]() ![]() “He had the appearance of someone who had been hit by extremity. ![]() ![]() Much of the trilogy’s genius lies in this structure: a smoothly linked chain of monologues, relieved by Faye’s careful description. People she meets en route, starting with “the man next to me on the plane,” seem instantly compelled to tell Faye their stories in urgent, personal detail. A now-remarried mother of two sons - whose uncited past, involving a wrecked first marriage and efforts to regain equilibrium, infuses all else - narrator Faye is traveling to a literary festival in an unnamed country (perhaps Brazil) where she’s scheduled to speak. They enter a reader’s imagination like a series of half-remembered dreams whose details seem at once to vanish, but whose ambiance continues to haunt with an eerie, desolate beauty.įans will recognize in “Kudos” a smooth resumption, from prior volumes “Outline” and “Transit,” of Cusk’s almost sublimely simple method: to observe, listen and record. Cusk’s narratives - summarized cheerfully by her publisher as “following a British writer named Faye as she goes about her daily life and encounters a series of friends and strangers” - in fact elude easy description. With “Kudos,” British author Rachel Cusk completes an extraordinary trilogy of novels that may have even forged a modern form (nodding to Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales,” Boccaccio’s “Decameron” and the fiction of W.G. ![]()
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