If in Carolina’s song during all friends they are called Cayetano, in Parade (Editorial Asteroid), Rachel Cusk’s last book, all artists are called G. A daring that baffles the reader until it is located in a novel that lacks almost all the elements that characterize a work of that literary genre. But the taste for the challenge is one of the distinctive features of the Canadian author who, rather than inventing, makes fiction by reorder reality. Asteroid’s books has published it in Spanish translated by Catalina Martínez Muñoz and Editorial Les Hores in Catalan with translation of Núria Busquet Molist.
With this book, which is divided into four parts –The double, the midwife, the jumper and The spy-, the writer continues with the walk through the world of visual arts that began with Second house, In 2021. Although the reason for using the same letter as a name for the artists who appear is to preserve their anonymity, it is not difficult to play ‘who is who’ with them: is she a woman and makes sculptures of huge spiders? Louise Bourgeois; Is he painter and has decided to represent the world upside down, including his wife? Georg Baselitz; Is it black and practices abstract paint? Norman Lewis. However, Cusk does not seem relevant for readers to know or not who they were in real life, hence all are lyrics.
As in all his works, his biography has sneaked into stories. In fact, his followers can also have fun with a ‘who is who’ of his life: lawyer, photographer and possessive father? Exmarido! “The roots of literature and literary practice at their highest level are always the result of private or personal experience. You reorganize it, you create something with it, but life is your material,” he explained to Eldiario.es and four other media at the Books of the Asteroid’s books in Barcelona.
The main question posed Parade It is, according to Cusk is: “at what time and how women find a place to become true creators?” In the book, the characters that have wives can be dedicated to developing their work without limits, since they take care of the raising of children and the rest of everyday issues. Women, however, change their trajectory – re -re -re -the intensity of their paintings, for example – to try to adapt to their status as a mother and, in addition, continue married. “Where would the story of the creative woman begin? There are some suggestions, one of which is violence,” said “women have to become violent to gain that land and generate their own vision.”
All children cry
Maternity is a recurring matter in Cusk’s work and is not lacking in his new work. In fact, one of his greatest scandals occurred with the publication, in 2001, from his memoirs A Life’s Work: On Becoming A Mother in the United Kingdom, a country where it resided at that time. When he arrived in Spain in 2022 – asteroid books he took it in Spanish translated by Catalina Martínez Muñoz with the title A lifetime work– It did not cause angry reactions, but at the beginning of the 21st century that Maternar was not a path of roses was still a taboo theme. At least for people as a journalist who pointed out that if many people read the book, humanity would extinguish.
Years after that earthquake, Cusk published in The Guardian The article I was just being honestin which he explained the reason for the book and his perplexity to the indignation of criticism and readers. In this writing there is a paragraph that says: “There we were, my husband, my husband’s eight -year -old daughter and our two children: a baby who passionately cried every time he moved me out of his field of vision, and his sister, fifteen months older.” In Paradethe first G’s wife confesses that: “These weeping children fill me with impatience and also a kind of fear, as if they represented a universal task that I can never free myself.” That woman’s children have already grown, but her feeling of responsibility does not disappear. “Being a mother is living crossed for the moment and without the possibility of escape,” says the character.
“What can I say? It’s true, children don’t disappear. It’s a permanent condition,” Cusk said when asked about that phrase. The writer developed that with this and with her previous book she has tried to see the scope of female life, which goes beyond the structures of biology. One of the examples he offers in the novel is that of Louise Bourgeois, who first was a mother and wife and then had a second stage in which he developed as an artist, freed from family obligations “although not completely,” he said before the press. “The interesting thing is that he uses that second life really to question everything in the first, what related to his biological existence.”
In 2015, Great Britain put the cry again in the sky for another of its thematic memories: Remains. About marriage and separation, that arrived in Spain in 2020 from the hand of asteroid books and, again, translated by Catalina Martínez Muñoz. On this occasion, she told the experience of her divorce of her second husband, Adrian Clarke, who is the father of her two daughters. The process was not friendly and the author explains it although the details were kept on what caused the breakdown (something that those who criticized it precisely by airing her intimacies, as if they said ‘since you tell him, tell him, tell him everything’).
However, beyond Salaseo, the book is interesting both for the reflections he makes about the decisions he made: so much to be the one who worked outside the home and he who took care of domestic life and denying shared custody and spending a maintenance to his ex. “I thought it was he who had played the role of women in our marriage, and apparently I expected me to defend it from myself, from the oppressive male. I thought that making the purchase, cooking and picking up girls in school were female tasks. I, on the other hand, when I felt more asexual was when I did those things,” he wrote. And the British took their hands to their heads.
In three pack
Those controversial autobiographies reached Spanish bookstores thanks in part to the success of the publication of the novel trilogy Backwards (Backwards (2016), Transit (2017) and Prestige (2018)). True to their style of using experiences to tell stories, they are self -fiction work although they escape the conventional for their way of writing, with a narrative composed of voices that flow through the channel of a plot that seems not to exist. Each title is the story of an experience, of a limited life that may not be interesting but, nevertheless, it is.
The roots of literature and literary practice at their highest level are always the result of private or personal experience
Rachel Cusk
– Writer
As explained in Barcelona, a third book about the art world is on its way. It would be a kind of continuation of Parade Because he still has things to say about the universe in which he is located. “I find it very difficult to write and my conception of books is usually brief (…) Very often, I can only get where I really want to go in two or three jumps, which is very similar to what happened to the trilogy.” It is tempting to think that this interest is caused by their marriage to the artist Siemon Scamell-Katz, but Cusk commented that, although he writes since he was a child, in his adolescence he was more attracted to the arts than literature. “I don’t think I saw that one could learn lessons from the visual artist to become a different type of writer. And maybe now I have learned that lesson.”
Despite what Parade It is not, nor will it be, his most applauded work, the University of London, in association with the New Stateman, has awarded the Goldsmiths 2024 Prize. She, who has resided in Paris for four years, has received it with some resentment: “It was very surprising because normally in the United Kingdom awards they ignore me completely. This award, so they didn’t give it to me without humiliating me first. ” That same year he won the Malaparte Italian award (which others like Benjamín Labatut, Yasmina Reza, Susan Sontag, Nadine Gordimer or Emmanuel Carrère) and the title of Chevalier de l’Ardre des Arts et des lettres. It seems that the shadow of the controversy has been left behind or, at least, for now.
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