Though we continue to learn about her from her own spoken words, it is through her reflections on the other characters and the words that she provokes from them that the narrator most shows herself. The skill, I saw, lay in skirting close enough to what appeared to be the truth without allowing what you actually felt about it to regain its power over you.”Īnd there it is, the laconic observation that reveals the narrator - who the reader identifies as the author - while she is revealing another character in the story. He animatedly tells her deeply intimate stories, “as though he had discovered the power and pleasure of reliving events with their sting removed. Like Outline, the first book of the three, Kudos begins with a startlingly frank conversation on a plane between two strangers, the narrator and her seatmate, a recently retired financier with a difficult daughter and a dead dog. Here again are the themes that are familiar from the first two books, Outlineand Transit: the self-effacing narrator whose name is mentioned only once the telling of the story through a series of conversations rather than the showing through action the lack of a traditional plot or an obvious narrative arc the preoccupation with the cruelties of divorce and the damage that adults do to their children and the business of being a high-brow, belletrist author.

You either love Rachel Cusk’s narrative technique or you don’t, and if you are still with her for Kudos, the final installment of her trilogy, then it must be because you love it.

Kudos a novel