Kudos by Rachel Cusk
Kudos, the third book of a trilogy (the first two books are the Outline and Transit), by Rachel Cusk, is an unusual book, in what the typical things that happen in novels where there is a certain plot and people are set in motion and various relationships, do not exist in this book. The form in Kudos is different; halfway through it reminded me the writing of Karl Ove Knausgaard, but Kudos is more than what we refer as metafiction.
The woman in Kudos, Faye, a writer from London, is travelling in a country in the south of Europe, to promote the book she has just published. She does not tell much about herself, her name is only mentioned once in the book, instead she meets people who tell stories to her.
People have stories to tell, about themselves and their families, about love and joy and sorrow, about justice and injustice, and they seem to want to tell these stories to her. What is about her that makes people want to confide to her? What makes us relate more with some people and not with others? I have been asking this question myself for a long time. Does it have to do with the ability of some people not only to listen to others and not judge but also with a wish – or a need - to remain, in a way, invisible. In Kudos, the conversations have the form of monologues delivered in the presence of a witness. Faye remains, for the most part, invisible. It is as if the more visible she becomes the less interesting she is. Is it self-preservation, or it is about a different kind of quality, one that Cusk calls suspense which seems to be generated by the belief that our lives are governed by mystery when, in fact, this is merely a self-deception over our own mortality. Or it is about freedom, the freedom to not believe in anything, and the realisation that our experiences are not that special, at least no more special that the experiences of other people.
There are quite a few things in Kudos to make you think; this is a passage that resonates with me.
“I remember,” she continued,” as a young girl, the realisation dawning on me that certain things had been decided for me before I had even begun to live, and that I had already boon dealt the losing hand while my brother had been given the winning cards. It would be a mistake, I saw, to treat this injustice as though it were normal as all my friends seemed prepared to do; and it was not so very hard to get the better of that situation, she said, because the boy that is handed all the cards is perhaps also very slightly complacent, as well as having a big question mark in the form of the thing between his legs, which he must work out what to do with. These boys, she said, had the most ridiculous attitudes towards women, which they were busy learning from the examples their parents had given them, and I saw the way that my female friends defended themselves against those attitudes, by making themselves as perfect and as inoffensive they could. Yet the ones who didn’t defend themselves were just as bad, because by refusing to conform to these standards of perfection they were in a sense disqualifying themselves and distancing themselves from the whole subject. But I quickly came to see, she said, that in fact there is nothing worse than to be an average white male of average talents and intelligence: even the most oppressed housewife, she said, is closer to the drama and poetry of life than he is, because as Louise Bourgeois shows us she is capable at least of holding more than one perspective. And it was true, she said, that a number of girls were achieving academic success and cultivating professional ambitions, to the extent that people had begun to feel sorry for these average boys and to worry that their feelings were being hurt. Yet if you looked only a little way ahead, she said, you could see that the girls’ ambitions led nowhere, like the roads you often find yourself in this country, that start off new and wide and smooth and then simply stop in the middle of nowhere, because the government ran out of money to finish building them."