Category: Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk

The Cunning Little Vixen, in which a fox is caught by a hunter and kept in a farmyard with the other animals. He keeps her because he loves her, despite the fact she is destructive, and there is a value for her too in his attention, though its consequence is her captivity. But her nature drives her to seek the wild, and one day she escapes the farmyard and finds her way back into the forest; but instead of feeling liberated she is terrified, for having lived in the farmyard most of her life she has forgotten how to be free.

Rachel Cusk

She was surprised to discover that Paola was thirty-four. ‘What have you been doing all this time?’ she wanted to ask, but instead she said, ‘What brought you to England?”There was a man,’ Paola said. ‘When the man left, I decided to stay.”An Italian man?’Barely perceptibly, Paola nodded.’He had a job here. He is an -‘ She paused. ‘- aeronautical engineer. After a year he had to go home.’Solly was seething with questions. It was strange: in Paola’s presence she felt herself to be a failure, yet a part of her believed that a woman of thirty-four with no husband or children was the greatest failure of all. It was a kind of unstoppable need for resolution that grew from her like ivy over the prospect of freedom and tried to strangle it. She couldn’t bear the idea of loose threads, of open spaces, of stories without ends. Did Paola not want to get married? Did she not want children, and a house of her own? She sat there in her white sweater, delicately eating. Solly, a sack stuffed with children, a woman who had spent and spent her life until there was none left, sat opposite her, impatient for more.

Rachel Cusk

I can see us there still,” he said, “for those were moments so intense that in a way we will be living them always, while other things are completely forgotten. Yet there is no particular story attached to them,” he said, “despite their place in the story I have just told you. That time spent swimming in the pool beneath the waterfall belongs nowhere: it is part of no sequence of events, it is only itself, in a way that nothing our life before as a family was ever itself, because it was always leading to the next thing and the next, was always contributing to our story of who we were.

Rachel Cusk

I can see us there still,” he said, “for those were moments so intense that in a way we will be living them always, while other things are completely forgotten. Yet there is no particular story attached to them,” he said, “despite their place in the story I have just told you. That time spent swimming in the pool beneath the waterfall belongs nowhere: it is part of no sequence of events, it is only itself, in a way that nothing our life before as a family was ever itself, because it was always leading to the next thing and the next, was always contributing to our story of who we were.