Outline - Rilegato

Cusk, Rachel

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0571233627 ISBN 13: 9780571233625

Casa editrice: Faber & Faber, 2014

Riassunto

This book was shortlisted for the Folio Prize 2015. It is longlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction 2015. "Winter bouquets should be offered to the clever and stylish Rachel Cusk: her novel Outline is smoothly accomplished, and fascinating both on the surface and in its depths." (Hilary Mantel, Guardian). A woman writer goes to Athens in the height of summer to teach a writing course. Though her own circumstances remain indistinct, she becomes the audience to a chain of narratives, as the people she meets tell her one after another the stories of their lives. Beginning with the neighbouring passenger on the flight out and his tales of fast boats and failed marriages, the storytellers talk of their loves and ambitions and pains, their anxieties, their perceptions and daily lives. In the stifling heat and noise of the city the sequence of voice begins to weave a complex human tapestry. The more they talk the more elliptical their listener becomes, as she shapes and directs their accounts until certain themes begin to emerge: the experience of loss, the nature of family life, the difficulty of intimacy and the mystery of creativity itself. Outline is a novel about writing and talking, about self-effacement and self-expression, about the desire to create and the human art of self-portraiture in which that desire finds its universal form. It was also shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize 2014. It is named one of the best fiction books of 2014 by The New Yorker, The Guardian, The Independent and Glamour.

Su questo libro

Recensione:

Outline succeeds powerfully. Among other things, it gets a great variety of human beings down on to the page with both immediacy and depth; an elemental pleasure that makes the book as gripping to read as a thriller ... a stellar accomplishment. (James Lasdun Guardian)

If life were fair, Rachel Cusk would win every prize going for Outline - one of the most daringly original and entertaining pieces of fiction I've ever read. (Julie Myerson Observer)

A clever thought experiment that's far too readable ever to feel like one. (Sunday Times)

[Outline is] a piece of work of great beauty and ambition. Narratives are smoothed, as if by translation and retranslation, into their simplest, barest elements: parents, children, divorces, cakes, dresses, dogs. These elements then build, layer on layer, to form the most complex and exquisitely detailed patterns, swirling and whirling, wheels within wheels. (Jenny Turner London Review of Books)

That the composition of the novel itself so clearly and crisply renders the idea behind it brought to my mind the completion of Lily Briscoe's painting at the close of Woolf's To The Lighthouse ... And indeed, more than any tendrils of description or character it was a sense of shape and structure that lingered in my mind long after I'd turned the final page, rendering Cusk's novel something of a visual work of art. (Lucy Scholes Independent)

It defies ordinary categorisation. It is about authorial invisibility, it involves writing without showing your face. The narrator is a writer who goes to teach creative writing in Greece and becomes enmeshed in other peoples' narratives which Cusk stitches, with fastidious brilliance, into a single fabric. (Kate Kellaway Guardian)

[Outline] is mesmerizing; it makes a sharp break from the conventional style of Cusk's previous work ... Outline feels different, its world porous and continuous with ours, though not for the reasons we might expect. (Elaine Blair The New Yorker)

[A] lethally intelligent novel ... reading Outline mimics the sensation of being underwater, of being separated from other people by a substance denser than air. But there is nothing blurry or muted about Cusk's literary vision or her prose: Spend much time with this novel and you'll become convinced that she is one of the smartest writers alive. (Heidi Julavits The New York Times Book Review)

Outline is a poised and cerebral novel that has little in the way of straightforward plot yet is transfixing in its unruffled awareness of the ways we love and leave each other, and of what it means to listen to other people ... While little happens in Outline, everything seems to happen. You find yourself pulling the novel closer to your face, as if it were a thriller and the hero were dangling over a snake pit. (Dwight Garner The New York Times)

Cusk's uncompromising, often brutal intelligence is at full power. So is her technique ... I can't think of a book that so powerfully resists summary or review ... Inevitably, the only way to get close to the fascinating and elusive core of Outline is to read it. (Sophie Elmhirst Financial Times)

Descrizione del libro:

Outline by Rachel Cusk is a novel about writing and talking, about self-effacement and self-expression, about the desire to create and the human art of self-portraiture in which that desire finds its universal form.

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Faber & Faber
• Data di pubblicazione: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0571233627
• ISBN 13: 9780571233625
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 272