Review by Will Preston

There’s a moment towards the end of Kudos, the final installment of Rachel Cusk’s groundbreaking Outline trilogy, when the whole work—hundreds of pages of characters and conversation—abruptly and elegantly folds in on itself, smaller and smaller until, like a magic trick, it fits inside a single, luminous image. On her way to dinner in an unnamed European country, our narrator, Faye, is pulled off on a detour by her companion. Their destination is an old church that was completely ravaged by fire some fifty years earlier: the paintings and statues destroyed, the stonework “split into two by the heat.” Instead of restoring the church, Faye’s companion explains, the damaged interior was left untouched and reopened for worship. On her first visit, she had found the blackened interior so distressing she had wanted to scream. But then she realized the scorched walls were covered with something like images, ghostly shapes and textures left by the flames:

Continue reading Where Statues Once Stood: On Rachel Cusk’s Kudos