Skip to main content

Second Place by Rachel Cusk review – exquisitely cruel home truths

The deeply gendered experience of freedom is cunningly exposed in a shocking interrogation of art, privilege and property

If you wanted to locate a defining preoccupation in the consistently remarkable, formally daring fiction of Rachel Cusk, you might well alight on the issue of property. Cusk is obsessed with houses. Her revelatory Outline trilogy, completed in 2018 with the publication of Kudos, faltered on the awkward class politics of its central volume, in which the narrator’s efforts to renovate an ex-council flat are undermined by the inconvenient working classes living below.

Now, in her first novel since the trilogy’s reimagining of novelistic form, Cusk gives us not just a dream home but a dream home with a second home attached – the “Second Place” of the novel’s title. And it’s not just any old place either. It is, says the narrator, “a place of great but subtle beauty, where artists often seem to find the will or the energy or just the opportunity to work”. Indeed, she says, “people often say this is one of the last places”.

Continue reading...

from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3t4ofi5
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

One giant leap: meet the new generation of male ballet stars

Beauty, strength and bags of energy: BBC Four’s Men at the Barre documentary gets up close and personal with the Royal Ballet dancers on the rise ‘It’s a golden era of male ballet dancers.” So says Emma Cahusac, the commissioning editor behind a new documentary, Men at the Barre, part of BBC Four’s dance season. It’s not just hyperbole. The young men rising up at the Royal Ballet are some of the most exciting in dance right now: principals Matthew Ball and Marcelino Sambé, first soloists Cesar Corrales and William Bracewell, and first artist Joseph Sissens all feature in Men at the Barre. With the majority of them British or UK-trained, it’s a giant leap from the grumblings of a decade ago about the lack of local dancers making it to the top. I spoke to Ball, Corrales and Sambé by phone, all staying resolutely positive during this enforced break from their intensive dancing lives, but all desperate to get back to work with colleagues they’re certain are something special. “I see so m...
Post a Comment
Read more

Dita Von Teese: ‘Even when I was a bondage model, I had big-time boundaries’

As the star dives into a giant glass of fizz for her first online extravaganza, she talks about this new golden age for burlesque, why the French Strictly gives her costume problems – and how #MeToo has changed her Dita Von Teese is looking divine. Her lips are that signature red, she’s wearing 1950s cat eye glasses, and her black hair falls in a thick wave across a Snow White skin – and all this on the unglamorous stage of a glitchy Zoom call. Only knowing Von Teese from her femme fatale image, her teasingly aloof burlesque performances, and her time in the tabloids as former wife of goth rocker Marilyn Manson , you might expect an icy demeanour, an impermeable mystique. So it’s surprising to discover quite how normal she is: chatty, self-deprecating, not very vampish. It’s easy to see traces of Heather Sweet, the “super shy” girl from small-town Michigan who transformed into Von Teese. The reason for our conversation is a new film, Night of the Teese, made with director Quinn Wils...
Post a Comment
Read more