The third and final novella in Rachel Cusk’s trilogy, KUDOS (Faber and Faber Allen and Unwin 2018) is structured in a very different style from the previous two. Written in one long, continuous story, there are no chapters and only the occasional spacing break. This serves to provide the effect of an unbroken interior narrative, beginning with the narrator listening to the story of the life of the stranger next to her on the plane, continuing with her arrival in Europe to promote her newly released book, and finishing with her meditations on family as she prepares to return home.
Autofiction fans will love this mixture of fact and fiction, as always delivered in Cusk’s eloquent prose that somehow manages to be spare and sparse yet also incredibly detailed on specific points, the result of close observation and lengthy internal dialogues about moral and ethical issues, fate, chance and luck, especially as they relate to love, justice, politics, loss and joy.
Writers will especially love the last section wherein the narrator attends a writing festival, and Cusk denotes in painful detail such aspects as panel readings, accommodation and transport in a foreign city, the food, interviews and of course, the foibles of other authors. I didn’t particularly like the ending – I found it a rather coarse finale to what is a beautiful composition.