I have not read a work of Rachel Cusk before but the comments and extracts about her book concerning her journey and stay in Italy greatly interested me. In the bookstore in Athens "Arlington Park" was the only book of hers that was available. I was hesitant about buying it since it is female centered and Anglocentric and I am neither female nor English. Nevertheless after I bought the book I was happy to read it since the use of the language is superb and the utilization of the latent possibilities inherent in the mundane humdrum realities of everyday existence and interaction is inspirational. Unlike the "Iliad" which the Far Right extremists now in the ascendance in Greece exult as a literary work stressing the heroic and extraordinary aspects of human behaviour, this work concentrates on the average, the mundane, the commonplace and the plain process of living- with its inherent elements of resentment and angst. As the late philosopher and political commentator Panagiotis Kondylis used to write-the novel in Greece focused on the fate of people from the middle classes crushed under mundane and miserable circumstances and unfullfiled dreams and vain expectations-(it is not a translation I just render the meaning). Reading this novel by Rachel Cusk, which does not refer to Greeks but to the English and especially to women, I can not but realize that the words of the late master were correct and that those themes of middle-of-the-road existences lived within the confines of mundane lives had in them an element of universality to which a work of art should aspire to. I am looking forward to attending the creative writing seminar in Athens in June where Rachel Cusk is going to teach, I did not know her before but judging from this work it will be an enriching experience. I am currently rereading the book after the first reconnaissance reading.Having now finished a second more in-depth reading of the novel I stick to my initial appraisal of the book. It is a very good work, the characters believable if not lovable and the use of the English language imaginative and elaborate.
Arlington Park is a series of untitled & unnumbered passages; each one focuses on a different woman coming to grips with her suburban life's dissatisfactions. This variation on a single theme comes dangerously close to making the narrative obsolete as a whole. It's difficult to center one's attention on each separate character; the women's identities & responses almost merge into a single persona by the end. That there is no worthwhile plot and each character's fate is indistinct from that of the others is appropriate to the theme of the book: Time passes, nothing happens. Rachel Cusk paints a rather bleak picture of each woman's plight, the daily anxieties of the suburban mother/housewife/consumer, and it is easy for the reader to be overcome by the claustrophobic & strangulating details of these women's existence. "A downpour would come or a reprieving ray of light, and in the end you didn't know what the difference was, what it all meant, what it added up to, what set against the necessity for just surviving and getting through.""'You've just got to steer your own course. That's all you can do really, is steer your own course through it and not think too much.'"What makes the book worthwhile is that Cusk recognizes that Juliet, Maisie, Amanda, Solly, and Christine have at the core of their being a common existential dilemma: they are all equally incapable of enunciating their reality into words, and of speaking about it amongst themselves. Therefore someone else must speak for them. Arlington Park then becomes a testament to their predicament. My question is whether Cusk manages to give us something more to ponder on, beyond the obvious thematic references to Virginia Woolf and Philip Larkin. Rachel Cusk reviews other writers.
Do You like book Arlington Park (2007)?
Amazingly written and equally unbearable and bleak. The utter desolation of these privileged, godless British mothers was enough to depress the bejeebies out of me for the duration of the three days it took me to read it. Rachel Cusk is an inarguably brilliant writer, but my goodness! I could relate in many ways to the ambivalence and even fleeting hatred of one's spouse and children - it is real, and she is wise to remind us to acknowledge the dark side of the fairy tale as universal and "normal" - but the story overall left me on my knees thanking God that I do not look to my spouse and children, and the satisfaction of my selfish desires, to determine the meaning of my life. Inspired by her poetic prose, unnerved and ultimately respulsed by her characters.
—Rachel
Let me just start by saying that Cusk's prose is practically perfect--every sentence is poetic and eloquent and fraught with purpose and meaning. Although she depicts one side of motherhood (the mind-numbingly boring, annoying, miserable side), she fails to accurately capture the complicated nuances of it overall, which in turn, made me like her writing less and less as the book wore on so that by the end, I thought, "Whew--finally I'm done with all of these horrid characters." I wanted to like this book more than I did, but I found that I didn't care about any of the characters or see the point of it and was only relieved to be finished so that I could move on from the narrow, miserable existence that was Arlington Park. I appreciated the beauty of Cusk's writing--and her courage in saying something very honest and different about motherhood, but did not enjoy the book.
—Jennifer
This books seems to balance between a kind of undeclared feminine manifesto and a story of sheered families. The plot takes action during a single day. It starts during dawn on a rainy night and the characters are introduced to us during the day. All main characters are women. Around them, husbands and children, and the life in an English suburb. While they are introduced, the reader gets the feeling that they are unhappy and bit lost. Like they are just trying to survive, for an unknown reason. Juliet, Amanda, Christine, Maisie e Solly, are presented like triumphs from a lost batle.They have homes and families but just walk around life. At a certain point in the plot it really seems they dislike themselves. Could the easy answer for that might be that they hate their husbands? The ones that made them change their lives. Uninterrupted carers? Or the ones that save them giving them a home and family. Easy to read, however it is a bit melancholic. I would say that its main interest resides on the picture (more or less) trustful of a significant segment of the contemporary English society.
—Joana Vaz Teixeira
