In the review of my recent show on Hyperallergic by Lev Feigin he says, "Looking at her paintings, I couldn’t help but think of the autofictional books of Rachel Cusk, Sheila Heti, and Karl Ove Knausgaard, which focus a microscope onto the everyday minutiae of the authors’ personal lives. Like these novels, Levinthal’s paintings create a sense of unmediated access to their creator’s world and interiority."
I knew Heti and Knausgaard, although I haven't read their work but admit I had never even heard of Cusk. So I figured this summer that would be a good place to start my reading. I just finished Outline, the first in a trilogy by Cusk and I'm so thrilled. First, I loved the book. And also, if my paintings could be writing I would like them to have a lot of what is here so I'm flattered.
It's a really unique take on a simple subject. The narrator takes a plane to Athens to teach a one week writing course. She tells the story by sort of retelling the conversations of people like her neighbor on the plane, a coworker, students in her class.
I identified so strongly with her and yet she tells almost nothing of herself or her opinions. She creates this complex character through erasure. She's barely there yet you identify so strongly with her, she isn't easily definable but she is specific. And through this way of writing the form becomes the function -- she is showing us what it is to be a mother, woman in a literary (art) world where men are constantly telling her things, people are speaking at her to impress her, students are challenging her authority.
Cusk clearly wrote a book about her own 'everyday', unremarkable life and it is anything but expected. While being highly aware that the book is about the form, its never just to show off her ability, its absolutely to make a bigger statement about her main character. It's hard to explain the style, here is an excerpt where she is speaking to her seatmate from the plane:
“All the same, it seemed to him now that that life had been lived almost unconsciously, that he had been lost in it, absorbed in it, as you can be absorbed in a book, believing in its events and living entirely through and with its characters. Never again since had he been able to absorb himself; never again had he been able to believe in that way. Perhaps it was that – the loss of belief – that constituted his yearning for the old life. Whatever it was, he and his wife had built things that had flourished, had together expanded the sum of what they were and what they had; life had responded willingly to them, had treated them abundantly, and this – he now saw – was what had given him the confidence to break it all, break it with what now seemed to him to be an extraordinary casualness, because he thought there would be more. More what? I asked. ‘More – life,’ he said, opening his hands in a gesture of receipt. ‘And more affection,’ he added, after a pause. ‘I wanted more affection.”
“All the same, it seemed to him now that that life had been lived almost unconsciously, that he had been lost in it, absorbed in it, as you can be absorbed in a book, believing in its events and living entirely through and with its characters. Never again since had he been able to absorb himself; never again had he been able to believe in that way. Perhaps it was that – the loss of belief – that constituted his yearning for the old life. Whatever it was, he and his wife had built things that had flourished, had together expanded the sum of what they were and what they had; life had responded willingly to them, had treated them abundantly, and this – he now saw – was what had given him the confidence to break it all, break it with what now seemed to him to be an extraordinary casualness, because he thought there would be more. More what? I asked. ‘More – life,’ he said, opening his hands in a gesture of receipt. ‘And more affection,’ he added, after a pause. ‘I wanted more affection.”
