“That idea of being out on the street, which is very much an idea from Greek tragedy and the classical world, of war and exiting your home, meaning that there’s trouble—and so that’s her. So she has no identity, so what can her participation be? Because conversation is—it’s like a peacock showing their feathers to you. It’s a showing of identity to each other, and a search for conformity, a search for agreement. A search for agreement is really all that culture actually is, and it’s an amazingly good system. It’s what enables things to be recognized if enough time can pass.” ~Rachel Cusk
“In 2014, the novelist Rachel Cusk published “Outline,” the first novel in a trilogy whose style was markedly different from anything that she had previously written. On a brief trip to Greece, Faye, the novel’s protagonist, does very little, and says even less. Like “Transit” and “Kudos,” the two books that followed it, “Outline” serves as a record not so much of Faye’s own thoughts and actions but of those described to her by the people she encounters. “She lends herself as a filter,” as Judith Thurman wrote in a New Yorker Profile, last year. Her interlocutors speak in long, arcing monologues that swoop from the minute banality of personal experience to touch on the great themes of human life and society and back again. Some of them are kind. Some are penetrating, profound. Some are shockingly narcissistic.” “I Don’t Think Character Exists Anymore”: A Conversation with Rachel Cusk https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/i-dont-think-character-exists-anymore-a-conversation-with-rachel-cusk
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