Reading of the month

«She made her way to the lift as if she knew, and indeed she did, that loneliness was not a state but a condition, a place firmer and deeper, the only place where one’s feet truly found ground. It gave way, yet it was still ground.»

Some novels close on their narrative. Matilde, by H. G. Cancela, closes on an idea. Or perhaps on an ontological observation. Loneliness does not appear as an emotional accident, nor as a circumstantial consequence of life. It emerges as a territory. As a foundation.

At the end of the reading, one word kept returning: invulnerability.

Modern urban societies have built a network so efficient in sustaining existence that an individual can live fully functional without depending emotionally on anyone. One eats, works, travels, pays bills, fills time. Everything works. Nothing is lacking materially, provided there is money. One need not be rich or poor, only have enough to secure a measure of autonomy. Affection ceases to be a necessity and becomes a possibility. It is in this interval that the novel takes root.

The protagonist is not presented as the victim of some extraordinary event. Her condition is banal, recognisable, almost administrative. She has no active family network, no lasting romantic relationships, no deep friendships. Around her are colleagues, neighbours, occasional presences who coexist without real encounter. The most unsettling aspect lies not merely in the absence of bonds. It emerges in the double movement the book reveals with clinical precision. She seeks no one, and yet no one seeks her.

There is no overt hostility, no obvious exclusion. Only parallel trajectories, each absorbed in its own daily survival. The contemporary world allows, perhaps even encourages, this coexistence without connection, where truly looking at another is no longer a collective need. What might appear as an individual fragility proves instead a sign of the times.

None of this feels strange. On the contrary, it is disturbingly familiar.

Following the character, we begin to adopt the same justifications that structure her life. Avoid exhausting encounters. Distrust easy intimacy. Guard personal space. Prefer to be alone while sharing meaningless presence. At some point, the question ceases to be about her and becomes about us. Where does lucidity end and pathological distancing begin? At what point does self-protection turn into enclosure?

It is here that Matilde becomes profoundly unsettling. Not through extraordinary events, but through the emotional verisimilitude it achieves. The novel does not thrust the reader into delirium. It invites a slow approach, a gradual awareness, never quite revealing when the boundary has been crossed.

The prose mirrors this movement. The language is economical, almost mechanical, composed of short, repeated sentences, stripped to the essential: subject and complement. The author seems to serve the narrative rather than assert a personal style. This choice aligns with the universe of the novel, and, in a sense, is ethical. The writing refuses to embellish what is experienced as functional, repetitive, almost automatic. Anaphora creates a rhythm of routine and compulsion, as if each sentence obeyed the life it describes. Form does not comment on human distancing. It inhabits it.

The novel registers a fundamental loneliness. The protagonist reveals it in every action. Affection, which might be the only way to mitigate it, is absent or idealised. Existential enclosure takes hold. Functional independence blurs into freedom, and isolation slides into pathology and delirium. This seems to me the book’s diagnosis. Invulnerability thus becomes a model of life. The price is an existence that appears secure, organised, yet progressively dehumanised.

The final sentence lingers long after the book is closed. Loneliness as ground. As firm place. As foundation. I do not disagree: it is a condition. Yet the author shifts our awareness toward a silent question: if we no longer need one another to live, what remains human when we cease to seek each other?

It was the first book of H. G. Cancela I read. I suspect it will not be the last. Some fictions invent worlds. Others merely show ours with disconcerting clarity. Matilde belongs clearly to the second one.

«Hotel La Solitude» in Freamunde

And so it was in Freamunde, a place where my heart warmed despite the cold, that I brought the presentations of Hotel La Solitude to an end. There was something about it that felt like a return home, the closing of a cycle that found its place exactly where it should. One or two surprises remain in store for the near future, but for now it is time to draw back and devote myself to the writing of the new novel, which is already well underway.

I am grateful to Pedro Ribeiro for his generous words and for the personal way in which he read the book and gave it back to me. I felt genuinely at ease. My thanks also go to Arménio Ribeiro and the Freamunde Parish Council for all their support and for the hospitality with which we were received. The photographs were kindly sent to me by Idalina Ribeiro.

Finally, I send a warm embrace to everyone who came to listen. It was good to see friends again, to talk without haste, and to share this moment with people I hold in such esteem.

Reading of the month

Kudos is the final volume of Rachel Cusk’s trilogy, begun with Outline and continued in Transit. I chose to start at the end, and this choice contains a deliberate gesture: to encounter Faye through her conclusion, or rather, not to encounter her at all. Although she is the narrator, the subject is continually displaced, almost dissolved. This erasure is not a side effect; it is the core of the project. Reading Kudos first clarifies the radical nature of the narrative: a mode of writing in which the self withdraws, refuses power, and listens.

Throughout the book, Faye moves through conversations, encounters, journeys, conferences, dinners, beaches. Nothing settles. She speaks very little about herself. There are moments when it seems she might, but something unexpected always intervenes. Even those who interview her project their own narratives, confess themselves, voice opinions, seek validation. Faye, meanwhile, often appears invisible to others, a present but decentred body, absorbing without imposing. The narrator exists above all as a surface of reception. This decentring creates a strange, almost uncomfortable space, in which literature relinquishes what is traditionally expected of it: interiority, narrative arc, resolution. And yet the eye can hardly be drawn away from the page.

Another important erasure is that of geography. Places are diffuse, interchangeable. For much of the book, the action seems to take place in any city in northern or central Europe, or within an abstract urban space. Towards the end, small clues suggest Lisbon, but the territory is never fixed. At a certain point, something almost reveals saudade without naming it.

This blurring of space reflects contemporaneity. We live in a world in which places have lost symbolic density, becoming transitory, functional, provisional. Nothing takes root; everything is liquid, as Bauman diagnosed. Relationships, discourses and identities emerge and dissipate with the same speed. Kudos remains with this state of displacement without dramatization. There is no lament and no cynicism, only observation. It is here that the book becomes political. Listening emerges as the only means of resistance to noise, to easy opinion, to the need for self-assertion. Listening, in Faye’s case, is neither empathy nor reconciliation. It is a way of surviving the world as a subject.

The ending of Kudos returns us to the starkness of what Cusk observes. On the beach, Faye witnesses a robust, bearded man urinating into the sea where she is swimming, looking at her with pleasure. He does not question whether he is exercising power, and that is precisely the problem. The gesture is simultaneously scatological and symbolic: it asserts a form of masculinity, marks territory, but asks neither permission nor dialogue. Faye does not intervene. The entire book has already constructed the idea that verbal intervention has failed. There is no discourse capable of resolving the situation. There is only time, the body, and the possible limit.

She remains in the water, conscious, waiting for the gesture to exhaust itself, observing raw power exist and spend itself on its own. This scene encapsulates what Cusk captures so deftly: displacement, exposure, the limits of discourse, and the survival of the body as witness and resistance. The man acts without questioning the power he displays, and it is precisely this lack of awareness that reveals the force of the gesture.

The scene is powerful because it allows for multiple readings: masculine power, the politics of space, the limits of the body and of the other, silence and observation as the only responses. Faye neither judges nor intervenes. She simply remains aware of herself and of the other. Observation becomes, paradoxically, an act of sovereignty and resistance. Language no longer works; it is saturated with meaning, no longer capable of denunciation, or perhaps the author has recognised the violence intrinsic to the nature of discourse itself, whatever its form.

The interpretation presented here does not seek to fix or exhaust Cusk’s literature. The strength of the narrative lies in ambiguity, discomfort, and the immediate sensation it produces in the reader. Each reading is a living extension of the project, and the space left between the lines is as fundamental as what is described. To ignore it would be to betray the author’s very writing.

Rachel Cusk is one of the contemporary voices that fascinates me the most. She exposes the present world with cutting intelligence, without moralism, grasping its dramas and their complexity, showing them with implacable clarity. Kudos offers no easy answers or comfort, but something rarer: perception, density, and a form of listening resistant to cynicism. It does so with assertiveness and humour, without slipping into facile irony.