She looks like a vine. With a supple, slender figure dressed all in black, Rachel Cusk welcomes us barefoot into an old building in the Marais. « XVIIIe century, yes…she confirms. Magnificent…, but when it rains, it also rains on the stairs. » She laughs: ultimately, what do the waterproofing problems matter, since, by settling in these places, she has visibly found a form of serenity.
God knows, though, Rachel Cusk has been on the move all her life! Born in Canada to British parents, the writer lived in the United States, in England (London, Oxford, Exmoor, Bristol, Brighton, etc.), took a detour through Italy then returned to the United Kingdom before leaving. flee at the time of Brexit. “We were determined to stay in Europeshe says, speaking of her and her husband, the painter Siemon Scamell-Katz, who prepares tea in the kitchen. We have been here for three years. And, this time, it's over, we won't move anymore. »
What attaches this “wind-soled” writer to the Continent? “I had to find something…she said, shrugging her shoulders. Something that didn't reflect who I already was. » What does she mean? That the place of outsider suits him well: “I don’t know, I don’t prejudge anything and I’m learning all the time! » In Paradeher new novel, the first book written in France, she has one of her characters say that he has finally become a traveler without baggage. As if for a long time he had been his own burden. “ As if, abroad, he had finally been able to unchain himself from the predestination imposed by identity and to be free. »
Rachel Cusk has been writing for thirty years. In 1993 she published Saving Agnes (“saving Agnes”, not translated), which immediately attracted attention across the Channel and won the Whitbread Prize for first novel. However, it will take fifteen additional years to be translated into French, with Arlington Park (L'Olivier, 2007), adapted for the cinema by Isabelle Czajka, with Emmanuelle Devos, under the title Domestic life (2013). We meet four women who, as they say, have everything to be happy but feel fundamentally prevented from fulfilling themselves. As later in Backlash (The Olivier, 2013), Addiction (Gallimard, 2022) or even in his trilogy Contour (Folio, 2022), almost all the major Cuskian themes are already present in Arlington Park : marriage, distance, violence, intellectual life and, above all, the place assigned to women, motherhood, sacrifice…
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