The broken dishes of Rachel Cusk

Rodrigo FresánSEGUIR Updated: Save Send news by mail electrónicoTu name *

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Not long ago -before having revolutionized the concept of Literature of the Self ascending into the Literature of the Super-I with the master and consecratory trilogy composed by backlight, Transit and Prestige – Rachel Cusk was in trouble.

Until then a novelist well-regarded and descendant more or less side of Iris Murdoch and the powerful literature “of/for women” and viciously satirical of the post-war English, Cusk (Toronto, 1967) decided to put not hands but life to the work and become more or less faithful character of itself. Well, Cusk published three memories nothing complacent. In A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother (2001) talked about the horrors and frustrations, and regrets having succumbed to the song of the sirens and where the father figure is almost invisible.

At The Last Supper: A Holiday in Italy (2009), a holiday that was supposed to be paradisiacal become in the infernal purgatory, and portrait of “alien” (including to the neighbors of the summer that felt threatened by her portrait without authorization and forced Faber and Faber to convert to pulp the entire edition). Leftovers: On marriage and separation (2012) closed the circle and fanned the flames running like the closing of a natural cycle: if you’re not comfortable with your children and you engage your rest, then the next step can be none other than a divorce to the letter after ten years of cohabitation.

Death creative

The cover of the north american edition said it all: the pieces of a broken plate states, but not concealing the irreparable cracks. Welcome then to the Revelation of the divorce of Cusk and meet the super-villain: the photographer and exabogado Adrian Clarke who hinders you it-who is the main funder of the domestic economy – to have the full custody of the children of the couple because “they are my children and you belong to me”. Soon, Cusk was the subject of tabloid and white mobile of mothers and wives (it is remarkable the way in which this woman is hated by other women; the theory of Cusk is that she is concerned about the individual and not the gender) who consider it to be a sort of monster toxic. Then Cusk reached what they defined as “death creative” and feeling that “the possibility of returning to the fiction it seemed to me something false and shameful.” Suddenly, everything was and went for it. And then, of course, the formidable reaction/cunning of his next trilogy, in which your alter ego is nothing more than a attentive listener of the stories of the other.

it Was white mothers and wives, who see it as a sort of monster toxic

Meanwhile, what is offered here is the detailed portrait of the scene of a crime or the time-loop of a traffic accident in slow motion. Thus, making a cake, a visit to the dentist, a little disguise, the portrait moved from a husband triggered that you feel at the mercy of a monster (Cusk never reveals what is “the promise which it broke”) are converted into tracks diffuse that allow for the reconstruction of the destruction . At times, this portrait of domesticity seismic brings to mind John Updike, but without any of its redemptive lyricism. Or Joan Didion, but without the protective shield that automatically enjoys (although Cusk seems to go in that direction) someone legendary. Everything here is x-ray and tumor impossible to re-metaphor encandiladora. What of Cusk is more C. S. I. S. O. S . And, yes, it has the bias of a witness/participant, ambiguous and at times knowing very irritating who, finally, concludes that this is the fault of the institution of marriage more than the institutionalized with two vests of force.

Without anesthesia

On the end, Cusk have a great idea that in some way anticipates what is to come for herself and for her readers: in the coda/story titled “Trains” , the point of view switches to that of an au pair that provides the derailment from the platform. Someone that leaves that new insomniac and anorexic former wife that says to behave as a “Lady Macbeth motherly” . Someone who “looks like a skeleton,” and you have just extract, in addition to a husband, a grinding. Offal is a book without anesthesia. And it hurts like one of those empty spaces that can’t stop exploring with the the sharper of the tongues.