The different stories somehow don’t exist in separate compartments, and they don’t offer, at the point when they’re dropped, any neat lift of completion. It sounds as if I’m describing a succession of linked short stories, but that isn’t quite how it reads. In Transit, for instance, we hear from an ex-boyfriend (he lost a dog and got into a relationship) from a writer who reads with Faye at a festival (he was tormented by his cruel stepfather) from a student who comes to her for tutorials (she is obsessed with the life of an American painter) and from her builder (his father mocked him when he built a beautiful house in the woods at home in Poland). In her last novel, Outline, about a woman teaching creative writing in Greece, and now in Transit, where the same woman, Faye, is back in London, making a new life for herself after a separation from her husband, she has developed a radically new novel form that works triumphantly, I think, with just what’s distinctive in her writing personality.īoth these novels are constructed as a sequence of stories which are only connected through being told to Faye. One never feels her writing is trying to be liked, and in the past her memoirs of motherhood and of divorce have been both loved and hated by her readers, because of what’s abrasive and singular in them. Messages from Delphi, after all, were pretty generalised, as if they were generated randomly.Ĭusk is always an exciting writer: striking and challenging, with a distinctive cool prose voice, and behind that coolness something untamed and full of raw force, even rash. And yet, because it’s positioned there at the very entrance to the novel, we also know that the prophecy speaks to her sensibility, it really does open up the future for her.

The email is obviously generated by a mere algorithm, as the narrator grasps at once she isn’t fooled. The “movements of the planets” represent “a zone of infinite reverberation to human destiny” the portentousness is absurd, and stirring. “An astrologer emailed me to say she had important news for me concerning events in my immediate future.” How inspired and witty, to begin with a spam email – and carrying a message that sounds as momentous as if it might have come from the oracle at Delphi. Rachel Cusk’s new novel is tremendous from its opening sentence.

Transit rachel cusk