Outline

by Rachel Cusk
This book is nominated for the Giller and the GG award this year.

The Narrator is travelling to Greece to teach a writing course for a few days.  She is staying at the apartment of another academic.

She has a long discussion on the plane with thrice divorced man who tells her about his life, his failed marriages and his mistake. He loved his first wife the best but she has made a life with a ski instructor, abandoning him and their son (schizophrenic).She meets another teacher who tells her about his life, his temptations, etc.  She also meets other people, an old friend from Athens, an acquaintance of his has thrust herself upon him.  She asks her students to talk about themselves and to tell a story about animals.  One of the students walks out saying the course is crap.  Very few ever ask her about herself.  We learn very little about her other than that she is divorced and has left her children behind in England.

Notes from the book:
The narrator comments to a man she met on the plane "I said that on the contrary I had come to believe more and more in the virtues of passivity, and of living a life as unmarked by self-will as possible.... There was a great difference, I said between the things I wanted and the things that I could apparently have, and until I had finally made forever made my piece with the fact, I had decided to want nothing at all".

The end of the book, a playwright arrives as the narrator is preparing to return home.  The playwright has been traumatized by a brutal assault and finds she cannot take any idea seriously enough to write about.  She has weight but eats compulsively and ravenously.  She mentions meeting a diplomat on the plane...

"It had made something clear to her by a reverse kind of exposition; while he talked she began to see herself as a shape, an outline, with all 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".

The main character seems to be a person people want to download their life and experiences on.  In her writing class she encourages her students to be observant but she herself doesn't seem to be doing that.  All the people in he books seem to have had bad relationships.

The language in the books is lovely.  The author has a very eloquent way of describing and commenting on things.  She has a gentle way of portraying people.