These are not novels of plot or event. These are novels as after-action-reports. Incidents from the far reaches of someone else’s memory. Novels as overheard gossip. In summarizing these novels, you feel less like you are relaying the structure of a set of external experiences and more like you are recapping someone’s to-do list. The books are very... See more

What all of these people have in common is that in Faye’s presence, they grow voluble about their own lives, which they render in fable-like anecdotes. They tell her (with shockingly little prompting) stories about their marriages, their failures, their love affairs, their professional humiliations, the large and small agonies of raising children,... See more

Sebald’s project was one of recuperation. That he was in essence trying to recuperate something which could only be recuperated through this particular patterning of fact and fiction, and that only in transcending the boundary between those two domains could he reach across that gap of history and calamity and restore some sense of wholeness to the... See more

What I am trying to say is that the threat of erasure which informs so much of the melancholic urgency, the desperate thoroughness of the witness accounts that shape Sebald’s narrations in The Emigrants , is a strange fit for Cusk’s bourgeois exiles. They speak with the same cast of voice as Sebald’s refugees, but the circumstances of their... See more

style is always an external manifestation of a disposition toward life. It seems unfair that what we so often focus on that external aspect without showing equal consideration to that vast inner terrain that gives shape to the external aspect.

I now find first-person narrators so mediated that they even mediate their own experience of reality and consciousness back to themselves. You see it again and again, first-person fiction written as though it is third-person, external to the person narrating it.

Faye is less narrator than a mobile occasion for narrative. What I mean is that whenever she comes into contact with another person, they spontaneously erupt into narrative, as though it is leaving a point of high symbolic concentration (their own lives) to a point of low symbolic concentration (this deracinated female narrator about whom we know... See more

I’ve started to suspect that what’s going on with Cusk and other unknowing imitators of Sebald via the Cusk pathway is really postmodernism wearing autofiction drag to a realism costume party.

the novel offers philosophy, beautiful philosophy at times, rather than the truly, deeply, embodied personal.

This is a novel written with the eyeballs. About the witnessing of perception and the witnessing of insight. Visceral life—like the unkempt, sour, foul apartment of Faye’s downstairs neighbors—is kept at arm’s length, addressed only in the... See more