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Meike's Reviews > Parade
Parade
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Rachel Cusk doing Rachel Cusk things: In "Parade", she once more focuses on the female experience in society and particularly the art world, and while she started her experimental journey by introducing the annihilated female perspective (meaning a type of narration that only reflects the narrator through the voice of others), she now just blows apart the idea of a coherent narrative altogether, somewhat miraculously proving that we never needed it anyway. And if you now think, well, postmodern fiction doesn't rely on plot anyway, you're correct, but Cusk gets rid of a concise plot AND of characters: Don't even try to make sense of the cast here, these people are shapeshifters, especially the ghost-like, genderfluid artist G, a collective of people that haunts the pages.
Split in four interconnected parts, the individual sections also remain somewhat enclosed, while within the parts, narrative arcs are entangled, jumping without warning between paragraphs like a cut-up operation (so in case you belong to the tribe who start whining when an author does not use quotation marks because you claim that's super confusing, don't even bother with Cusk). Sure, it's possible to google the hints (I love this puzzle-like aspect of Cusk's work!) and identify iterations of G, like Georg Baselitz (who painted upside-down images), Louise Bourgeois (who created gigantic spiders), Norman Lewis (the Black artist who painted a cathedral), Éric Rohmer (a Nouvelle Vague director with a pseudonym) etc. pp. But while this is great fun, they all serve as means to craft a philosophical novel about female creation, female representation and the types of fragile bonds that connect humans. Apparently, Cusk has also added some personal experience, per usual (e.g., she was really assaulted on the streets of Paris). Discussing this novel is all about reading into the intellectually charged descriptions contained in the vignettes that the author presents us with.
It also means to marvel at the fact that Cusk seems to become more and more artistically radical, a master non-storyteller that has no fucks to give about convention, and she can afford this because she is in full control of her prose: Nothing about this text should work, yet it does work perfectly. More power to that woman, who seeems to ponder the shapeshifter in all of us: It's no coincidence that in the end, the first-person narration suddenly changes into "we".
Listen to us discuss the German translation on the podcast: https://papierstaupodcast.de/podcast/...
Split in four interconnected parts, the individual sections also remain somewhat enclosed, while within the parts, narrative arcs are entangled, jumping without warning between paragraphs like a cut-up operation (so in case you belong to the tribe who start whining when an author does not use quotation marks because you claim that's super confusing, don't even bother with Cusk). Sure, it's possible to google the hints (I love this puzzle-like aspect of Cusk's work!) and identify iterations of G, like Georg Baselitz (who painted upside-down images), Louise Bourgeois (who created gigantic spiders), Norman Lewis (the Black artist who painted a cathedral), Éric Rohmer (a Nouvelle Vague director with a pseudonym) etc. pp. But while this is great fun, they all serve as means to craft a philosophical novel about female creation, female representation and the types of fragile bonds that connect humans. Apparently, Cusk has also added some personal experience, per usual (e.g., she was really assaulted on the streets of Paris). Discussing this novel is all about reading into the intellectually charged descriptions contained in the vignettes that the author presents us with.
It also means to marvel at the fact that Cusk seems to become more and more artistically radical, a master non-storyteller that has no fucks to give about convention, and she can afford this because she is in full control of her prose: Nothing about this text should work, yet it does work perfectly. More power to that woman, who seeems to ponder the shapeshifter in all of us: It's no coincidence that in the end, the first-person narration suddenly changes into "we".
Listen to us discuss the German translation on the podcast: https://papierstaupodcast.de/podcast/...
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Ilse
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rated it 4 stars
Jul 30, 2024 01:55AM
Great review and sleuth work, Meike (thank you for identifying Norman Lewis). "A master non-storyteller" is such a wonderful characterisation of Cusk as an artist. Nonetheless, reading a book recently on how the 20th century novel tended to chase out the element 'character' from the novel (in comparison with the 19th century novel), her giving up of character rather struck me as another stage in this tradition, rather than being revolutionary :).
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Ilse wrote: "Great review and sleuth work, Meike (thank you for identifying Norman Lewis). "A master non-storyteller" is such a wonderful characterisation of Cusk as an artist. Nonetheless, reading a book recen..."Thank you, Ilse! Now you GOT to tell me what book on the 20th century novel you read, I'm intrigued!
Meike, it was Edwin Frank's Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel - I am a little sad because the ARC I read already 'disappeared' so I cannot return to it but also happy because I managed to read it entirely ;). I don't think you would find many insights in it that are new to you, but I was struck how well his reflections on character and on the theme of innocence fitted with respectively reading 'Parade' and current reading of Camus :).
Ilse wrote: "Meike, it was Edwin Frank's Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel - I am a little sad because the ARC I read already 'disappeared' so I cannot return to it bu..."This looks great, thank you so much for the tipp, Ilse!
