‘I don’t feel gendered’: Rachel Cusk’s most radical novel yet makes the familiar strange – and moves beyond womanhood
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星期日, 六月 2, 2024
Spirituality, Recreation, Light, Love, Ambiguity, Child, Conversation, Head, Madonna, Bed, History, Mother, Violence, Woman, Perception, Beauty, Heart, Cusk, Darkness, Human, Second Place, Exhibition, Painting, Wikimedia Commons, Narration, Essay, CC, Creativity, Female, Meditation, Parent, Recurrence, Entertainment
Rachel Cusk’s new novel conjures myriad acts of creation – of lives and of art.
Key Points:
- Rachel Cusk’s new novel conjures myriad acts of creation – of lives and of art.
- Her twelfth novel, Parade is concerned with artists, with mothers and children, and with place: material, psychological, historical, cosmic.
- But, as ever with Cusk’s writing in all its forms – fiction, memoir, essay – she renders the familiar strange in ways that force us to see it anew.
- Defined on its title page as a novel, it appears to be four interlinked fragments, all narrated in different voices.
The artist-mother
- For the artist is a perceiver, and the mother the first and fundamental object of perception, the first image, the Madonna of earliest Christian iconography.
- What will the outcome be when these two identities – perceiver and perceived – become one?
- It features several creators who are designated artists, six of whom are denoted by the letter “G”.
- The result of these multiple threads is a work of astonishing, mesmerising complexity and ambiguity, refracted through seven guiding narrative voices.
- And the “re-adjustment of the old relation” between the sexes is an evolution in which we remain embroiled […] Parade operates in this vein.
- It charts these critical, world-shaping relational readjustments, condensing entire histories in its scant 200 pages.