Embracing the Mundus Inversus

Reading Parade is walking over shards of broken glass sunken to and shattered over the bottom of a lake, a venture to approach with caution, not only to avert getting wounded but also not to overlook the polished diamonds among the treacherous slivers. Threading along, I found myself highlighting many sentences, lured by their brilliance or struck by their acuity and provocativeness.

The rarity of love. The omnipresence and pluriformity of violence, oppression and cruelty in human relationships. The longing for versus the fighting against death. The creative drive as a ruthless inner force that propels the artist into mania, if not egotism and abuse. The anxiety for conformity. The impossible impasse of motherhood, inexorably traumatising and wrecking both mother and child. Anger and hatred pervading relationships and burning underneath the surface of innocuous words. The universe of Rachel Cusk might be one abound with art, erudition and tantalizing thought, it is also quite brutal, inhospitable and chilly. Nature is mostly hostile and menacing, even dawn brings no hope but curious devastation, a relentless casting of new light on old failures.

Divided in four sections, the bookÂ’s fragmented structure and multiple alternating narrative perspectives, the nameless characters and various locations offer the reader little to hold onto, yet Cusk transfixes the reader to the page, unable to stop watching. Perspectives are not simply shifting but erratic, the narrative seems to explode into a shamanic dance between singular and plural narrators, victims and perpetrators, mothers and children, husbands and wives, artists and their family.

This is not a conventional novel, going beyond simple non-linear storytelling, stitching together biographical cut-outs of lives of (real and maybe also fictitious ) artists as in a miniature Künstlerroman, essayistic reflections on art and artists, thematising writing, creativity, storytelling, freedom, the body, gender, identity, responsibility, motherhood, power dynamics within the family and death. The section ‘The Diver’ echoes the party in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, bringing in its own Septimus Smith; I intuit many more literary allusions (Rilke?) and intertextual references which have escaped me can be found by the patient reader.



A parade of artists – men and women, black people and white people, visual artists as well as writers and directors, all called G, are breaking in (offering a good deal of fun sleuth work for art lovers to identify the artists and their works, Louise Bourgeois’ Maman among them), conjuring up a continuous metamorphosis in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. On the other hand the namesake G’s render the artists anonymous and hard to differentiate , their individuality merging into one abstract, archetypical Artist. Through their multitude, only distinguishing them in a few strokes, the interchangeability of the G’s acknowledges the artistic credo of one of them (in the section ‘The Spy’), bespeaking the artist’s need to erase the self a to be a good observer (of which I wondered if this is the artistic vision that Cusk takes towards her position as a writer herself):

He began to understand that the discipline of concealment yielded a rare power of observation. The spy sees more clearly and objectively than the others, because he has freed himself from need: the needs of the self in its construction by and participation in experience

While this view defies those artists who are cloak the world in their subjectivity, the aloof stance in its turn is criticized as a criminal luxury, an aesthetic and moral objection to the phenomenon of causation, a running away from an artistÂ’s social and political responsibility:

To conceal identity is to take from the world without paying the costs of self-declaration.

The GÂ’s seem to function as a box of instruments enabling Cusk to dissect the position and role of the artist in both their own work and in the world.

Sometimes Cusk reminds me of a Pythia intoxicated by words, regurgitating the naked truth in fumes of poison and doom. Fortunately she is also showing a dollop of clemency by presenting the grey and imperfect reality of permanent change as the best we can hope for We recognised the ugliness of change; we embraced it, the litter-filled world where truth now lay.

Reading how other reviewers are interconnecting Parade to former work of Rachel Cusk – her essays and novels and especially her The Outline Trilogy: Outline, Transit and Kudos - it was ly unwise to pick this for a first acquaintance with her fiction, nonetheless I would strongly recommend reading Parade, if only out of selfishness, awaiting with bated breath what other readers will unearth from it, particularly on the works of art Rachel Cusk wove into the fabric of her own viscerally celebral piece of art.

A big thank you to the author, NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for granting me an ARC of this novel that will be published on 17 June 2024.2024 21th-century reviewed232 s75 comments Jaidee 652 1,355

3 "the banality of affluent suburban feminism" stars !!

Thank you to the author, Netalley, and Farrar, Strauss & Giroux for providing me with an ecopy. I am providing an honest review. This will be released June 2024.

Vignette

J, a fervent Cuskophile and aspiring Cuskologist is feeling elated. Underneath his arm is the beloved Outline trilogy as well as the devilish Second Place. He is to meet R at a Viennese cafe for a discussion, a deep and fervent discussion. He is wearing his favorite lavender scarf and as he enters the cafe he is assaulted by the most heavely scents. Anxiously, he looks around and the bakery is full. Goodness gracious ! There is a painter, a writer, a poet, a sculptor, a film director and a few of each. Mostly white affluent women by their attire and a couple of goateed men that sort of look women. They look forlorn, ever suffering, put upon. Pouting and grimacing and leering. The waitress comes across to greet me. Are you the doodler G ? You are expected. She loves my lavendar scarf. No no I am J ! The Cuskophile. She grimaces. There are no tables here for you...all are taken by G. The Gs stare. I am meeting R. She points to a small wobbly table. The Gs gasp and grimace. I notice the nametag of the waitress is also G. Phd in aesthestics studying the put upon genius of G.... aaaa i say.
The G next to me states where is Parade ? I don't wish to discuss Parade. A collective gasp. May I have some opera cake. The Gs have all ordered it. Pavlova please....eaten by the Gs. But but....The waitress G sneers....the desserts are for the put upon , oppressed Gs...not for the s of you. The s of me? Why yes....but wait you look off white, olive perhaps, and definitely queer, perhaps working class ? If you are nonbinary perhaps I can find you a croissant. Ummm no I am cismale but I would love the croissant. Harrumph say all the Gs even the goateed ones. A spot of tea only...just a spot and out you go....

Sparkling and intelligent prose reveal dated and currently irrelevant manufactured neurosis. Ummm my least favorite R and I hope she moves back to brilliance and effervescence.

The Gs look at me with their misplaced suspicion as I exit with my other beloved books.

three-stars-books68 s24 comments Roman Clodia2,628 3,597

The pane of glass between herself and us, between the dark of outside and the day of inside, had been broken. We recognised the ugliness of change; we embraced it, the litter-filled world where truth now lay. This grey reality, this meeting of darkness and light across shards of broken glass, was our beginning.
Cusk is astonishing! This is a book that is so thoughtful, so intentioned, so capacious and uncontainable that it's almost impossible to write a coherent review. But that's not a negative thing, I think it's a comment on how dense and intense this is, how it takes its big topics - art and representation, the nature and experience of reality and subjectivity, life and death, motherhood and identity, the 'doom' of gender, split selves and constructed narratives, liberation and confinement - and treats them with a pliable fluidity.

Other have described the form and structure, something that gives order and purpose - if not any easy 'meaning' - to the investigations here. There are images and motifs that echo and which are iterative: mirrors and reflections, visual splittings that proliferate, just as there are various artists of different genders who operate as G. The 'I' of the opening narrative becomes the 'we' of the later ones, representing, I think, the divisions of self, mind and body, possibly gender, with which the writing is concerned, but which also unify as a combined 'we' by the end.

Throughout, this challenges the conventions of the 'novel': it interrogates the concept of the narrator, of form and narrative (the third section, The Diver, is a witty replay of the annihilated narrator of the The Outline Trilogy) but also pushes past what Cusk has done before. The integration of essay- elements, some drawn from Cusk's own legitimate essays on art and female modernism, are re-purposed as part of this fiction, collapsing boundaries that are more usually upheld. This is also critically-engaged, not just in terms of art and literary theory but also their intersections with issues of capitalism and emotional commoditization.

The network of intertexts and references is wide and individual readers will bring their own prior knowledge to make these of lesser or greater significance to their interpretation and engagement with this text. I was especially struck by the centralisation of shame, something which Annie Ernaux has already demonstrated to be one of the key drivers of her own literary project, alongside desire.

This is not, I'd suggest, a book to be picked up lightly: it demands attention (and I ended up with 29 pages of Kindle annotations!) - but, for me, it's the best thing Cusk has written to date, building on her previous work but feeling purer and more directional. How exciting to see where she will go next!

Huge thanks to Farrar, Straus and Giroux for an ARC via NetGalleynetgalley59 s11 comments emma2,151 68.2k Want to read

new rachel cusk release...huge day for the most annoying girl you know

(me)arc literary-fiction non-ya ...more37 s1 comment nathan495 397

READING VLOG

The themes are the same.
The form is new.

Swirling thoughts and ideas on the battle of the sexes and artÂ’s place between the two. And then what happens when children come into frame? Guilt as adults, guilt as children, guilt carried over in living and dying, all is explored through different artists, whom of which are Georg Bazelitz, Louis Bourgeois, and Eric Rohmer. Half of the book has been previously published as short stories in The New Yorker and HarperÂ’s:

The Stuntman

The Spy

At first impenetrable, it’s a text that surprises, scares, bolts a harshness that is much coming into the world after a matinee, wondering wondering wondering where you belong if anywhere at all.29 s1 comment Paul FulcherAuthor 2 books1,549

ItÂ’s the parade that has confused everything.

Rachel Cusk’s recent novels have challenged the conventions of the novelistic form (and seemingly the patience of some readers). Her Outline trilogy (Outline, Transit and Kudos) introduced the startling technique of ‘annihilated perspective’. And Second Place was a bravura, almost Oulipan, take on Lorenzo in Taos.

And in both cases, constrained as any reader is, by the expectations of genre, even if the genre is literary fiction, the intent of her books only became clear over time, from discussions amongst readers and interviews with the author (indeed the conceit behind Second Place, which explains much of the novel, still seems to escape most critics).

Which makes me suspect that, four months before publication, Parade has still to reveal its true architecture.

Cusk is known, outside of her novelistic output, for her essays on art, female artists in particular. Two examples below which feature artists also important to Parade - the first Paula Modersohn-Becker and the second mentions Louise Bourgeois (who also played a key role in Kudos).

https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/artic...

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/07/ma...

The first section of Parade, The Architect, began life as a lecture Cusk gave in Italy (one apparently rather different the expectations of her host) and was then published as a stand-alone piece in the New Yorker, accompanied by an interview with the author.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...

https://www.newyorker.com/books/this-...

And it is fascinating to see the small changes that Cusk has made for the novel Parade (my annotations with underlining representing insertions):

At a certain point in his career the artist DG, perhaps because he could find no other way to make sense of his time and place in history, began to paint upside down. This is how I imagine it. At first sight the paintings looked as though they had been hung the wrong way round by mistake, but then the signature emblazoned in the bottom right-hand corner clearly heralded the advent of a new reality. His wife believed that with this development he had inadvertently expressed something disturbing about the female condition, and wondered if it might have repercussions in terms of his success, but the critical response to the upside-down paintings was more enthusiastic than ever, and DG was showered with a fresh round of the awards and honours that people seemed disposed to offer him almost no matter what he did.

The deletion of “this is how I imagine it” removes the explicit acknowledgement of the fictional nature of some of what follows, but thereby also separating the author Cusk from the fictional narrator.

And the switch in the cipher for the artist concerned from D to G might be a clue to the reader that this artist is in fact an imagined/novelistic take on Georg Bazelitz.

Except one key feature in the novel is to have more than one artist named G.

Whereas in the New Yorker we had:
We went for a weekend to Berlin, where there was an exhibition of the artist Louise BourgeoisÂ’s late fabric works.

Referring to the 2022 exhibition The Woven Child at the Gropius Bau, where Cusk provided a contribution to the catalogue. The novel now has it:
We went away for a weekend to another city, to see an exhibition of works by the female sculptor G.

This continues, describing the work:

The exhibition occupied the entire top floor of a grand museum, accessed by a broad walkway that circled a vast central atrium. Light cascaded from the glass ceiling down to the marble floor far below. Beyond the open doors of the entrance, where the attendant sat checking tickets, one of G’s characteristic giant cloth forms could be seen hanging in space, suspended from the ceiling – a human form without identity, without face or features. It was genderless, this floating being, returned to a primary innocence that was also tragic, as though in this dream-state of suspension we might find ourselves washed clean of the violence of gender, absolved of its misdemeanours and injustices, its diabolical driving of the story of life. It seemed to lie within the power of this G’s femininity, to unsex the human form.

Gs that follow include:

Sometimes the screams reached the window of my room in the new apartment, where I was reading about G, a late-nineteenth-century woman painter dead of childbirth at the age of thirty-one. Her nude self-portraits show her heavily pregnant, her head inclined to meet her own eyes in the image. Can the element of the eternal in the experience of femininity ever be represented as more than an internalised state? G is trying to show herself from the outside, while she experiences the dawning knowledge of her situation and its consequences. She doesnÂ’t entirely know quite what it is she has chosen: she is being led by instinct. To be led by instinct is the pre-eminent freedom attributed to male artists, and to the making of art itself. There is a self-destructive element to that instinct, and to the creative act, but in this case the cards have been dealt out in advance: G is stepping out of a relative safety and into the world of her own illegitimacy.

Referring to Paula Modersohn-Becker

One day in an exhibition I saw a painting by the Black artist G of a cathedral
[Â…]
It had struck me as small, for the reason perhaps that its subject was big. By painting a small picture of a cathedral, G appeared to be making a comment about marginality. In the eye of this beholder, the grandiosity of man was thwarted: his products could be no bigger than he was himself. What was absent from the painting was any belief in what the cathedral was. I remembered it as resembling a glowing pile of blackened embers, charged with internal heat: it seemed to belong more to nature than to man. I wondered how this same artist might have painted a mountain. The justice he brought to the cathedral was of a rare kind, was something akin to love, or pity. He would not, perhaps, have pitied a mountain in the same way.

Norman Wilfred Lewis

And, in The Spy (again the G was initially E when an extract was published in Harpers), someone I initially failed to identify:

The mother of the film-maker G did not know who her son was: his name, which had become widely known, was not in fact his real name. He had assumed it so that she should not discover what he did. While she lived she knew nothing of his illustrious career, and even after she died he maintained this alias and the habits of secrecy and disguise that came with it.

which Johanna Thomas-Corr in The Times successfully identified as Éric Rohmer

Which leaves a mysterious G which baffled the Times reviewer as well - perhaps fictional. In The Midwife:

It was well known that GÂ’s early years in the city had been wild. As time went by her circumstances had become more conventional, which everyone except her seemed to regard as a natural progression. Great success had come to her, and with it a husband and child, and money that needed to be converted into material things.

Three sections follow The Stuntman: The Midwife; The Diver; and The Spy. Three of these alternate between the story of one of the Gs, and a present day account of the narrator(s) (not necessarily the same people in each section; and who may or may not be based on Cusk, The Stuntman built around a real incident which befell Cusk in Paris).

The Diver offers a variation on this theme, set after the same exhibition seen in the narrator on The Stuntman, but here a death by suicide from a visitor has interrupted a planned day of events and lectures, and various of those involved meet to discuss what happened and also, intertwined with this, the life of the artist G (the Bourgeois stand in) who several of them knew personally.

The G of The Spy, a film-maker, film-reviewer and novelist also neatly links back to one of CuskÂ’s own dilemmas:

His began to attract notice for their striking avoidance of the word ‘I’. The memory of his novel now embarrassed him: his idea of writing had begun to falter. Of all the arts, it was the most resistant to dissociation from the self. A novel was a voice, and a voice had to belong to someone. In the shared economy of language, everything had to be explained; every statement, even the most simple, was a function of personality. He remembered how exposed he had felt as a child, as his mother steadily built a panorama of cause and effect around him. He was publicly identified with everything he did and said, as well as with what he did not do or say. Writing seemed a drastic enlargement of this predicament.

The novel contains much lyrical and profound writing on art, and in particular the condition of the female artist, echoing CuskÂ’s non-fictional writing, and indeed strays at times into the essayistic. And I suspect some of its novelistic foundations await excavation.

We had obligations and responsibilities of our own. We travelled for work. In a northern city, in our free time, we went to a museum. It was late in the day, half an hour before closing, and we decided to see the temporary exhibition that was on display. We were surprised that we knew nothing about the artist but in fact there was nothing to know: he was virtually anonymous. For centuries his work had been mistaken for that of a far more famous artist of the same school, and once the misappropriation had been acknowledged his activities lay too far back in time to be reconstructed. There were only the paintings themselves in which to look for clues. The paintings were interiors and streetscapes. They possessed a great eeriness that was partly the result of their manufacture by an unknown hand and partly that of the strangeness of what they saw. They were often scenes in which apparently nothing was happening and where the basic formality of the captured moment was absent. In one, for instance, a middle-aged woman was sitting alone in an empty room reading a book. The room was full of a bare light but the windows behind her were dark: it was night-time. She was fleshy, well dressed, self-absorbed. This woman was alone in a way that was nearly impossible to represent – it might have been captured, for instance, on a security camera. Immersed in being herself, she was indifferent to how she was seen. This indifference was oddly familiar to us. How had someone observed her in that way, alone?

It was only after several moments that we noticed a face in one of the windows behind her. It was the face of a small child standing outside in the darkness. He was looking in at her but she didnÂ’t know he was there. She didnÂ’t care enough to know: he didnÂ’t matter to her. Yet he wanted something, was waiting out there in the dark for something. He wanted her to turn around and see him. In another painting of the same room, again at night, there was now a different woman sitting in the chair. She was leaning toward the dark window so that we could only see her back. On the other side of the window there was again the face of the little child alone in the darkness. The woman was waving at the child through the glass, her hand and face almost pressed to it, the chair nearly toppling with her enthusiasm. The child was smiling. We were told that this was the only example in this school of painting of a woman tipped forward in her chair to look through a window. But we had already recognised the rarity of love.

Pending the verdict of time this didnÂ’t quite live up to Second Place for me, but not did Second Place itself on a first reading, but still another excellent novel from a truly creative author.

Thanks to the publisher via Netgalley for the ARC.2024 net-galley28 s7 comments Maxwell1,261 10.1k

Told in four nonlinear sections, Cusk’s latest novel stretches what the form and function of a novel is and can be. We move between various artists all referred to simply as ‘G’, while sifting between first and third person narratives.

While exploring themes of art/artistry, creation, motherhood, family, gender, bodies, space, and much, much more, Cusk seems to be asking more questions than answering them.

-Why do we make art?
-How does parenthood inflict upon or uplift the act of creation?
-Is it better to be the seer or the seen?
-Is reality something we observe, experience, or create?

The joy in this book is the attention it demands. I have just finished reading it, and I will need to sit with this one for a while. Along my reading journey I would constantly flip back and forth between sections, rereading chunks to try and process what she was saying, and finding the many parallels between the various sections.

I underlined, I notated, I struggled but I enjoyed it. I think a quick reading of this would do it a disservice, and yet you may need one quick pass to capture the whole, then a more meditative return to it to glean whatÂ’s below the surface. passing through an art gallery and stopping occasionally to ponder what catches your eye. Next visit, you might find something else to ruminate on.

IÂ’m sure IÂ’ll revisit this again in the future. Cusk is one I respect, admire and in awe of while being confounded by and encouraged to go deeper.arc29 s Doug2,257 784

3.5, rounded up.

Amongst contemporary novelists I seemingly tend to favor female writers from the UK who stretch the limits of what literature can do: Deborah Levy, Ali Smith, Sarah Moss ... and most recently Rachel Cusk as well, who I feel is perhaps the most impenetrable and murky of these. Her new work is alternately confounding and intriguing, and I always feel after reading her that I have missed a goodly portion of what she has been trying to articulate - and that I should immediately reread her to try to see if I can put it all together.

Much of her work depends upon both a vast knowledge of her own biography and at least a rudimentary understanding of contemporary art and philosophy, which I do NOT possess. Thankfully, due to other GR readers, most notably the Fulcher brothers, the heavy lifting on this one has already been done in that regard!

This book is divided into four sections of more or less equal length - the first, and most difficult to penetrate, stands as an overture or preamble to the work as a whole, in which she provides snippets of narrative, some of which are autobiographical in nature (a story of being inexplicably attacked by a woman on the street, which actually happened to Cusk in Paris) with four or five brief tales concerning various artists, all given the nomenclature of 'G'- some of whom are recognizable, others whom may or may not be fictional.

Sections 2 and 4 alternate between two narratives, while the 3rd is a self-contained story of a group of people enjoying an alfresco dinner and discussing the aftermath of a suicide that occurred in an art gallery earlier that day, that had been one of the stories alluded to in the first section. These are more recognizable as actual narratives, rather than the more fanciful lectures that constitute other portions of the book, and indeed were published previously as essays. These cover a wide range of topics, but mainly focus on the nature of art itself, and particularly the possibilities and constraints for a female artist, as well as the nature of life and love itself.

Of these, the final section - which alternates two stories - one of yet another G artist, the other of which centers on a first-person narrator who appears to be Cusk herself - and their reactions to the impending deaths of their respective mothers, packed the most impact. Having just gone through the death of my own mother two years ago, this section hit me the hardest and thus tended to be the most winning and relatable for me.

I am still not quite sure what it all adds up to, but I appreciate that Cusk makes me work hard towards an understanding, and stretches me to think outside my normal parameters. I am quite confident that this will attract as many awards and detractors as her previous Booker-nominated Second Place, and I look forward to seeing what other readers can parse from it.

My heartfelt thanks to publishers F S & G and Netgalley for providing me with an ARC in exchange for this honest review.29 s6 comments Rachel280 34

Cusk’s latest work ventures down a well-trodden path, one that questions the viability of a woman being both an artist and a mother and the commodification of the female body. No, these themes aren’t new, not to Cusk and certainly not to modern literature. But it’s her play with form, with structure, and her unique ability to craft a sentence that’ll stop you in your tracks that prevents Parade from immediately being relegated to “been there, done that” territory.

The novel—some may feel linked stories or vignettes is a better description—is divided into four sections. Three of the four involve alternating narratives, one written in third person and focusing on an artist named G, and the the other told in first person. The first person accounts sometimes engage with the art of G, though G is an enigma and changes gender, race, and medium of art throughout.

Through the creation and reception of the ever-changing GÂ’s art, we witness the barriers to being a woman and an artist, or a mother and an artist, or a daughter and an artist. ThereÂ’s a lot at play here and my own understanding of its meaning is constantly shifting. Love, death, childhood, all of the usual themes are present, but CuskÂ’s methods are anything other than usual.

On a sentence level, I often feel CuskÂ’s writing delicately straddles a line between genius and gibberish. I felt Second Place contained more of the latter and Outline the former. Thankfully, Parade belongs in the Outline camp, I was highlighting sentences left and right.

ItÂ’s a book that defies easy summary and demands to be reread. I think every reader will come away with different meanings and interpretations and IÂ’m very eager to read otherÂ’s thoughts. 17 s4 comments s.penkevich1,223 9,679 Want to read

Gonna parade to the bookstore for a new Cusk novel, thats for sure.16 s Krista1,469 731

Mauro sprang to his feet as we approached and congratulated us on finding the restaurant. IÂ’m afraid the others might not solve the riddle so quickly, he said. ItÂ’s typical of this cityÂ’s attitude to fashion, he said, that the most desirable meeting place should also be impossible to find. Not so impossible, Julia observed, since they found it. ItÂ’s the parade that has confused everything.
Obviously, Rachel Cusk is smarter and more sophisticated than I am, and despite the fact that I am always struck by how wonderfully constructed her sentences are, I’ve only ever given one of her novels (Second Place) more than three stars: the wonderful sentences stack up and up into something that whooshes right over my head. Because Parade is primarily about art and artists, I’ll use the analogy that I much prefer Impressionism to Realism (in both painting and literature), and while I might appreciate elements of Abstract art on an intellectual level, it doesn’t speak to my soul; and what Cusk is doing in her work to “disturb and define the novel” strikes me as closest to the Abstract. This novel that reads a series of essays or vignettes — a shifting parade of artists, all named “G” — repeats themes of doubling and mirroring, death and violence, having children and losing parents, and it all seems to add up to a commentary on gender and artmaking — and I say “seems” because coming right out with a point seems to be beside the point (which is not a fatal flaw, just hard for me to connect with). As an intellectual exercise, I am enlarged for having picked this up, but when it comes down to taste, this isn’t exactly my thing. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

It occurred to me in the time that followed that I had been murdered and yet had nonetheless remained alive, and I found that I could associate this death-in-life with other events and experiences, most of which were consequences in one way or another of my biological femininity. Those female experiences, I now saw, had usually been attributed to an alternate or double self whose role it was to absorb and confine them so that they played no part in the ongoing story of life. a kind of stuntman, this alternate self took the actual risks in the manufacture of a fictional being whose exposure to danger was supposedly fundamental to its identity. Despite having no name or identity of her own, the stuntman was what created both the possibilities and the artificiality of character. But the violence and the unexpectedness of the incident in the street had caught my stuntman unawares.
Cusk has written before about having been “brained” by a strange woman in Paris, and Parade would seem to be an expansion (in themes and format) of the short story she had based on that event, “The Stuntman”. Rotating between third person accounts of various artists (G the painter whose style evolved into painting upside-down landscapes, prompting a female novelist to lament, “G was not the first man to have described women better than women seemed able to describe themselves.” — or G the sculptor who made amorphous figures out of fabric, “It seemed to lie within the power of this G’s femininity, to unsex the human form.” — or the Black artist G, “By painting a small picture of a cathedral, G appeared to be making a comment about marginality. In the eye of this beholder, the grandiosity of man was thwarted: his products could be no bigger than he was himself .”) and various first person accounts (of everyday life and travel and family demands), this is more about the artists’ common humanity than what they created. (Many of the artists who appear, despite all be named “G” in the novel, are identifiable as real people by their work, but masking their identities seems to be in keeping with Cusk’s attempts to write herself, as the author, out of her novels). There is no overall plot, but the episodes recounted reinforce themes of gender disparity, artistic vision, and family dynamics. Again: Cusk has much to say and her sentences are masterful —


• Perhaps men had always painted nudes in the same way as they committed violence – to prove that their courage had not been damaged by morality and need.

• Not to be understood is effectively to be silenced, but not understanding can in its turn legitimise that silence, can illuminate one’s own unknowability. Art is the pact of individuals denying society the last word.

• Something had changed: somehow she had become identifiably female. This was not a sexual but a social femininity, offered to her as a form of weakness.

• Psychologists tell us that little children are proud of their own shit, and enjoy showing it to other people, until they are informed that their shit is disgusting and should be hidden, and I suddenly wondered whether artists somehow never got this message and kept on being proud of their shit and wanting to show it to people.

• A woman artist marries a male artist because she sees her ambitions mirrored in him. She thinks that because he’s an artist he’ll let her be an artist – she thinks he’s the one guy who will understand her. But a male artist wants a slave, and when he marries a woman artist he gets the bonus of a slave who thinks he’s a genius.
Two of the artists that Cusk writes about seem to be achieving in their preferred media the “effaced narrator” that Cusk strives for in her writing. There is the painter, G: “She painted a number of big oils that showed a seamless, almost featureless surface, quietly undulating the surface of the sea. They seemed to hang mutely and pacifically between death and life. They proposed something non-human, a spiritual quest.” And the film-maker, G:

His style, so uninterfering, drew attention to itself without meaning to. He rarely, for instance, showed his characters in close-up, believing that this was not how human beings saw one another. His films had no particular aesthetic. They often took place in public spaces, and his characters seemed barely to notice that they were being watched. They wore ordinary clothes and rarely looked at the camera. They were absorbed in their own lives. For those accustomed to the cameraÂ’s penetration of social and physical boundaries and the strange authority of its prying eye, this absence of what might be called leadership was noticeable. People were often baffled or even angered by his films. They expected a storyteller to demonstrate his mastery and control by resolving the confusion and ambiguity of reality, not deepening it.
These two creations (an “almost featureless” painting and a film without a narrative that deepens the ambiguity of reality) are fairly analogous to how I perceived the construction of the “almost featureless” Parade — and that may very well be genius and genre-defining, but personally, I need more there there; whoosh, right over my head.
2024 arc netgalley13 s4 comments Kasa Cotugno2,497 529

Rachel Cusk continues to deconstruct the traditional form of a novel, daring the reader to regard this collection as a single work unified by explorations of art in many forms. The central characters are not necessarily the artists, or their work, but those surrounding or attendant to them. The effect of love, either its reality or its lack, is paramount, even that between parent and child. A masterwork.arc genre-class-of-its-own subj-art ...more11 s1 comment Katia N624 849 Read

I need to “sleep” on it and see how it settles down with me. But it is the most fragmentary of hers I’ve read, more essayistic and closer to her Trilogy rather than “The Second place”. I preferred “the place”. Also at first glance, it packs more ideas per line but is less sophisticated on sentence level. It didn’t help to my impression of overall coherence that 3/4 of the book were published earlier as separate pieces in different places. However, the last story “A Spy” that I have not seen before was the most impressive part. 10 s7 comments Troy215 145 Read

Cusk is the queen of deeply analytical and reflective fiction writing. Her sentences are sharp philosophical musings that demand full attention from the reader - I will admit this is a reason I need to reread the second half. The thematic philosophical elements that Cusk enacts are the backbone of the narrative which takes its form as a novel told in alternating stories and characters, more or less. The first half of this book I found to be more engaging than the second, personally, but I said, I need to reread the second half at fuller attention so I can get more out of it. Really intriguing questions asked of the nature of reality, identity, art and representation of life through art and the self, gender, and so so much more. ThereÂ’s a dinner scene which to me was a huge callback to Outline. I think a good handful of prior readers of CuskÂ’s work will find a lot to love of this newest one, as well, as long as they are in the ride for a thinker. I donÂ’t really think readers coming to Cusk for the first time should start here.9 s cass krug160 172 Read

me yapping about rachel cusk and this book for 50 minutes because i could not distill my thoughts into a written review
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