Rachel Cusk’s writing offers that unusual convergence of microscopic observation and breathtaking sentences. It is rare for a writer to be capable of both sensitivity and beauty. It was discernible in the problematic but absorbing Aftermath but especially manifest in Outline. This sentence seems almost a summation of Cusk’s grand theme, or at least what I can detect from reading just two of her books. It is one of those sentences that force me to lay the book aside, transcribe it with fountain pen and grey ink into my notebook, type it into this box, and then sit back and think of its force.

“Sometimes it has seemed to me that life is a series of punishments for such moments of unawareness, that one forges one’s own destiny by what one doesnt notice or feel compassion for; that what you don’t know and don’t make the effort to understand will become the very thing you are forced into knowledge of.”

Rachel Cusk, Outline