Outline

Book 37 of my 2019 Reading Challenge

read from May 18 - 27

Outline

by Rachel Cusk

Summary (via the book jacket)

published 2014

A novel in ten conversations, Outline follows a novelist teaching creative writing during an oppressively hot summer in Athens. She leads her students in storytelling exercises and meets other writers for dinner and discourse. She swims in the Ionian Sea with a man she met on 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 a woman learning to face a great loss.

My Opinion

3 stars

The author has very vivid characters descriptions and phrasing that made it easy to fall into. The chapters were long but that only became noticeable when looking for a place to stop reading or in the one chapter I didn't find particularly interesting (the dinner with Paniotis).

A Few Quotes from the Book

"He spoke a refined and formal kind of English that did not seem wholly natural, as though at some point it had been applied to him carefully with a brush, like paint."

"The interesting [people] are like islands, he said: you don't bump into them on the street or at a party, you have to know where they are and go to them by arrangement."