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A review by ailsapeacock
The Bradshaw Variations by Rachel Cusk
A cold exercise of narrative that runs between members of the Bradshaw family, torn between irritation at their stultifying familial roles and the insulation that living as part of a whole offers from reality.
It was interesting reading this so soon after The Real Thing by Stoppard and Dream Story by Arthur Schnitzler, two other texts which explore the boundaries between self and the ones you love. What is love and what is habit?
I hit upon a section which reminded a lot of her later Outline trilogy:
"It strikes her now that life is not linear, a journey, a passage, but a static process of irreversible accretion. It is perspective that moves, passing over it all like the sun, now illuminating, now casting into shadow. The angle changes, the relation of one thing to another, the proportion of dark to light; but experience itself is block-like, is cumulative and fixed." 99
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"He has not asked them one question about themselves: she and Claudia do not exist for him, they are just lines of perspective, ways for him to measure his location in space." 93
"It is true that Thomas is increasingly preoccupied by the mystery of other people's abilities. He can hardly bring himself to listen any more to his Glen Gould recordings, to his Clifford Curzon boxed set, to Feinstein's indistinct primordial account of Bach, so swamped does he become in the knowledge that these men are vastly more capable than himself. And it isn't just music, either: the same feeling besieges him when he considers literature or painting, when he leafs through the photographs in his Encyclopedia of World Art, a feeling that is beyond jealousy, that is a sort of sulkiness. All these others, born just as he was, into the same world: they are all better, more capable, more exceptional than he is." 118
It was interesting reading this so soon after The Real Thing by Stoppard and Dream Story by Arthur Schnitzler, two other texts which explore the boundaries between self and the ones you love. What is love and what is habit?
I hit upon a section which reminded a lot of her later Outline trilogy:
"It strikes her now that life is not linear, a journey, a passage, but a static process of irreversible accretion. It is perspective that moves, passing over it all like the sun, now illuminating, now casting into shadow. The angle changes, the relation of one thing to another, the proportion of dark to light; but experience itself is block-like, is cumulative and fixed." 99
.
.
.
.
.
.
"He has not asked them one question about themselves: she and Claudia do not exist for him, they are just lines of perspective, ways for him to measure his location in space." 93
"It is true that Thomas is increasingly preoccupied by the mystery of other people's abilities. He can hardly bring himself to listen any more to his Glen Gould recordings, to his Clifford Curzon boxed set, to Feinstein's indistinct primordial account of Bach, so swamped does he become in the knowledge that these men are vastly more capable than himself. And it isn't just music, either: the same feeling besieges him when he considers literature or painting, when he leafs through the photographs in his Encyclopedia of World Art, a feeling that is beyond jealousy, that is a sort of sulkiness. All these others, born just as he was, into the same world: they are all better, more capable, more exceptional than he is." 118