There's something nagging about the narration in Outline, a sense of something constantly withheld, where the withholding is happening in a way that's structural to how the almost-unnamed narrator - her name appears only right near the end - experiences her world. Its mode sometimes reminded me of Deborah Levy's brilliant Hot Milk, but Hot Milk is all undertows and the heat of fierce, flickering emotion and dangerous ambiguity, while Outline generates a stifling sense of blockage, as if between surface and interior lies a layer so heavy and still as to be virtually impenetrable.
Then a young woman, whose name, according to my diagram, was Sylvia, began to speak, having glanced around the room apparently to ascertain that no one else was going to take the initiative. Her small, resigned smile made it clear that she often found herself in this position.
The narrator is sharply, forensically observant; facets of surfaces accumulate, and there are times when language and world merge, as below, the 'surprisingly' itself appearing surprisingly in an otherwise typically plain sentence.
I could imagine her in the monasticism of a practice room, her fingers flying surprisingly across the black and white keys.
Themes of identity, stories and other types of meaning-making recur, and the barest details of the narrator's life emerge: a divorce, a connection to Athens (where the book's two days take place), hints of an unsatisfying relationship with her sons. You spend a whole book in her head, privy to her highly nuanced, specific responses to the people and places around her, yet by book's end I felt I hardly knew her at all.
He paid the bill, waving away my offers of money after a brief but observable hesitation, and we stood to leave.
Even after two consecutive reads, I can't say why Outline is so intriguing, so seemingly lingering. It's not the mystery as such, and it's certainly not the plot (which is basically non-existent). Some of it, I think, lies in the human drama associated with the many slices of people's lives that make up the book's scenes, each with different levels of closeness to an actual narrative of the person's life; and, maybe, the contrast to the narrator's own opacity, a blankness that seems incongruous with the intimacy that her proximity ought to bring. I like phenomenological fiction, after all, and here there's a phenomenology at once baffling and curiously familiar.
I closed my eyes and tried to summon up my feelings for my neighbour. When I opened them again Elena was still looking at me, waiting. I said that I had become so unused to thinking about things in terms of whether I liked them or whether I didn't that I couldn't answer her question. My neighbour was merely a perfectly good example of something about which I could only feel absolute ambivalence.
Then a young woman, whose name, according to my diagram, was Sylvia, began to speak, having glanced around the room apparently to ascertain that no one else was going to take the initiative. Her small, resigned smile made it clear that she often found herself in this position.
The narrator is sharply, forensically observant; facets of surfaces accumulate, and there are times when language and world merge, as below, the 'surprisingly' itself appearing surprisingly in an otherwise typically plain sentence.
I could imagine her in the monasticism of a practice room, her fingers flying surprisingly across the black and white keys.
Themes of identity, stories and other types of meaning-making recur, and the barest details of the narrator's life emerge: a divorce, a connection to Athens (where the book's two days take place), hints of an unsatisfying relationship with her sons. You spend a whole book in her head, privy to her highly nuanced, specific responses to the people and places around her, yet by book's end I felt I hardly knew her at all.
He paid the bill, waving away my offers of money after a brief but observable hesitation, and we stood to leave.
Even after two consecutive reads, I can't say why Outline is so intriguing, so seemingly lingering. It's not the mystery as such, and it's certainly not the plot (which is basically non-existent). Some of it, I think, lies in the human drama associated with the many slices of people's lives that make up the book's scenes, each with different levels of closeness to an actual narrative of the person's life; and, maybe, the contrast to the narrator's own opacity, a blankness that seems incongruous with the intimacy that her proximity ought to bring. I like phenomenological fiction, after all, and here there's a phenomenology at once baffling and curiously familiar.
I closed my eyes and tried to summon up my feelings for my neighbour. When I opened them again Elena was still looking at me, waiting. I said that I had become so unused to thinking about things in terms of whether I liked them or whether I didn't that I couldn't answer her question. My neighbour was merely a perfectly good example of something about which I could only feel absolute ambivalence.
