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Mellifluous with a beautifully honed thematic core. The tone nimbly alternates between black despair and forlornness and subtle humor. If E.M. Forster excelled at intrusive narrators, always commenting on events, Rachel Cusk’s narrator here might be called unintrusive for the way she hangs back and let’s others speak. One of the walking wounded herself, her damage manifests itself in a kind of unquestioning passivity. She’s going through the motions.

A divorced woman, English, she is a writer of middle age who is in Athens one hot summer to teach a writing workshop. A key motif here is of looking back and seeing that for many years you lived your life almost unconsciously, that time then simply elapsed and in retrospect you see it as freedom, yes, but you also see it as unfocused, almost rambling, free-style in essence—and this is something, a mindset, a way of being you could not adopt today if you tried, such being the indelibility of experience.

“When I looked at the family on the boat, I saw a vision of what I no longer had: I saw something, in other words, that wasn’t there. Those people were living in their moment, and though I could see it I could no more return to that moment than I could walk across the water that separated us. And of those two ways of living—living in the moment and living outside it—which is the more real?�� (p. 75)

Later we meet a woman, Elena, who says “Very often I have felt that my relationships have no story, and the reason is because I have jumped ahead of myself, the way I used to turn the pages of a book to find out what happens in the final chapter. I want to know everything straight away. I want to know the content without living through the time span.�� (p. 191) Here too is someone living outside the moment rather than in it. Since reading the book is the moment we live for. Thus Elena deprives her relationships of their essence, so busy is she trying to head off any surprises, any pain.

This is a brilliant novel. It’s astonishingly fresh. It reminds me in its compression and economy—not its style, nor its themes—of a few other exquisite books, including Ernest Hemingway’s best novel, The Sun Also Rises, Per Petterson’s stark Out Stealing Horses, and Willa Cather’s terse frontier fable My Ántonia.