got this at the nashville airport, read in new york and finished back here in tennessee

this was disappointingly dull through the middle, it didnt have the same readability as outline and transit. i love love loved this trilogy but cusk comes across so sterile and cold in this one.... it’s almost like alright lets get this series over with. regardless, the ending to the trilogy was beautiful and i can’t wait to revisit outline

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Late in this slim volume that concludes Rachel Cusk's "Outline" trilogy, she writes "it reminds them of the possibility that it is patience and endurance and loyalty – rather than ambition and desire – that bring the ultimate rewards." I think that might be the best way to sum up my reaction to these books. I loved each one of them and I think it was patience, endurance, and loyalty that I brought to them. None of the books has a plot per se and if you had just tried to describe them to me I probably would not have thought them my cup of tea. But I loved the way she uses the books to just tell stories, stories that ring true in a way that most fiction does not. I felt like I was letting myself float in a pool as I read them. I wasn't working hard to get anywhere, instead I was letting things just happen. Probably a good life lesson. One quirk of this book is that Ms. Cusk refuses to name the place where the book takes place. This ends up creating comical lines that reminded me of "The Simpsons" who never pinned down the location of Springfield so you get a movie producer crying out "get me two tickets to the state that Springfield is in." It plays for laughs there but I did find the gymnastics here to be a little much. But knowing your exact location is probably way overrated as a means of knowing yourself. As she writes, "All that time, he said smiling, when they thought they were free, they were in fact lost without knowing it." I was happy to be lost in all three of these books. ( )

Only skim read - not engaging enough. But perhaps you needed to have read books 1 and 2 first

The individual anecdotes and scenes were okay, I guess, but the whole thing felt meandering and somewhat without point. The actual writing was excellent, but the whole seemed to me to be a lot less than the sum of its parts. ( )

Every word of this novel and the two before is different from anything else you've read, but subtly, not obviously. On the surface, you're learning what the narrator hears as she goes about her life and encounters various people, from passengers on planes to an old boyfriend, to the publicity person in this last book when the narrator, her career firmly established, is in (Portugal?) at a literary conference. People tell her their stories and she recounts them calmly, thoughtfully, without judgement, although sometimes you intuit that she believes the person is telling the truth, sometimes probably not, that probably they are rewriting the narrative to make themselves look better or victimized or powerful or simply acceptable to themselves. Almost always the atmosphere is calm, there is little drama. Even when there is conflict, the narrator tends to withdraw rather than confront. (One exception would be when her children, two boys, are at issue.) The narrator is divorced and now remarried, but her life is not under the microscope and while she mentions various experiences, it is only as they relate to the present moment. Under that smooth surface the book seethes. The sea is often present or a presence (sometimes in a painting, sometimes as a memory, sometimes for real), dangerous but embracing. Stop and think now. What is a woman in the eyes of men? In their own eyes as a result of not considering other options? A vessel. Passive. But also . . . dangerous. The sea. THE NOVEL MODELS WHAT WE DO AS WOMEN. Listen. Empathize. Absorb. Reflect. In this last novel the sea is a presence from which the town has cut itself off, building huge warehouses, docks, a fenced military post, so that one can only get to the sea by car. For a port to cut the people from the sea, is to cut them from nourishment. Pretty much every aspect of this novel that you choose to focus on will take you somewhere and I'm not sure I'm equal to the task of describing the effect the book had on me. It is, make no mistake, a meditation on what women experience, endure and suffer in the world of men. Through the course of the three books this becomes clear, not angrily, not resignedly, but acknowledged. Towards the end of this novel the woman who translated one of the narrator's novels says, after describing how her husband deprives her of even her child's respect, carefully and subtly and inside the law, "There is a passage in one of your books . . . where you describe enduring something similar, and I translated it very carefully and with great caution as if it were something fragile that I might mistakenly break or kill, because these experiences do not fully belong to reality and the evidence for them is a matter of one person's word against another's. It was important that I didn't get any of the words wrong . . and afterwards I felt that while you had legitimized this half-reality by writing about it, I had legitimized it again by managing to transpose it into another language and ensuring its survival." Another woman responds immediately, "We survive . . Our bodies outlive their use of them, and this is what annoys them most of all. These bodies continue to exist, getting older and uglier and telling them the truth they don't want to hear." (If you don't know your feminist legal history you won't fully get the point of this interaction. Never kid yourself for a nanosecond that the laws under which you live are written to protect "everyone". Made by men almost exclusively, the laws have been arranged to protect men. Even the smallest shift elicits a furious pushback.) The implications of the three novels, especially taken all together, are haunting, disturbing, thought-provoking, moving and, at the price of sounding bossy, important. This is not a simple novel to comprehend, and I expect many women won't want to take the plunge and most men won't touch it! The half-way reality. It's half-way because we don't want to see it as more than that. We know it's there. By the way, some men do get it, and they suffer accordingly. Brava Cusk. ***** ( )