
Outline
The Outline Trilogy, Book 1
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Narrated by:
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Kate Lock
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By:
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Rachel Cusk
A luminous, powerful novel that establishes Rachel Cusk as one of the finest writers in the English language.
A man and a woman are seated next to each other on a plane. They get to talking - about their destination, their careers, their families. Grievances are aired, family tragedies discussed, marriages and divorces analyzed. An intimacy is established as two strangers contrast their own fictions about their lives.
Outline is a novel in 10 conversations. Spare and stark, it follows a novelist teaching a course in creative writing during one oppressively hot summer in Athens. She leads her students in storytelling exercises. She meets other visiting writers for dinner and discourse. She goes swimming in the Ionian Sea with her neighbor from the plane. The people she encounters speak volubly about themselves: their fantasies, anxieties, pet theories, regrets, and longings. And through these disclosures, a portrait of the narrator is drawn by contrast, a portrait of a woman learning to face a great loss.
Outline takes a hard look at the things that are hardest to speak about. It brilliantly captures conversations, investigates people’s motivations for storytelling, and questions their ability to ever do so honestly or unselfishly. In doing so it bares the deepest impulses behind the craft of fiction writing. This is Rachel Cusk’s finest work yet and one of the most startling, brilliant, original novels of recent years.
©2014 by Rachel Cusk (P)2014 by W. F. Howes, Ltd.Listeners also enjoyed...




















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The narrator reads with lots of inflection and supposed meaning, and yet, somehow, the effect is of cool distance.
It took me a while to figure out that the book was going nowhere, that we were entreated to find, if not meaning, at least some interest in so many conversations.
I stuck it through to the end.
Might it be better in print?
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The tone of the narrator is perfect
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Difficult and Better in Print
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Fine
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Unenjoyable listen
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Excruciating
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Am I missing it?
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Not even an editor could help this one . . .
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This feels like a writing exercise the writer in the story gives her students. Yes, it is well written - but what's the point other than any number of disconnected and barely interesting musings about the lives and experiences and idiosyncrasies of people you will even remotely begin to care about? According to one snippet, the "novel about writing and talking, about self-effacement and self-expression, about the desire to create and the human art of self-portraiture in which that desire finds its universal form." Oh, please, that sounds as pretentious as the novel was flat.
Maybe I'm just not seeing it - someone help me, please - enlighten me. It's happened before. I initially hated Annie Proulx' The Shipping News. When reading it again years later, I absolutely loved it. Still, for the life of me, I cannot see anything that I might have missed here. Again, enlighten me.
Barely an outline
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Depressing and grim.
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