Transit

Transit by Rachel Cusk

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


*** Possible Spoilers ***

A woman has a number of encounters with friends, family and tradespeople. That's it. That's the entire plot of this book. Nothing happens. We learn so little about the narrator that the author might as well have written the book in the third person. The characters we meet are sketched out lightly. We might learn a few things about them but precious little. I have no idea why the author even bothered to write this book.

One gets the impression that the author believes that all the characters - and possibly the entire world - is deep to the point of being utterly inexplicable. Then she turns over rocks for a couple of hundred pages while examining, with a biologists intensity, and a scientist's objectivity, what she finds under them. This isn't a story. At best it's an author's sketch pad or perhaps a fictional diary. The entire book is an illusion of intellectual discovery. I do not recommend it to anyone who opens a book and expects to find something of a plot between the covers.

Transit was a runner-up for 2017 Giller Award thereby demonstrating the depth to which Canadian Literature has sunk. I enjoy Canadian Literature. I've enjoyed books by Margret Atwood, Margret Lawrence and even Mordecai Richler. They wrote stories. Transit is nothing more than intellectual twaddle spread over a number of pages.

Okay let's be fair. The author may not say anything but she is a sufficiently qualified wordsmith that she says nothing in a manner that is very pleasant. Her words are almost hypnotic. They flow nicely. Reading this book is much like listening to music. It may not mean much but it sounds good.

Many of the reviews on Goodreads are positive so some people clearly enjoyed it. It may be that a younger audience would make up Ms. Cusk's target audience. I could easily imagine myself, back when I was in university, sitting around with a group of friends discussing the deep impenetrable mysteries of the universe and the meaning of life as laid out in books such as this. That was before it was known to be 42. Referencing this sort of thing, we'd attempt to demonstrate that we were dark troubled souls of great sensitivity - mostly in the vain hope that we'd get laid but we didn't dare admit to that sort of thing. So by all means, if you are filled with the torments of adolescent angst, this book will provide you with a number of quotes that might make you seem deep and introspective, steeped in the nihilism of postmodernism. Those who are past that sort of thing might be better off finding something else to read.



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