Book Title: Outline (Fiction)

Book Author: Rachel Cusk

Into the first 45 pages, I was delighted. When I closed the last page, I was glad it was over. The page long, no, the book long wisdom from the stories of the narrators impressed me so much –  the Greeks are indeed wiser no wonder they created a once glorious history and still it is shining at every corner. My next find turned the whole thing around - everybody in the book talked the same way, from 15-year-old to 50-year-old. No way could I survive a real day of my life listening to psychoanalytical narration for the second round.

I do not remember any character's name, some were mentioned only once, a few appeared halfway or tail end of the book. They did not have faces, as intended by the author. What they had in common was failure stories (is that all I retained?) dissected with frequent perception and insight. I admit the perception was deep and mind opening, but they were too big and too frequent, as if a sharp knife cutting the stories into colorless pieces, like graffiti. For a while I was lost in the graffiti pile and couldn't make out what the author was trying to say. Feminist? No, the first character and returning character was a male. Stepping away and forming a full picture of your life? Maybe, that would call for detachment. The author was indeed very much detached from all her narrators and her own feeling, for instance she disliked the male character but accepted anyway his swimming invitation on the boat out to the sea.

But still that's not it. The author dedicated a full chapter describing a room with every possible point-by-point elaboration. From the room we saw the invisible owner. At the end, however, I left the book on the table with the outline of each character without much detail. That's very ironic, and that is also exactly why the author is marvelous – “she began to see herself as a shape, an outline, with all the detail filled in around it while the shape itself remained blank. Yet blank as it is, this empty outline gives a sense of who she now was." All the graffiti I received were crafted by the author to shape them and my view of them.  Rachel knows how to control her writing and designed from page 1. She made her point. So did the book.

As beautiful as a flower arrangement her writing technique in this one, I would not take it home. To those loving classics, this could be a keep. 

Quotations:

• "I had this feeling,' she continued, 'which I have had since and which gets worse each time we argue, that we were caught in a net of words, tangled up in all these strings and knots, and that each of us thought there was something we could say that would set us free, but the more words we spoke the more tangles and knots there were. I find myself thinking of the simplicity of the time before we had said one syllable to one another: that is the time I would like to go back to,' she said, 'the time just before we first opened our mouths to speak."
• Your failure keeps returned to you, while your successes are something you always have to convince yourself of. 
• It seems success takes you away from what you know, he said, while failure condemns you to.
• Looking at it I felt overcome with a sadness that was partly confusion, as though his back were a foreign country I was lost in; or not lost but exiled, in as much as the feeling of being lost was not attended by the hope that I would eventually find something I recognized. His aged back seemed to maroon us both in our separate and untransfigurable histories. 

文/图：夕阳影里一归舟

止笔于2016年3月22日美国西花田