New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2018 •Amazon Editors' Top 100 of 2018
Rachel Cusk, the award-winning and critically acclaimed author of Outline and Transit, completes the transcendent literary trilogy with Kudos, a novel of unsettling power.
A woman writer visits a Europe in flux, where questions of personal and political identity are rising to the surface and the trauma of change is opening up new possibilities of loss and renewal. Within the rituals of literary culture, Faye finds the human story in disarray amid differing attitudes toward the public performance of the creative persona. She begins to identify among the people she meets a tension between truth and representation, a fissure that accrues great dramatic force as Kudos reaches a profound and beautiful climax.
In this conclusion to her groundbreaking trilogy, Cusk unflinchingly explores the nature of family and art, justice and love, and the ultimate value of suffering. She is without question one of our most important living writers.
**
Amazon.com Review
An Amazon Best Book of June 2018: Do you wish you could have read Virginia Woolf in 1927? If so, you should be reading Rachel Cusk in 2018. With her new novel, Kudos, Cusk brings to a close a trilogy that’s the smartest, most nuanced of any fiction about the politics of sex and privilege written in decades. Readers of the two previous books in the trilogy have followed Faye, a writer and divorced mother of two sons, from a teaching stint in Athens, to London, where she undertakes a near-disastrous apartment renovation and begins a new romance. Now in Kudos, Faye, remarried, travels to a literary festival in an unnamed European country where misogyny seems especially entrenched. But plot lines don’t begin to describe Cusk’s rare intelligence, mean wit, and innovative style, which is what makes her writing so remarkable. Most evident is her method of narrating each novel through the voices of the people Faye encounters, so that Faye is revealed almost exclusively through her side of their conversations. The result? The reader stays continually hungry for Faye’s perspective, which is meted out slyly and parsimoniously. Though there is a feminist edge to Faye’s sensibility, we never feel drowned by it, perhaps because Faye’s sons, and her new marriage, suggest hope for the future. Kudos begins and ends with men behaving badly: in the final instance, Faye witnesses a gross, aggressive act with the patience of someone who knows such antics can’t last forever. “I looked into his cruel, merry eyes,” she says, “and waited for him to stop.” —Sarah Harrison Smith, Amazon Book Review
Review
The Best Fiction for 2018, The Guardian • 30 Best Books to Read this Summer, Elle • 30 Summer Books to Get Excited About, Buzzfeed • 20 Books We Can’t Wait to Read, The Toronto Star • 10 Most Exciting Book Releases for 2018, Vulture • Books We Can't Wait to Read in 2018, Chicago Reader • Los Angeles Review of Books June Book Club Pick
"[Cusk] has that ability, unique to the great performers in every art form, to hold one rapt from the moment she appears . . . These books―all right, let’s call them the Outline trilogy―strike me as a stark, modern, adamantine new skyscraper on the literary horizon." ―Dwight Garner, The New York Times
"The exhilarating finale of Rachel Cusk’s magnificently unclassifiable trilogy of novels . . . With her typical acerbic wit, Ms Cusk skewers the pretensions of the literary world while simultaneously upholding the intrinsic value of literature―no small feat . . . A daring bonfire of hypocrisies and emotions." ―The Economist
"Cusk commandeers reality . . . An object lesson in rigor, elegance, and fury." ―Merve Emre, Harper's
"The darkly stirring conclusion to the acclaimed Outline trilogy." ―O Magazine
"Brilliantly aware without being indulgent or preachy, this novel has the intense beauty of form that has marked Cusk's trilogy from the beginning, and the final installment does not disappoint." ―Booklist (starred review)
“Cusk’s final book in a trilogy (after Outline and Transit) expertly concludes the story of protagonist Faye . . . As always, Cusk’s ear for dialogue and language is stunning. The author ends Faye’s trilogy with yet another gem." ―Publishers Weekly (starred, boxed review)
"Brilliantly accomplished and uncompromisingly dark." ―Kirkus (starred review)
"Does [Kudos] live up to its title? In short, unequivocally. Despite their ostensible uniformity, each of the three volumes delights in a different way. Outline dazzled with its intrepid originality, while the low hum of violence that ran through Transit had a mesmeric quality, and now Kudos, which builds to a sparkling crescendo, thrills at its own more serene tempo. Regarded as a whole, it’s a tour de force of a trilogy." ―Lucy Scholes, Financial Times (London)
“Cusk has glimpsed the central truth of modern life . . . She moves through it as a blasted centre full only of instinct and superhuman hearing and hackles . . . The three novels blend together, and not to their detriment. Their of-a-wholeness is why they are so often referred to as ‘a project’. And the pleasure of this project is a rare one: it is the pleasure of a person figuring out exactly what she ought to be doing.” ―Patricia Lockwood, London Review of Books
"Kudos is an education . . . [Cusk] has found, in this cool and collected new mode, a mature voice that looks abstract yet feels intimate and brightly present . . . Cusk has inherited the gift of holding our attention as she shows us the things that humans do." ―Melissa Katsoulis, The Times (London)
"This is a novel of ideas, intelligent, original in form and content, and brilliantly engaging . . . Kudos is rich and compelling. It confirms Rachel Cusk’s status as one of the most interesting contemporary writers―avant-garde, highly original, challenging but entirely accessible." ―Eilis Ni Dhuibhne, The Irish Times
"[Cusks's trilogy is] likely to live on, inflecting our thoughts, offering an experience that feels closer to thinking than to reading." ―Lara Feigel, The Times Literary Supplement
"Cusk has found a new way to say the things she has always said: quieter, but to devastating effect." ―Katie Law, Evening Standard (London)
“The [Outline] trilogy is a bravura interrogation of the social habits and assumptions that, assembled together, start to look suspiciously like a man’s world in which women just so happen to live . . . [Outline, Transit, and Kudos] stand as a landmark in 21st-century English literature, the culmination of an artist’s unshakable efforts to forge her own path.” ―Andrew Anthony, The Guardian (London)
Description:
New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2018 • Amazon Editors' Top 100 of 2018
Rachel Cusk, the award-winning and critically acclaimed author of Outline and Transit, completes the transcendent literary trilogy with Kudos, a novel of unsettling power.
A woman writer visits a Europe in flux, where questions of personal and political identity are rising to the surface and the trauma of change is opening up new possibilities of loss and renewal. Within the rituals of literary culture, Faye finds the human story in disarray amid differing attitudes toward the public performance of the creative persona. She begins to identify among the people she meets a tension between truth and representation, a fissure that accrues great dramatic force as Kudos reaches a profound and beautiful climax.
In this conclusion to her groundbreaking trilogy, Cusk unflinchingly explores the nature of family and art, justice and love, and the ultimate value of suffering. She is without question one of our most important living writers.
**
Amazon.com Review
An Amazon Best Book of June 2018: Do you wish you could have read Virginia Woolf in 1927? If so, you should be reading Rachel Cusk in 2018. With her new novel, Kudos, Cusk brings to a close a trilogy that’s the smartest, most nuanced of any fiction about the politics of sex and privilege written in decades. Readers of the two previous books in the trilogy have followed Faye, a writer and divorced mother of two sons, from a teaching stint in Athens, to London, where she undertakes a near-disastrous apartment renovation and begins a new romance. Now in Kudos, Faye, remarried, travels to a literary festival in an unnamed European country where misogyny seems especially entrenched. But plot lines don’t begin to describe Cusk’s rare intelligence, mean wit, and innovative style, which is what makes her writing so remarkable. Most evident is her method of narrating each novel through the voices of the people Faye encounters, so that Faye is revealed almost exclusively through her side of their conversations. The result? The reader stays continually hungry for Faye’s perspective, which is meted out slyly and parsimoniously. Though there is a feminist edge to Faye’s sensibility, we never feel drowned by it, perhaps because Faye’s sons, and her new marriage, suggest hope for the future. Kudos begins and ends with men behaving badly: in the final instance, Faye witnesses a gross, aggressive act with the patience of someone who knows such antics can’t last forever. “I looked into his cruel, merry eyes,” she says, “and waited for him to stop.” —Sarah Harrison Smith, Amazon Book Review
Review
The Best Fiction for 2018, The Guardian • 30 Best Books to Read this Summer, Elle • 30 Summer Books to Get Excited About, Buzzfeed • 20 Books We Can’t Wait to Read, The Toronto Star • 10 Most Exciting Book Releases for 2018, Vulture • Books We Can't Wait to Read in 2018, Chicago Reader • Los Angeles Review of Books June Book Club Pick
"[Cusk] has that ability, unique to the great performers in every art form, to hold one rapt from the moment she appears . . . These books―all right, let’s call them the Outline trilogy―strike me as a stark, modern, adamantine new skyscraper on the literary horizon." ―Dwight Garner, The New York Times
"The exhilarating finale of Rachel Cusk’s magnificently unclassifiable trilogy of novels . . . With her typical acerbic wit, Ms Cusk skewers the pretensions of the literary world while simultaneously upholding the intrinsic value of literature―no small feat . . . A daring bonfire of hypocrisies and emotions." ―The Economist
"Cusk commandeers reality . . . An object lesson in rigor, elegance, and fury." ―Merve Emre, Harper's
"The darkly stirring conclusion to the acclaimed Outline trilogy." ―O Magazine
"Brilliantly aware without being indulgent or preachy, this novel has the intense beauty of form that has marked Cusk's trilogy from the beginning, and the final installment does not disappoint." ―Booklist (starred review)
“Cusk’s final book in a trilogy (after Outline and Transit) expertly concludes the story of protagonist Faye . . . As always, Cusk’s ear for dialogue and language is stunning. The author ends Faye’s trilogy with yet another gem." ―Publishers Weekly (starred, boxed review)
"Brilliantly accomplished and uncompromisingly dark." ―Kirkus (starred review)
"Does [Kudos] live up to its title? In short, unequivocally. Despite their ostensible uniformity, each of the three volumes delights in a different way. Outline dazzled with its intrepid originality, while the low hum of violence that ran through Transit had a mesmeric quality, and now Kudos, which builds to a sparkling crescendo, thrills at its own more serene tempo. Regarded as a whole, it’s a tour de force of a trilogy." ―Lucy Scholes, Financial Times (London)
“Cusk has glimpsed the central truth of modern life . . . She moves through it as a blasted centre full only of instinct and superhuman hearing and hackles . . . The three novels blend together, and not to their detriment. Their of-a-wholeness is why they are so often referred to as ‘a project’. And the pleasure of this project is a rare one: it is the pleasure of a person figuring out exactly what she ought to be doing.” ―Patricia Lockwood, London Review of Books
"Kudos is an education . . . [Cusk] has found, in this cool and collected new mode, a mature voice that looks abstract yet feels intimate and brightly present . . . Cusk has inherited the gift of holding our attention as she shows us the things that humans do." ―Melissa Katsoulis, The Times (London)
"This is a novel of ideas, intelligent, original in form and content, and brilliantly engaging . . . Kudos is rich and compelling. It confirms Rachel Cusk’s status as one of the most interesting contemporary writers―avant-garde, highly original, challenging but entirely accessible." ―Eilis Ni Dhuibhne, The Irish Times
"[Cusks's trilogy is] likely to live on, inflecting our thoughts, offering an experience that feels closer to thinking than to reading." ―Lara Feigel, The Times Literary Supplement
"Cusk has found a new way to say the things she has always said: quieter, but to devastating effect." ―Katie Law, Evening Standard (London)
“The [Outline] trilogy is a bravura interrogation of the social habits and assumptions that, assembled together, start to look suspiciously like a man’s world in which women just so happen to live . . . [Outline, Transit, and Kudos] stand as a landmark in 21st-century English literature, the culmination of an artist’s unshakable efforts to forge her own path.” ―Andrew Anthony, The Guardian (London)