#AMREADING RACHEL CUSK, KUDOS

I love Rachel Cusk’s long sentences. How come my editor never lets me get away with that?

The man seated next to her on the plane:

He was somewhere in his forties, with a face that was both handsome and unexceptional, and his tall frame was clad with the clean, well-pressed neutrality of a businessman’s weekend attire. He wore a heavy silver watch on his wrist and new-looking leather shoes on his feet; he exuded an air of anonymous and slightly provisional manliness, like a soldier in uniform.

Bells:

You could the bells that rang unendingly from the town’s many churches, striking not just the hours but the quarter and half hours, so that each segment of time became a seed of silence that then blossomed, filling the air with what almost seemed a kind of self-description. The conversation of these bells, held back and forth across the rooftops was continued night and day: its cadences of observation and agreement, its passages of debate, its longer narratives – at matins and evensong, for instance, and most of all on Sundays, the repeating summons building and building until it was followed at last by the joyous, deafening exposition.

Journalist and literary critic:

He couldn’t ever imagine writing as the author had written, or indeed, in some cases, wanting to; even thinking about it exhausted him, and he sometimes found himself wishing these prodigies had a little less energy, because every time they wrote something new they also created his obligation to respond to it. The tremendous effort to conjure something out of nothing, to create this great structure of language where before there had been only blankness, was something of which he personally felt himself incapable: it usually rendered him, in fact, quite passive and left him feeling relieved to return to the trivial details of his own life.

#AMREADING RACHEL CUSK. Creative Writing in Athens.

• ON THE PLANE TO ATHENS: My neighbour was a man of conventional sandy-coloured good looks, but close up there was something uneasy in his appearance, as though he had been put together out of unrelated elements…He had large white teeth which he kept always a little bared and a loose body poised somewhere between muscle and fat.
• ON SELF-IMPROVEMENT: The notion of self-transformation was an article of faith…he could decide how he wanted to be and then be it. There was no pre-ordination.
• ATHENS AT NIGHT: Darkness fell but otherwise the evenings were strangely without the sense of progression. It didn’t get cooler or quieter, or emptier of people; the roar of talk and laughter came unstaunched from the glaring terraces of restaurants, the traffic was a swarming, honking river of lights, small children rode their bicycles along the pavements under the bile-coloured streetlamps. Despite the darkness it was eternal day, the pigeons still scuffling in the neon-lit squares, the kiosk open on street corners, the smell of pastry still hanging in the exhausted air around the bakeries.
• MORE SELF-IMPROVEMENT: In his marriage, the principle of progress was always at work, in the acquiring of houses, possessions, cars, the drive toward higher social status, more travel, a wider circle of friends, even the production of children felt like an obligatory calling-point on the mad journey. When there was nothing more to add, he and his wife would be beset by a great sense of futility, a kind of malaise: the feeling of stillness after a life of too much motion.
• HUMAN AFFAIRS are like cloud banks, sometimes portentous and grey and sometimes mere distant inscrutable shapes that blotted out the sun for a while and then just as carelessly revealed it again.

(From Rachel Cusk, Outline)