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.