Kudos

By: Rachel Cusk

Narrated by: Kate Reading

Rachel Cusk, the award-winning and critically acclaimed author of Outline and Transit, completes the transcendent literary trilogy with Kudos, a novel of unsettling power.

A woman writer visits a Europe in flux, where questions of personal and political identity are rising to the surface and the trauma of change is opening up new possibilities of loss and renewal. Within the rituals of literary culture, Faye finds the human story in disarray amid differing attitudes toward the public performance of the creative persona. She begins to identify among the people she meets a tension between truth and representation, a fissure that accrues great dramatic force as Kudos reaches a profound and beautiful climax.

In this conclusion to her groundbreaking trilogy, Cusk unflinchingly explores the nature of family and art, justice and love, and the ultimate value of suffering. She is without question one of our most important living writers.

©2018 Rachel Cusk (P)2018 Audible, Inc.

Brilliant

Loved this - cusk is a master - I’ve read it twice and listening was a new pleasure

Reader issue

I couldn’t finish this listening to this book. The reader’s portentous monotone as if the quite innocuous, ironically presented material were divine decree, deep as the sea, grew unbearable. Do authors get to approve readings of their books I wonder. This doesn’t apply to the first part of the book about the pilot and the dog, which was riveting, though, and well survived the reading, even appropriate to it, but then that plot broke off suddenly and switched into an implicit protest against the vapidity of book fairs and the boringness of writers who often are very private people gathering because it’s good for business. I’ll have to read the rest in print to see if the writer was able to spin this indigestible straw into golden pancakes and whether there was something there that the reading drowned in its nauseatingly repetitive beating down of mechanical waves on the marooned body of text.

Think I'm going to re-download the whole trilogy

and binge listen to it. Ms. Cusk is such a great stylist and observer. The performance by Kate Reading is just right. Cusk's observations on parenting, on sexism, on life are so striking that I often had to rewind a bit to make sure I had it right.

Kate Reading is A Great Reader

This is a quiet book, much like the previous two in the Trilogy. A writer talking to other writers about representation and misrepresentation. And kids. And divorce or separation. And there is the requisite story about a dog. If you like Lydia Davis’ writing, you may enjoy this as well.

Kate Reading reads well. Her voice and characterization are well done. And you get the sense that she gave some thought to what to make of the narrative.