![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() It is no accident that Paniotis, with his mounting calamities and jittery persona, seems to have catapulted out of a Thomas Bernhard novel. One of Cusk’s key themes is the workings of the self when it is forced back on its own resources in the wake of separation, loss and solitude. Yet Outline is most concerned with the storyteller’s inner drama. This post-divorce saga is one of several in Rachel Cusk’s new novel. Her silence, her failure to ‘take up, as it were, her part in our lifelong duet’, pitched him deeper into distress. Later, still panicked by their predicament, Paniotis phoned his ex-wife from a mountain inn. Herds of pigs and goats surged across their path and the children, pocked with mosquito bites from their stay in a filthy motel – bites Paniotis feared would become infected – screamed as floodwater poured into the car. As a storm descended, the steep mountain roads turned to mud. It was, Paniotis tells the novel’s narrator, the first time he had taken his children on his own. In one of Outline’s many stories within stories, a recently divorced father recounts a perilous drive into the hills beyond Athens. ![]()
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