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From Rachel Cusk, author of the Outline trilogy, comes this startling, exhilarating novel that once again expands the notion of what fiction can be and do.
Midway through his life, the artist G begins to paint upside down. Eventually, he paints his wife upside down. He also makes her ugly. The paintings are a great success.
In Paris, a woman is attacked by a stranger in the street. Her attacker flees, but not before turning around to contemplate her victim, like an artist stepping back from a canvas.
At the age of twenty-two, the painter G leaves home for a new life in another country, far from the disapproval of her parents. Her paintings attract the disapproval of the man she later marries.
When a mother dies, her children confront her legacy: the stories she told, the roles she assigned to them, the ways she withheld her love. Her death is a kind of freedom.
Parade is a novel that demolishes the conventions of storytelling. It surges past the limits of identity, character, and plot to tell the story of G, an artist whose life contains many lives. Rachel Cusk is a writer and visionary like no other, who turns language upside down to show us our world as it really is.
"Simmering underneath all the stories and talk is the desolate sense of how alone people can be even, perhaps particularly, in the most intimate relationships—existential issues by no means limited to those who make art. Cusk's prose is diamond-sharp, as are her insights. Short and intense, crammed with desperately human characters and much food for thought." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Less a story than a meditation on seeing and what is seen, Cusk's new novel is a work of quiet intensity with an oddly Zen quality to it; it is a book that makes demands, foremost that readers stop looking and finally see." —Library Journal (starred review)
"[A] stimulating experimental novel...Though the connections between the sections can feel tenuous, the author's spare approach to character is as sharp as ever. Once again, Cusk offers ranging and resonant perspectives on art, love, and femininity." —Publishers Weekly
This information about Parade was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Rachel Cusk is the author of Second Place, the Outline trilogy, the memoirs A Life's Work and Aftermath, and several other works of fiction and nonfiction. She is a Guggenheim Fellow. She lives in Paris.
At times, our own light goes out, and is rekindled by a spark from another person.
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