The events in the novel – which are largely based on the real life visit of D. ‘Why not?’ I asked, and I believe it was the utterance that lay at the furthest bottom of my soul, the thing I had always been asking and still wanted to ask, because I had never yet received an answer. He looked at me with a faintly quizzical expression. ‘If you’re going to paint anyone,then surely it ought to be me!’ In fact this latter serves one of the most cruel moments in the book when M cries out that The quiet haven that M has built up around herself and Tony, almost reclusive in their marsh, is disrupted in many ways by L’s arrival – not least in his arriving with the beautiful and talented young lady, Brett, and in his refusal to engage with M herself. It just open the next scene with “One day I wrote to L…”

M invites L to stay at the marsh, for reasons that were not immediately apparent: I mean, fifteen years had elapsed, and Cusk doesn’t really make it clear what prompted the invitation. M responds to the painting with pity – “the kind of wordless pity a mother might feel for her mortal child, who nonetheless she brushes and dresses so tenderly” – and feels as if she is being spoken to, hearing, when she looks at the image, the words “ I am here”.įifteen years later, M is married to Tony and living on the marsh with a house and land on which they have built another building – the eponymous second place – which is used as a somewhat elitist guest house when it is not being lived in by her daughter Justine and her boyfriend Kurt. He looks almost surprised to see himself: he gives that stranger a glance that is as objective and compassionless as any glance in the street. It presages a breakdown of some kind which is only staved off by a random encounter with a painting by L – a self portrait in which the artists appearsĪt about the distance you might keep between yourself and a stranger. Our narrator is M – and I have never liked the use of letters for names as if to grant anonymity to fictional characters – who is a writer and claims to have met the devil on a train in Paris. This was my first Rachel Cusk and, oh boy, it was a challenging read, make no mistake! With its examination of the possibility that art can both save and destroy us, Second Place is deeply affirming of the human soul, while grappling with its darkest demons. Over the course of one hot summer, his provocative presence provides the frame for a study of female fate and male privilege, of the geometries of human relationships, and of the struggle to live morally between our internal and external worlds.

Rachel Cusk SynopsisĪ woman invites a famed artist to visit the remote coastal region where she lives, in the belief that his vision will penetrate the mystery of her life and landscape. True art means seeking to capture the unreal. The truth lies not in any claim to reality, but in the place where what is real moves beyond our interpretation of it.

Second place rachel cusk amazon