These novels of Cusk's are so mysterious and bewitching in their effect that I have little idea whether my more muted response to Kudos - the last in the trilogy following Outline and Transit - is due to the properties of the book itself or where I've been at while reading it.
The similarities to its predecessors are far more pronounced than any differences, and in Kudos too there are repetitions, some - like dogs and musical instruments - carrying over from Transit, and others - like precocious children and people distressed by and sensitive to lies - new as far as I can tell. Also new is the spectre of Brexit, and a greater explicitness in the prominence of story and metaphor, the female experience (although, flipping back through Outline to verify that impression, nearly the first page I opened to had someone recounting a dream where she and her friends all began menstruating profusely at the opera to the horror and disgust of the passing men ...), and the disappointments of marriage and the disappointments between parents and children.
I've read some reviews arguing that Faye is more visible - more tangible - in Kudos than in the two earlier books, but I didn't particularly find that. For me, Transit was the peak of this puzzling and quite great sequence; Kudos is the first to feel a tiny bit over-determined in its language, imagery and faint through-lines. Still, for large sections I was enthralled, and all in all found plenty to grapple with - at times in that way of grappling with the text's own elusiveness, and in other places directly with the ideas that it poses in overt terms.
The similarities to its predecessors are far more pronounced than any differences, and in Kudos too there are repetitions, some - like dogs and musical instruments - carrying over from Transit, and others - like precocious children and people distressed by and sensitive to lies - new as far as I can tell. Also new is the spectre of Brexit, and a greater explicitness in the prominence of story and metaphor, the female experience (although, flipping back through Outline to verify that impression, nearly the first page I opened to had someone recounting a dream where she and her friends all began menstruating profusely at the opera to the horror and disgust of the passing men ...), and the disappointments of marriage and the disappointments between parents and children.
I've read some reviews arguing that Faye is more visible - more tangible - in Kudos than in the two earlier books, but I didn't particularly find that. For me, Transit was the peak of this puzzling and quite great sequence; Kudos is the first to feel a tiny bit over-determined in its language, imagery and faint through-lines. Still, for large sections I was enthralled, and all in all found plenty to grapple with - at times in that way of grappling with the text's own elusiveness, and in other places directly with the ideas that it poses in overt terms.
