Greek Lessons by Han Kang

        Characters neither see nor speak evil in the most recent translation of Han Kang’s oeuvre, Greek Lessons. The story focuses on two central characters, one being a mute woman whose only son is being taken away because her mutism has made her, in the eyes of the courts, unfavourable relative to her ex-husband. She shares a mutual vulnerability with the other main character, her Greek teacher, who is going blind and needs to memorize the text of his lessons because he can no longer make out small words. Their conditions create between them a tender bond and their relationship becomes the central driving force of the novel.

Told alternatingly between them, the narrative reveals small moments without ever fully disclosing the timeline, causation, or outcome of these characters’ strangely joined fates. Despite being stylistically rich, there’s a kind of terseness to the narrative that imbues the novel with a somewhat mysterious and ethereal voice. Admittedly, I found myself struggling to navigate the gaps in the story, projecting motivations and narratives that dwelt beneath the surface, particularly in the early stages of the Greek teacher’s sections. 

For example, about a third of the way through the novel there is a section where the Greek teacher appears to be writing a letter to the mute woman in the second person: “You watched my lips intently,” he writes, “then met my eyes with a dazed look” (41). However, he’s actually writing letters to a lost love who was deaf. The moment is a tragic one because the Greek instructor then tells his love that “at some point we would live together, and that I would go blind. That when I was unable to see, we would need spoken words” (41). It’s a moment riddled with pain. His insistence on spoken language becomes a form of betrayal to his young love and an ignorant oversight of her feelings. He admits, of course, “You couldn’t have known how often I longed to turn back time, how much I wanted to take back those foolish words” (41). Kang offers a surprising parallel, though, in the future of the novel. Temporarily temporally confused, I found myself making connections across the narratives. The moment above could be transplanted into the future where the Greek instructor falls in love with a mute woman. There are (at least) two possibilities here. On the one hand, we can see the seeds of the relationship’s destruction early on: eventually words will fail them. The more optimistic reading is that the Greek instructor has learned from his past and, driven by his regret, is ready to accept a relationship without the spoken word.

In addition to the emotional charge of the moment, the passage is elevated through Kang’s lush descriptions: 

Your face turned cold and hard and you threw me out of the workshop, where the scent of the wood had been intensified by the drizzle. You wouldn’t see me anymore, of course wouldn’t kiss me, wouldn’t let me bury my face in your long black hair, the sweetly scented nape of your neck, or your delicate collarbone, wouldn’t let me slide my ardent hand under your shirt to feel your heartbeat, steadfastly refused to see me even when I loitered in front of your house from the early hours, slammed the workshop door shut whether my fingers got caught or not, and eventually, one night a few weeks later, punched my frantically beseeching face. (41).

The heartbreak of the moment—those small moments that devastate us—rings so true in Kang’s description. Even the construction of the sentence, a prolonged, caesura-rich expanse emulates that experience, that longing for a connection rendered remote.

I have a profound admiration for authors who write profoundly different books. As much as I love, say, Kafka, all of his books are essentially the same. Not so for Kang; all of her books have a different flavour. That said, Greek Lessons does have certain echoes of her other works: the mutism of The Vegetarian, the flashes of second person narration from Human Acts, and the poetic and linguistic precision of The White Book all find home here. What makes the project even more intriguing to me is the context in which it exists. There were controversies in Deborah Smith’s translation of The Vegetarian, and Kang has found an additional translator here, but it’s interesting in that I’m dealing with a book written in Korean, translated into English, which deals with characters translating Korean into German, German into Korean, Korean into Greek, and vice versa, with a character who can’t vocalize words from the language. The layers of translation form their own complex network of puzzles for the possibilities of language.

Kang seems to reflect on this throughout the text, as well. There are a number of reflections on the structure and vocabulary of the Greek language. For instance, there are some considerations about how in Greek the form of words changes based on its role in the sentence, hence you must know the complete idea before you opt to meander your way through step-by-step; it’s a language that requires wholeness. Kang offers the following musing:

A language as cold as a pillar of ice.

A language that does not wait to be combined with any other prior to use, a supremely self-sufficient language.

A language that can part the lips only after irrevocably determining causality and manner. (16)

That final line offers, perhaps, an avenue for explaining the main character’s lack of speech. How can one speak without having complete knowledge of what to articulate?

Other grammatical reflections circulate around the “middle voice”, bringing agency into question. Kang gives credence to Wittgenstein’s adage that “the limits of my language mean the limits of my world” — the linguistic structure of our language gives rise to the philosophical possibilities we can explore. One phrase uses the middle voice to explain that “truth destroys foolishness” and the Greek teacher questions its validity in his letter: ”When truth destroys foolishness, is truth necessarily altered by the encounter, influenced by the very thing it has destroyed? Does a fissure form in foolishness when it destroys truth? When my foolishness destroyed love, if I claim that that foolishness was equally undone in the process, would you call that sophistry?” It all comes back, he notes, to “Voice. Your voice. The sound [he] has not forgotten in more than twenty years.” 

As you can probably see, there’s a wistful romance (in both the literary and conventional sense) that underpins the novel as a whole, though it exists in a melancholic register. There are several gorgeous sequences of wandering (again: lack of purpose, perhaps) that are all seasoned with sadness. The student walks through the streets and we are provided with the following passage:

The lily magnolia, lit by the glow from the street lights, scatters its bruised petals to the winds. She walks past the voluptuous blooms straining the branches and through the spring night air, which is thick with an anticipatory sweetness of crushed petals. She occasionally raises her hands to her face, despite the knowledge that her cheeks are dry. (17).

The beauty of the images are consistently undercut. The petals are “bruised”, the glow of street lights “scatters” them. The “voluptuous blooms” are “straining the branches” before the mention of the petals being “crushed.” That ability to balance the lush and the grim is a nicely crafted approach. When Kang references the character’s cheeks being dry, we get the sense of the impossibility of expression; beyond her mutism, even her body refuses to communicate her interiority. Just a few pages later the narrator states: “If only she’d made a map of the route her tears used to take. / If only she’d used a needle to engrave pinpricks, or even just traces of blood, over the route where the words used to flow” (19).

Almost halfway through the book later, the mute woman is on another journey at night. Her son has gone to bed and she wanders the city streets. It’s a beautiful sequence, and its culmination is a masterful move:

When midnight is near, she discovers that she has arrived at the entrance to an unfamiliar cinema. The lights are off in the booth; all the tickets for the final film have been sold. Without realizing what she is doing she approaches the booth’s translucent acrylic partition. She brings her lips close to its eight black holes, then flinches away. As if a terrifying force might blast out of those neat, orderly holes and forcibly aspirate her voice from her lips and throat. (89).

I love how ominous this moment is. The image is perfect. Perfect. Perfect. Perfect. Her being barred from the seeing the film—locked out of the conversation—is a nice touch, but that image of the booth with all those big holes for speaking into takes on a monstrous quality. It’s like a haunting invitation of mouths, which she almost brings herself to kiss. Their vampiric quality, the idea that it could forcibly “aspirate her voice from her lips and throat” is incredibly powerful to me. It’s a perfectly climactic moment to end the scene and one of the most memorable images from the book.

There’s a sense in which poetry flows through the characters. Kang’s juxtaposition of images craft the mood well. In one scene, we have a list of ‘red’ details:

“A rose.”

 

“The inner red of a watermelon, blooming like a flower, when you split it open.”

 

“The night of Buddha’s Birthday.”

 

“Snowflakes.”

 

“The face of a woman long gone.”

 

“I won’t be waking from a dream and opening my eyes;

the world is what will close when I wake from a dream.” (146).

“The world is what will close when I wake from a dream.” Parse that sentence. Kang’s grammar, even in translation, is a surprise. The fact that that comes at the opposite of a rose (famous for opening into a beautiful bloom), a closing of the world outside of a dream adds layers to the text.

The parallels that run throughout the text create a tightly wrought novel. The evocation of a dream above is not the first. In fact, the Greek instructor recounts a recurring dream that also draws parallel to the mute woman’s walks. He notes that he had “ceaselessly recurring dreams [he]’d had since [his] teens, when [he] began [his] new life in Germany” (64). He notes, “In these dreams it was always dusk, I was on a bus, and the shopfront signs in the street outside bore unfamiliar writing that was neither my mother tongue nor German. My dream-self always wanted to alight from this wrong bus I’d taken, but didn’t know which bus was the right one, or how to get to another bus stop. Nor could I recall my original destination. There was nothing I could do but stay where I was, sitting at the back, staring out into the streets that were darkening moment by moment” (64). The futility and aimlessness of his journey and his own lack of control travelling on bus routes is a nice reflection of the inevitability of his situation. He is going blind (hence the dream being at dusk), and it’s out of his control (hence navigating the world at the whim of others). The closer you look, the more appropriate each of Kang’s artistic choices are. 

 

What’s surprising, perhaps, is just how similar the Greek instructor and the student are, though in a distorted form. Consider some of the key factors above: busses and the lack of mobility, the lack of vision that characterizes the Greek instructor’s world, and so on. The student has a moment where”sleep evades her. She has goosebumps on her arms and at the back of her neck from the aggressive air conditioning” (90). When she looks out the window, she sees a bus. She then sees a range of other fragmentary images: “Muffins and slices of cake in various colors [...] displayed in the clear-glass fridges of dazzlingly illuminated cafes” (90), and a fake diamond necklace at a jewlery show, “an enormous poster covering one side of a building” (90) for a film (evoking her other night walk, too). She then talks about what it was like “after losing words” (91). Kang notes that “there were times when that world rose up in front of her eyes, overlaying whatever scene was already there” (91). If the world closes when she wakes from a dream, here we have a world opening. It’s also a contrast to the Greek instructor’s experience: while his world diminishes, for her there is an “overlay”---a doubling of the world rather than a restriction. And yet, when she rides a bus she gets to the academy and there’s a “long corridor that led to the classroom” (91). It feels restrictive. That said, the imagery is still lush: “When gazing at afternoon sunlight, quiet and trees, leaves, the patterns of yellow light between them. When walking beneath the neon signs and colored bulbs that flashed noisily, as if it fit to burst” (91). First, note how the narration retains visual imagery that would be inaccessible to the Greek teacher. Second, note how there is no subject to these sentences. Neither ‘she’ nor ‘her’ are any part of the experience. The grammatical constructions have removed her, alienated her. The passage culminates with the idea that “Once she lost words, all such scenery became fragmented, each piece distinct and separate—like the colored paper inside the kaleidoscope, shifting silently, repeatedly and in concert to form new patterns” (91). The scenery became fragmented, just like the sentence fragments that present them. And yet, there’s hope for more—the dash amends the loss of images with even more lush imagery.

I liked Greek Lessons, and it’s the kind of razor-thin book that offers more rewards the more attention it is paid. Even in writing this review, I feel like new details have revealed themselves, blooming open. It’s that fine attention to detail that is becoming less feasible for the Greek instructor to such tragic effect.

Take the time. Read—this book, all books, the world—with care. It’s well worth it.

Brown Girls by Daphne Palasi Andreades

  Brown Girls, a novel by Daphne Palasi Andreades, does something that I have never seen in a full-length book: it narrates from a second-person plural position. “We” go to fancy schools, or not. “We” marry white men, or not. “We” have children, or not. It’s an interesting approach that both individuates experiences of the multiple main characters and collapses their individuality into a collective identity, despite their differences. “Brown girls” encompasses any number of Pakistani, Indian, Dominican, Puerto Rican, Mexican, Trinidadian, Thai girls, and so on, yet Andreades captures the similarities that unite their experiences.

The story can be summarized fairly quickly: Brown girls grow up in Queens, New York. Brown girls’ paths diverge as they go to different high schools and universities. Brown girls’ brothers deal drugs and go to jail. Brown girls marry white boys and have affairs with old flames. Brown girls’ cousins die in a car crash and brown girls are haunted by dreams of her. Brown girls have sexual awakenings about the perfect white Jenny. Brown girls grow up, have kids, and brown girls die. Far be it from me to assess the authenticity of a brown woman’s experience, but the whole story feels extremely real. I feel like I’ve seen each of the tropes in the book in the real world more than once, and the specific events and variations give the book a universality that rings true and is, often, heartbreaking.

For instance, the scene that describes the death of the brown girls’ cousin is gruesome and the account of her funeral tragic. The dreams in which she returns sting like the death of a real person. Given that we are not attached to any specific character makes it that much more surprising when these moments contain such emotive power. Imagine reading Anna Karenina without Anna Karenina—just a “we” women. When the different experiences of brown girls converge into a simultaneous voice, it’s a hotwiring of your brain. For example, in one scene, old brown girl friends are recounting the various racist experiences they’ve had. The narration reads as follows: “Alright, y’all, get this: This girl from my psych class? I kid you not, she came up to me one day and said (here, we pinch our noses to mimic her nasally voice), It must be sooooo hard being---And I said, Being what?” (82). It’s a bizarre moment to imagine the collective voice to be both listener and speaker, and moreover for the speaker to be a collective voice imitating the character in the story to which they are listening. They all pinch their noses to voice a character of a story they haven’t yet heard? Andreades pulls off a kind of magic trick, which is even more fun when there are contradictions. From sentence-to-sentence, on occasion, there are brown girls that go in different directions and yet exist on the same plane: both/neither are made one through the phrasing of the premises.

The narrative voice takes me back to some studies I did in my Master’s on Louis Althusser’s concept of interpellation: essentially, the State says, “Hey you!”, you turn around, and thus you’ve become-subject. I thought about the scene in Spartacus in which all the characters rise up and declare “I am Spartacus”, breaking the State’s conception of interpellation by producing false responses to the call of “hey you!”. Here, we have a similar approach through the collective “we” that allows the brown girls to escape the limitations on their identity imposed by State apparatuses. It’s material for a future essay—you heard it here first!

One of the most powerful lines in the book is when some of the brown girls in the book abandon their business degrees to pursue art (cough. Can’t think of a real-world corollary, nope) and actually become successful in it. The artists then become representatives for their respective races, expected to speak on behalf of their communities, and so on. Andreades lists a number of the questions they are asked and ends the chapter as follows: “We are so visible that we have become invisible. Odd that in this moment we dreamt of, we are faceless” (108). The book exposes that there are different brands of erasure. Erasure by others or erasure within a community—with two very different results. Again: future essay to follow.

The contradictions within their identities also seem to be produced by their families. I’ll offer a lengthy passage here to demonstrate the disconnect between the main characters’ experiences, the reception they get from the their peers, and the reception from their parents:

We love the way the lead sluices the page like butter in a hot pan. We join our classmates and teachers to take customary, nerve-racking walks around enormous art studios to view everyone’s work. When our teachers stop at our portraits, they remark, It’s all in the eyes, and we watch our classmates nod in agreement. We bubble at their approval.
        Some of us are voice majors, and we prepare ourselves to sing French and Italian arias by warming up our larynxes. La la la LA la la laaaa! Shift smoothly from one key to the next, higher and higher. We are sopranos, altos, prima donnas in training. Open your mouths like this, our teachers say. Dutifully, we reposition our tongues. Even in song, we become fluent in the language of our colonizers. Our English, impeccable. Our mother tongues, if we were taught them at all, become atrophied muscles, half-remembered melodies.
        Our parents, who don’t care for capital A Art, or the pursuit of beauty, or so we believe, say, We don’t understand, slow down, can you explain it again? when they ask about our days. And when we see the confusion clouding their eyes, we feel powerful. Reckless. Mean. (45)

The idea of “bubbling” at the approval of peers, to find that sense of community after being somewhat ousted offers that glint of hopefulness (even if the art teacher’s assessment is somewhat cursory). Art is presented as a bittersweet experience: initially seen as freedom. It becomes a way of co-opting brown girls into colonization, as “we” see when “we become fluent in the language of our colonizers” when singing in their form. The grandiose ideas of art are dismissed by parents, and it becomes a double-edged sword. That twist at the end of the passage where parents’ confusion is turned against them by children who can be reckless and mean in response encapsulates that complex and tense relationship between immigrant parents and their children, and the conflict in their dreams, in such a concise way.

You may also have gotten a sense from the passage above that Andreades’ work incorporates a great deal of evocative imagery. In fact, the first passage in the book is a wonderful representation of the lively and imagistic voice of the work. The book begins with the following passage to set the scene:

We live in the dregs of Queens, New York, where airplanes fly so low that we are certain they will crush us. On our block, a lonely tree grows. Its branches tangle in power lines. Its roots upend sidewalks where we ride our bikes before they are stolen. Roots that render the concrete slabs uneven, like a row of crooked teeth. In front yards, not to be confused with actual lawns, grandmothers string laundry lines, hang bedsheets, our brothers’ shorts, and our sneakers scrubbed to look brand-new. Take those down! our mothers hiss. This isn’t back home. In front yards grow tomatoes that have fought their way through the hard earth. (3).

The specific details of the scene are limited, but chosen with a curatorial eye. The image of the tree and its sprawling roots work as an effective symbol for the different strands of the brown girls’ lives branching outward, as well. Andreades also uses language in a clever way to note that “yards” are not to be confused with “actual lawns” — there’s a nuance to the language that is worth recognition. The passage instructs the audience to pay attention to these minor differences in word choice. It’s a great way to start the novel.

Actually, the ending of the novel does an exceptional job with its imagistic qualities as well. Andreades presents a conception of the afterlife, alternatingly involving exploding stars, decomposition, becoming fragrant magnolia trees, existing on clouds, existing on digital clouds as “every item we’d ever ordered” (202). There’s an incantatory tone as Andreades lists all of the possibilities for brown girls after their deaths; there’s also a powerful scene in which the long-dead cousin returns in a dream as an escort to the afterlife. The list towards the end of the afterlife is gorgeous and haunting: “We discover that we are now a pool of water within a cave, black and unknowingly deep, the translucent onion skins that cling to our grown daughters’ or our granddaughters’ palms. We are the vertebrae of our grandparents’ curved spines” (202) and “We are the gnarled tree on the block. The one we’d biked past as children” (203). There are echoes of the opening passage, which serves as a nice bookend, of course, and I audibly gasped when Andreades wrote something that I myself have thought (and actually had a poem published about it in 2015 p.66): “Death sounds like a wind chime and a croak and the faintest whistling noise” (203). Wind chimes are the sound of death. Prove me wrong. 

Ultimately, Brown Girls is a book as unique in its narration as it is accessible and universal in its messaging. I suspect that the main audience for the book is brown girls themselves, who (I think) will see themselves written into every page, but I saw so much in here that rang true in a stylistically inventive mode. It’s very likely worth your time. “Our” time. “We” should probably read it.

 

Kudos by Rachel Cusk

  Rachel Cusk reads to me like a modern day philosopher of both aesthetics and everyday life, a philosopher who writes devastatingly penetrating novels, seemingly with very little in the way of plot. My first exposure to her was her 2021 novel Second Place, which I adored for its emotionally fraught existentialism. Wanting to devastate myself further, I decided to start my year with her 2018 release, Kudos—Never mind that it’s the third review I’ve posted this year, never mind that it’s the third book in a trilogy of which I have not read the first two. My enjoyment of the text was undiminished by my ignorance, so I suspect that the previous two books are not necessary for understanding Kudos’ episodic and conversational structure.

Kudos blurs the line between memoir and fiction. The novel’s narrator, a stand-in for Cusk herself, travels to various interviews and literary festivals in Europe and recounts her conversations with the strangers she meets along the way. The vignettes offer masterful accounts of the complexities of human hearts and interactions that pull at something inside me, either to unravel or to create new knots on which to pull.

What is most compelling to me are the contradictions in human experiences made palpable by Kudos being a book of triangles. Partway through the book, it occurred to me that there was a motif of three points playing off of one another and individuals being mediated themselves by the other two points. It read to me like Cusk applied the lessons of Harold Pinter’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech, though with a great deal of subtlety.

In one of the earliest narratives, Cusk’s seat partner on a plane is a boisterous man introduced as having “an abashed and easy confidentiality that made it clear he spoke for the purpose of entertainment rather than to arouse consternation” (10). In just a few sentences, Cusk creates a sketch that establishes vivid depths in a character that could be lifted right out of your nightmare interactions with Commerce Bros. (In fact, Cusk has a knack for offering rich characterization in just a few strokes). Her gentle evisceration of the character nonetheless retains, though, the sympathetic touch needed to engage with him authentically: “He had grown animated while he spoke and his desperate, wild-eyed demeanour had softened into the genial mask of the raconteur, I had the impression that these were stories he had told before and liked to tell, as though he had discovered the power and pleasure of reliving events with their sting removed. The skill, I saw, lay in skirting close enough to what appeared to be the truth without allowing what you actually felt about it to regain its power over you” (10). There’s a convergence of overconfidence, vulnerability, and performance that allows you that balances an uneasy revulsion with a touch of sympathy and, as a result of both, a compelling story from which you cannot look away.

From there, the man tells the story of his wife and his dog (notably a triangle). The marriage is not a happy one, exactly, and the man feels slighted by his wife and daughter. There’s a sense in which he is slighted by a family that exploits him, not that he is a particularly downtrodden figure. Everyone loves the family dog, and he feels a certain propriety over loving it. The dog is sick, though, and when his wife and daughter travel away from home for a few days they demand that he call with updates. Instead, he wrestles with the private and devastating decision of whether the dog needs to be put down. He decides yes and he has a vet come by to administer its final shot. The moment is a tormented one—largely, actually, because the main is waiting for the dog to die and is wracked by his own ignorance of whether the moment has passed. Then, without telling his family he buries the dog in the backyard and then leaves on a plane, where he encounters Cusk’s avatar. It’s a memorable story, powerful for the depths of its darkness and the clearly strained relationships between all of its human occupants. It sets that tone of contradiction, of elements fighting against one another, that seems reflective of the novel as a whole.

In fact, Cusk recounts another novelist’s story that follows a similar trajectory, but as a kind of distorted mirrored image. In the story, a married couple gets their daughter a hamster. Then, the husband and daughter bond over the hamster and inspire jealousy in the wife, Linda. She also starts to sympathize with the hamster, whose “imprisonment got increasingly on Linda’s nerves” (55). She thinks, “WHat kind of love was this, that needed the love object domesticated and locked up? And if there was love being handed out, why wasn’t she getting any?” (55). There’s a clear commentary on marriage politics and a kind of reverse Electra complex, wherein it occurs to Linda “that since their daughter had found a satisfactory companion in the hamster, her husband might have taken the opportunity to round that situation out by returning his attention to his wife, yet the opposite was the case: he could leave the child alone less than ever” (55). Linda begins to doubt his love of the hamster, and also of the daughter:

Every time she went near the cage he would leap to his feet to join her, until Linda wondered whether he was actually jealous of the hamster and was only pretending to love it as a way of keeping hold of her. She wondered whether secretly he wanted to kill it, and since she’d realised in the meantime that she felt at best ambivalent about the possibility of him resuming an interest in herself, it became important to keep the hamster alive.

I feel like Cusk looks into the darkness inside each of us, especially those internal contradictions. In this case, Linda wants to destroy the hamster as the object of affection, and yet also feels compelled to maintain it, even feeling “sorry for the hamster as the unwitting victim of the mutual narcissism of human relationships” (56). An odd parallel emerges with the hamsters. Linda “had heard that if you put two hamsters in a cage together they would end up killing each other” (56). I can’t help but see that as a reflection of her relationship with her husband, and so the triangle—as painful as it is to exist within it—is a necessity. 

The ending of the story is undecided. In one version, the author imagines that the daughter loves the hamster “so much that she sets it free” (56) and in the other “it is Linda herself who frees it, opening the cage and shooing it out of the apartment while her daughter is at school” (56). It’s interesting that both motivations lead to the same outcome for the hamster, but the malice of the latter version doubles down: “Worse still, she allows her daughter to think that she herself left the cage open by mistake that morning and that she is therefore to blame” (56). The protection towards her own ego demands such intense hatred of others’ joys; it’s an eclipse that passes over our hearts.

To help answer the question of interior motives, I’ll reappropriate and decontextualize Cusk’s own words: “the very opacity of those mysteries [...] was in itself grounds for terror, for if the world seemed full of people living evilly, without reprisal and living virtuously without reward, the temptation to abandon personal morality might arise in exactly the moment when personal morality is most significant. Justice, in other words, was something you had to honour for its own sake” (42). Ultimately, through the stories of the characters in the book, the novel as a whole reads as a kind of moral instruction, even if the lessons are ones you have to infer, rather than ones that are told to you.

When Cusk makes her way to various literary festivals, meeting her agent for drinks at the bar, talking with other authors, and shmoozing around with supposedly significant figures. The commentary the book provides on the literary world is consistently penetrating. For instance, in conversation with a publisher of Sudoku puzzles and some minor literature, we are given a glance into the world of publishing. He offers the following overview of what publishers want:

 

What all publishers were looking for, he went on – the holy grail, as it were, of the modern literary scene – were those writers who performed well in the market while maintaining a connection to the values of literature; in other words, who wrote books that people could actually enjoy without feeling in the least demeaned by being seen reading them. He had managed to secure quite a collection of those writers, and apart from the Sudoku and the popular thrillers, they were chiefly responsible for the upswing in the company’s fortune. (37)

The conversation begins with a kind of contradiction—popular, but not common; literary, but not pretentious; commercial, but not base. In response to the capitalistic reality of the industry, Cusk’s narrator

was struck by his observation that the preservation of literary values – in however nominal a form – was a factor in the achievement of popular success. In England, I said, people liked to live in old houses that had been thoroughly refurbished with modern conveniences, and I wondered whether the same principle might be applied to novels; and if so, whether the blunting or loss of our own instinct for beauty was responsible for it. (38)

The publisher then exclaims how people love “combustion” and how “you could see the whole history of capitalism as a history of combustion, not just the burning of substances that have lain in the earth for millions of years but also of knowledge, ideas, culture and indeed beauty – anything, in other words, that has taken time to develop and accrue” (38). Not that I ever stop thinking about it, but it reminds me of Zadie Smith’s saying that conservatives are arsonists. It also makes me think of the philosophy of accelerationism, of burning through as many things as possible to bring about the future more quickly. There’s a similar flavour in Cusk’s perception, voiced through the publisher, as you might find in Tom McCarthy’s work. What is being combusted? He answers:

It may be time itself [...] that we are burning. For example the English writer Jane Austen: I have observed the way in which, over the space of a few years, the novels of this long-dead spinster were used up,’ he said, ‘burned one after another as spin-offs and sequels, films, self-help books, and even, I believe, a reality TV show. Despite the meagre facts of her life, even the author herself has finally been consumed on the pyre of popular biography. Whether or not it looks like preservation [...] ‘it is in fact the desire to use the essence until every last drop of it is gone. Miss Austen made a good fire [...] but in the case of my own successful authors it is the concept of literature itself that is being combusted. (38-39).

I find the passage extraordinarily apt. Consider, for example, the culture of sequels, reboots, remakes, and so on, that we see across all artforms. There’s a cynical destruction at the core of our consumption, a kind of contradiction wherein the more something is loved the more we hate it—or at least act as if we hate it, destroying it, committing an act of sacrilege each time we turn our love into another form of consumption. And yet, he points out, there is no going back:

There was, he added, a generalised yearning for the ideal of literature, as for the lost world of childhood, whose authority and reality tended to seem so much greater than that of the present moment. Yet to return to that reality even for a day would for most people be intolerable, as well as impossible: despite our nostalgia for the past and for history, we would quickly find ourselves unable to live there for reasons of discomfort, since the defining motivation of the modern era, he said, whether consciously or not, is the pursuit of freedom from stricture or hardships of any kind. (39)

I have a fascination with nostalgia. The core of it is well-known: nostalgia is an impossibility: when we actively seek to recapture that which makes us nostalgic, it can only end in disappointment. That is already known, but what Cusk highlights really effectively is the core of the contradiction. Obtaining nostalgia is “discomfort” because “the defining motivation of the modern era [...] is the pursuit of freedom from stricture or hardships of any kind.” I think that’s such a compelling notion, as if nostalgia ties us to our history and that that is, as Joyce put it in Ulysses, “the nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” The publisher continues on, “What is history other than memory without pain?” (39).

The commentary that Cusk offers on literary festivals themselves is pretty grim, too. One of her interlocutors talks about “the inferiority of these occasions to the work that was their subject, which seemed to be circled with increasing aimlessness and never penetrated” (105). Rather than talking about literature at a deeper level, “We get to walk in the grounds [...] but we never enter the building” (105). As a result, “the purpose of festivals like this one had become less and less clear to her [...] while the personal value of books had—for her at least—increased” (105). I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the purpose of talking about books. Data would suggest that almost nobody engages with my reviews, for instance. BookTok is seemingly just a surface-level marketing of ‘what’s popular’. Where does the discourse actually happen? It’s hard to engage in conversations, especially in short-form media, since readers generally think for themselves and reading demands attention, so it’s not exactly consumer-friendly. Anyway, Cusk’s character notes that literary festivals “make a public concern out of a private pastime” and yet that very format “was spawning a literature of its own, in that many of the writers invited here excelled at public appearances while producing work she found frankly mediocre” (105). I find that’s fascinating — it’s like a literary version of Oscarbait. Extending the metaphor, she notes that “in the case of such people [...] there are only the grounds: the building isn’t there, or if it is, it’s a temporary structure that will be swept away by the next storm” (105). I find it an effective metaphor that creates a distinction in forms of literary consumption. For the speaker, she reverts to the past “landmarks of literary history” (105), and “meanwhile, the unstoppable juggernaut of commercial literary success pressed on, though she had the sense that the marriage between the two principles – commerce and literature – was not in the best health” (105) and presents a peculiar optimism that all of the notion of public taste and the commercial industry might fall apart. The global market might fall apart, but “leaving the small rock of authentic literature where it always was” (105).

While Cusk is incredibly astute with literature, she also demonstrates some great insight into visual arts. In the last third of the novel, she starts discussing an artist of whom I have distinct memories. Initially describing the artwork obliquely, when Cusk revealed the author of the text, I felt that little thrill of being right, of recognizing that it was indeed Louise Bourgeois. The way Cusk embeds an analysis of her work within the text feels organic and insightful, and it brought me back to my first exposure to her artwork: concrete clothing sprawled about the gallery. 

There’s an artistry to Cusk’s voice that encapsulates the sense of real life while simultaneously elevating the our perception of the cultural artifacts around us. In response to Louise Bourgeois’ work, Cusk offers a passage that I think is critical to a philosophy of art. She writes that “A work of art could not, ultimately, be negative: its material existence, its status as an object, could not help but be positive, a gain to the sum of what was” (181). Despite all the negativity and cynicism of peoples’ motivations throughout the book, the book itself offers something more to the spirit. Cusk continues to note that “the self-destructive novel, like the self-destructive person, was something from which in the end you remained helplessly separated, forced to watch a spectacle — the soul turning on itself — in which you were powerless to intervene” (181). I think there’s a lot of truth in this kind of assertion, and why faux-nihilistic books are often so disappointing. There needs to be something to believe in, and tearing things down is only half the battle. 

I feel like Cusk strives for that positive artwork, a “gain to the sum of what was” — the collection of stories herein comprise a kind of worldview, an aesthetics of the everyday connections we find, but elevated by allowing the characters to jump into the deep stuff. The cast of characters—from the boisterous man who put down his dog to the math-oriented tour guide trying to calculate the best way of doing tours—are all enriching in their own way. Thematically, there are connections between them that help to create a mosaic whose pieces can be read individually or collectively.

Cusk’s commentary on ‘great art’, as voiced through one of her characters, continues on to note that it “was very often brought to the service of this self-immolation, as great intelligence and sensitivity often characterised those who found the world an impossible place to live in; yet the spectre of madness was so discomfiting that it made surrender to the writing unfeasible; on stayed on one’s guard, as a child might stay on its guard against a mad parent, knowing itself ultimately alone” (182). Continuing on, Cusk comments on the various forms of honesty as presented in literature: “Negative literature [...] got much of its power through the fearless use of honesty: a person with no interest in living and hence no investment in the future can afford to be honest [...] and the same dubious privilege was extended to the negative writer” (182). It’s a premise that has been repeated ad nauseam: the subversive artist can be honest because there’s no reason to go on in the world. Cusk offers a different perspective on that honesty being “unpalatable” (183): “in a sense it went to waste, perhaps because no one cared for the honesty of someone who was jumping the ship the rest of us were stuck on” (183). Cusk herself feels entrenched in the real world and “The real honesty, of course, was that of the person who remained on board and endeavoured to tell the truth about it” (183). I love that voice from the inside that speaks truth to ourselves and offers us a mirror into our own souls.

The end of the book offers one last critique of the industry in a clever way. The final scene offers one that is seemingly so common it’s nearly a cliche: a woman walks into the water. I’m thinking in particular of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, which famously ends with its main character walking into the ocean to her death. Kudos ends with its main character walking into the water as well, evoking that idea of a self-destructive writer only to subvert it with the narrator peeing—a bodily function that helps to point towards the fundamental aliveness of the main character. It’s a surprising and amusing turn, subverting expectations and ultimately serving as an affirming end (even as it helps to destroy a famous literary trope).

Admittedly, I’ve been sitting on this review for a month. Whenever time passes, I feel it’s not my best work since the work isn’t as immediate to me. That said, I really quite like Rachel Cusk’s work, and Kudos was another worthwhile read for me. She has a particularly entrancing and distinctive voice that is well-worth engaging with, if for no other reason that it provides an aspirational version of what conversations with strangers might be.

Happy reading!