SECOND PLACE - RACHEL CUSK | BOOK

For the first time ever it seems that I’ve found an author with the ability to blatantly articulate the subconscious. Page after page, line after line, its as if the mind effortlessly streams forth into an obstructed river of thought and emotion. Rich in detail and in world-building, Second Place by Rachel Cusk delves deep into the heart of what being an artist means and the effects that art has on the maker and the audience. It explores themes of regret, love, life, and death, so poignantly.

I discovered this book inadvertently through Moya Mawhinney, a lifestyle Internet personality. She had gone on a trip to the island of Ischia in Italy (this already sounds like the setting of a fiction novel) and beautifully framed next to some fruit or the beach was the book “Kudos” by Cusk. The straightforward, minimal book cover immediately caught my eye. I went down the rabbit hole of discovering this author and realized that all her book covers had this sort of gallery format with a clean white border, black letters, and striking imagery. They say to not judge a book by its cover and yet, here we are.

‘Second Place” arrested my attention. The premise is that of an artist who lives in Paris, and a woman who encounters his work and is so compelled by it that she invites the artist to the remote landscape that her and her family live in as this sort of workshop. We come to learn that this guesthouse is called the second place.

I had to get the book. It has arrived at a time in my life where  I’ve created a mental Venn-diagram, with circles including Art, Paris, Family, Travel, and the Coast. This book certainly was comprised of all these elements - the perfect overlap. And so there I was, lost again in my imagination, building the world that Cusk had laid out before me. Of course, as a reader, you almost always find ways to sympathize with the protagonist, and this was no exception. I felt like this character with so many questions about self-perception, and how we perceive others. The entirety of the book felt like it had simply ripped pages out of my own personal journal. It was raw, brutally at times, with truth and emotions that make up the core of being a human - imperfect at that.

I’ve just finished the book about an hour before writing this, and I realize that to delve into its meaning, beat-for-beat, would be to ruin it for you (if you’d like to read it). So instead, I’ve chosen some of my favorite snippets as a means to convey the overarching prose and atmosphere that this author creates:

why do we live so painfully in our fictions?

underneath skies throbbing with stars

the artist can create outside of himself the perfect replica of his intentions

touching the senses very lightly

mistaking sensory perceptions as reality

stillness is the most perfect form of action

Second Place was an enriching literary experience, the type where once you close the. book you forget you were existing in any other reality. The type of book that makes you think long after you’ve read the last page.