I’d like to share a brief recap of the Hotel La Solitude presentation in Lisbon on October 23. My heartfelt thanks to Nuno Quintas for his warm introduction, to Glória Pérez Carrasco for her beautiful space, to Carla Leão from Idioteque for her support, and to Pedro for capturing the moments in photographs. A big hug to everyone who attended and made this gathering so special. I already miss it. Thank you all.
I am delighted to invite you to the presentation of my novel Hotel La Solitude in Lisbon.
The event will take place on October 23rd at 7:00 PM at Palácio do Mercador – Studio Momentos de Glória, and will be presented by Nuno Quintas.
After the presentation, there will be regional wine and cheese, in an intimate setting for literary conversation.
Admission is free.
Metro: Avenida (Blue Line)
«Using the system of love, we built a structure of possession. Our feelings lived within this structure, trying to replicate themselves there. They sought the familiarity and the sense of reality of things. They sought repetition. Some of these feelings were acceptable enough to be shown in public; the others we banished to attics and cellars.»
from Parade, by Rachel Cusk.
When I closed Parade, I realised that Rachel Cusk does not give us characters, but variations of a single experiment on power, gender and creation. There are clear outlines — G the son and filmmaker devoured by his narcissistic mother; G the painter supported by his wife’s domestic perfection; G the painter crushed by her tyrannical husband; and another G, a brilliant and exasperating painter who tries to don the masculine codes of success — and there is a diffuse field, the “we” that runs through the narrative, witness and accomplice, spectator and participant, which we can never quite define, but which reaches me as a universal voice.
What fascinates and unsettles me is that Cusk touches on all these questions of power and gender without moralising. Morality does not arise from the author but from the voices that contradict, judge and annihilate one another. Betsy, with her cutting avant-garde moralism, or the farm owner, trapped in a logic of authority he himself invented, are figures or examples of this parade, where there is no ethical escape, only diagnosis and friction between positions. Remarkable.
The novel moves fluidly between the third person and an indeterminate “we”, dragging us through experiences we can never pin down as singular or right. Each G is a facet of the tension between autonomy and submission, creation and destruction, violence and fragility. The woman who takes the blows, the painter subdued, the painter who imitates masculine codes — all show us that the attempt at freedom is always subject to the same forces of domination, even when inverted or distorted.
There is no comfort, no linear narrative, no resolution. Only the parade of forces, the continuous movement of power within human relations, exposed with almost clinical precision. And yet, the writing is poetic, restrained, exact: every sentence has density; every shift in point of view provokes; every contrast illuminates what reproduces itself in the interstices of daily life and artistic creation.
Cusk asks neither for compassion nor for condemnation. She asks for attention, lucidity. She asks that we endure the evidence that power is everywhere — even in the most intimate gestures, even in art — and that awareness of it does not set us free, it merely places us before what we are: always on parade, always in motion, always exposed.
Among the best I have read in recent years.
