They talk about themselves, about art and literature, sorrow and joy, justice. The contrast between the absence of background and the graphic descriptions of bodies highlights the point: people and their stories are what matters. Faye introduces every one of them with a colourful physical description: “She was a tiny sinewy woman with a childlike body and a large bony, sagacious face in which the big heavy-lidded eyes had an almost reptilian patience, occasionally slowly blinking.” These people are eccentric, opinionated, and highly articulate. We are somewhere or anywhere in literary Europe, a grey set against which the characters stand out the more clearly. The setting is deliberately, unsettlingly, vague.
And it's not a million miles from what Geoffrey Chaucer does in The Canterbury Tales – perhaps he discovered the most genuine way to write a novel in the 14th century. Somerset Maugham used it frequently in his short stories. Indeed, the novel has a unique form and voice, even though the device of a travelling writer meeting characters who tell him their life stories is time honoured.
Cusk's technique has been rightly heralded as ground breaking and novel – "Of her efforts to expose the illusions of fiction and of life, she may have discovered the most genuine way to write a novel today", Ruth Franklin wrote of one of her previous books. The stories are largely related in indirect speech so the narrator's voice is dominant. Written in a formal literary prose, the voice reminds me of the style of say W.E.Sebald, or perhaps Kafka in translation. Kudos charts her travels from the US to a writer's conference somewhere in Europe, and the novel consists of the stories a variety of random characters tell her.
Almost everyone she meets confides their secret history to her.
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