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The Last Supper
When Rachel Cusk decides to travel to Italy for a summer with her husband and two young children, she has no idea of the trials and wonders that lie in store. Their journey leads them to both the expected and the surprising, all seen through Cusk's sharp and humane perspective.
215 pages, Paperback
First published May 1, 2009
198 people are currently reading
6284 people want to read
About the author
Rachel Cusk
60 books5,159 followersRachel Cusk was born in Canada, and spent some of her childhood in Los Angeles, before her family returned to England, in 1974, when Cusk was 8 years old. She read English at New College, Oxford.
Cusk is the Whitbread Award–winning author of two memoirs, including The Last Supper, and seven novels, including Arlington Park, Saving Agnes, The Temporary, The Country Life, and The Lucky Ones.
She has won and been shortlisted for numerous prizes: her most recent novel, Outline (2014), was shortlisted for the Folio Prize, the Goldsmith's Prize and the Bailey's prize, and longlisted for Canada's Giller Prize. In 2003, Rachel Cusk was nominated by Granta magazine as one of 20 'Best of Young British Novelists'
She lives in Brighton, England.
Cusk is the Whitbread Award–winning author of two memoirs, including The Last Supper, and seven novels, including Arlington Park, Saving Agnes, The Temporary, The Country Life, and The Lucky Ones.
She has won and been shortlisted for numerous prizes: her most recent novel, Outline (2014), was shortlisted for the Folio Prize, the Goldsmith's Prize and the Bailey's prize, and longlisted for Canada's Giller Prize. In 2003, Rachel Cusk was nominated by Granta magazine as one of 20 'Best of Young British Novelists'
She lives in Brighton, England.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 279 reviews
January 6, 2026
if i can't teleport to italy i guess i'll just read about it.
(and i read this while on a work trip to columbus, ohio just to rub it in.)
https://emmareadstoomuch.substack.com...
not only was this so cleverly descriptive that it took me out of columbus and dropped me in tuscany, and so beautifully written as to make me use my pen and my bookmark to underline lines during a turbulent flight, and so intelligent about art and life that i found myself rereading paragraphs...
it is also the rarest, for books, thing of all: funny.
at one point the relentless and dutiful reports from the tangled social world of textbook characters actually made me laugh out loud. more accurately, it made me puff air out my nose, then do it again but with more force, and then finally let out a single guffaw. i read this in so many not ideal places: conference rooms before meetings, taxiing planes, on the floor of a failing mall...and it brought me peace and joy in all of them. i never wanted to finish.
bottom line: almost perfect.
(and i read this while on a work trip to columbus, ohio just to rub it in.)
https://emmareadstoomuch.substack.com...
not only was this so cleverly descriptive that it took me out of columbus and dropped me in tuscany, and so beautifully written as to make me use my pen and my bookmark to underline lines during a turbulent flight, and so intelligent about art and life that i found myself rereading paragraphs...
it is also the rarest, for books, thing of all: funny.
at one point the relentless and dutiful reports from the tangled social world of textbook characters actually made me laugh out loud. more accurately, it made me puff air out my nose, then do it again but with more force, and then finally let out a single guffaw. i read this in so many not ideal places: conference rooms before meetings, taxiing planes, on the floor of a failing mall...and it brought me peace and joy in all of them. i never wanted to finish.
bottom line: almost perfect.
August 25, 2018
One has to ask oneself why we read memoirs of travels. Wouldn’t it be better to just take off on our own, not knowing of other people’s troubles or joys in case we are fearful or disappointed? But Rachel Cusk reminds us why we read other people’s tales: she is observant, and terribly funny. Tales of her trips make ours resonant with laughter, too. How did we first manage when confronted with grocery stores without anything we would consider food in them?
Oh yes, training one’s palate until we recognize what is so special about food, in this case, in Italy. The simplicity of it. We meet the brusque-seeming, loud and insistent butcher, the tennis-playing hotelier who smokes incessantly, and the “four Englishwomen [on the train] their own laps full of purchases from Florence boutiques…returning to their rental villa in the hills….They seem to have outlived the world of men, of marriage and motherhood and children. They laugh hilariously at anything any one of them says. They are a third sex, these happy materialists.”
One of the best afternoon’s amusements is listening to Cusk detail the paintings she comes upon in her travels; endless pictures of Madonna and any number of versions of the Child. She gives the backstory of Raphael, his adoration of the work of Michelangelo, and his death at the early age of thirty-seven. The observations she makes about the “congested alleyway toward the Piazza della Signoria, where a riot of of café terraces and horse-drawn tourist carriages and pavement hawkers selling African jewelry is underway.” How much has this scene changed in millennia of Italian history? Or has it always been just like this, where people
The Catholics have a large presence in Italy, the Basilica di San Francesco lending credence to “the giantism of Catholic architecture…which harmonize unexpectedly with the iconography of late capitalism…the airport terminal…and the shopping mall.” Cusk takes the stuffing out of adults who use “Christianity as a tool, a moralizing weapon they had fashioned in their own subconscious…the strange, dark chasm of repression and subjectivity…judgment lay down there…flowing like a black river.” Do I need to say Catholic school growing up in England was a less than satisfactory experience?
This is the book I would give a friend to explain why I love the work of Cusk so. How can one not appreciate the quiet way she inserts her family into an unfamiliar world and does not spare herself nor anyone else the sharpness of her observations. The family moves over a period of months, down the Italian coast, just south of Naples.
The last day of their southern journey, the ‘bottom’ of their vacation, they are denied a trip to Capri by boatman strike. Instead they boat to Positano where father, mother, and two children paid fifteen Euros each to lie on the beach. Beside them were young American newlyweds in white bathers, ‘groomed as gods” but timid and self-conscious. Cusk wishes she had a Raphael to paint them for her, and I do, too.
Cusk has a warmth in her writing for the magnificent, the ‘theatrical and sincere,’ the elaborate, the splendid Italians, and she tells us her children will always remember Italy as a place they want to live. Her husband gets no notice, and if we did not know she travelled in a family of four, we would not know he was there at all. This book was published in 2009, and three short years later her marriage lay in ruins. We see the beginning of that split here, methinks.
One feels quite as though one had done this journey, too, traveling along with sunburnt girls in the back of a car with the windows wide. The final week in a faded blue tent strike us as real as real can be—even with the call from the publisher saying the rights to publish her last book in South Korea allowed them the possibility of a glorious, comfortable night in a seaside resort with gold bathroom fixtures but an unused swimming pool and a beautifully-appointed restaurant in which no one ate.
‘Rewarding’ hardly seems adequate praise. I savor her work like Peruginas. Her writing is for me like one of those moments she describes whose effects will last forever…visually stunning, thought-provoking, delicious to remember. The summer feels lived.
Oh yes, training one’s palate until we recognize what is so special about food, in this case, in Italy. The simplicity of it. We meet the brusque-seeming, loud and insistent butcher, the tennis-playing hotelier who smokes incessantly, and the “four Englishwomen [on the train] their own laps full of purchases from Florence boutiques…returning to their rental villa in the hills….They seem to have outlived the world of men, of marriage and motherhood and children. They laugh hilariously at anything any one of them says. They are a third sex, these happy materialists.”
One of the best afternoon’s amusements is listening to Cusk detail the paintings she comes upon in her travels; endless pictures of Madonna and any number of versions of the Child. She gives the backstory of Raphael, his adoration of the work of Michelangelo, and his death at the early age of thirty-seven. The observations she makes about the “congested alleyway toward the Piazza della Signoria, where a riot of of café terraces and horse-drawn tourist carriages and pavement hawkers selling African jewelry is underway.” How much has this scene changed in millennia of Italian history? Or has it always been just like this, where people
“push and shove rudely, trying to get what they want…I have seen a fifteenth-century painting of the Piazza della Signoria, where children play and the burghers of Florence stroll and chat in its spacious spaces, while the monk Savonarola is burned at the stake in the background outside the Palazzo Vecchio. Here and there peasants carry bundles of twigs, to put on the fire.”So few are the antiquities that people from the world over wait in long, snaking lines, “an overgrown humanity trying to fit into the narrow, beautiful past, like a person in corpulent middle age trying to squeeze in to a slender garment from their youth.” It takes one’s breath away, the clarity with which Cusk writes, reminding us of what we may have once observed but could not convey.
The Catholics have a large presence in Italy, the Basilica di San Francesco lending credence to “the giantism of Catholic architecture…which harmonize unexpectedly with the iconography of late capitalism…the airport terminal…and the shopping mall.” Cusk takes the stuffing out of adults who use “Christianity as a tool, a moralizing weapon they had fashioned in their own subconscious…the strange, dark chasm of repression and subjectivity…judgment lay down there…flowing like a black river.” Do I need to say Catholic school growing up in England was a less than satisfactory experience?
This is the book I would give a friend to explain why I love the work of Cusk so. How can one not appreciate the quiet way she inserts her family into an unfamiliar world and does not spare herself nor anyone else the sharpness of her observations. The family moves over a period of months, down the Italian coast, just south of Naples.
The last day of their southern journey, the ‘bottom’ of their vacation, they are denied a trip to Capri by boatman strike. Instead they boat to Positano where father, mother, and two children paid fifteen Euros each to lie on the beach. Beside them were young American newlyweds in white bathers, ‘groomed as gods” but timid and self-conscious. Cusk wishes she had a Raphael to paint them for her, and I do, too.
Cusk has a warmth in her writing for the magnificent, the ‘theatrical and sincere,’ the elaborate, the splendid Italians, and she tells us her children will always remember Italy as a place they want to live. Her husband gets no notice, and if we did not know she travelled in a family of four, we would not know he was there at all. This book was published in 2009, and three short years later her marriage lay in ruins. We see the beginning of that split here, methinks.
One feels quite as though one had done this journey, too, traveling along with sunburnt girls in the back of a car with the windows wide. The final week in a faded blue tent strike us as real as real can be—even with the call from the publisher saying the rights to publish her last book in South Korea allowed them the possibility of a glorious, comfortable night in a seaside resort with gold bathroom fixtures but an unused swimming pool and a beautifully-appointed restaurant in which no one ate.
‘Rewarding’ hardly seems adequate praise. I savor her work like Peruginas. Her writing is for me like one of those moments she describes whose effects will last forever…visually stunning, thought-provoking, delicious to remember. The summer feels lived.
May 23, 2022
3.5 stars
I had just finished a book about slavery and started one about the Holocaust when I thought, you know what? I think I’ll go to Italy instead.
I went with Rachel Cusk, which is a guaranteed way not to just relax and enjoy but that’s okay, that’s how I travel too.
Cusk’s 2009 memoir is more than a summer holiday. It begins with a quote by D.H. Lawrence, one of her favourites, and one of mine.
Comes over one an absolute necessity to move. And what is more, to move in some particular direction. A double necessity then: to get on the move, and to know whither.
Lawrence led a nomadic existence for much of his life. He lived in Italy, and in Australia, and in America, both in the desert and the mountains. And in Germany, and in France, where he died.
Cusk lives in Bristol when the book begins, and appears to be brewing up a midlife crisis. “There has to be a reckoning, an accounting,” she remarks on a tangential issue. There has, at some point, to be the truth.” And so the children are removed from school, and Cusk’s family of four moves to Italy for a summer, fleeing real life, searching for real life, only time will tell. They move around, and as always, Cusk dissects her surroundings and the people they meet with no particularly kind eye.
She’s one of my favourite writers, but many people seem to hate her. In part because of the unlovely motherhood book that dared to find babies horrifying, in part because of the coy divorce book, but largely I think because she is unforgiving of foibles, and of fools, and it doesn’t take much to be seen a fool by Rachel Cusk. An early run of this book was pulped after someone recognized themselves and threatened to sue, and I’m amazed that none of the people who remain have sued, frankly. Presumably they don’t read.
Apart from her hard, frank glare, this wasn’t my favourite because it tries over-hard to be philosophical and profound. Occasionally, there are moments of transcendence. Returning from a day observing famous paintings of anonymous young women, Cusk sees some older women on a train.
They are returning to their rented villa in the hills. They are in their early sixties, smartly dressed, with hair cut short and firmly styled. They seem to have outlived the world of men, of marriage and motherhood and children. They laugh hilariously at anything any one of them says. They are a third sex, these happy materialists. They have outlived it all, the mystery of men and women: it has passed like the day’s heat has passed and left behind its warm, tolerable aftermath of evening.
This is a wonderful, intimate moment relayed by an observer in the middle ground, neither flawless young painter’s model nor survivor of life’s mystery; simply a woman in her late thirties with two youngish children. Too often though, the philosophizing descends into muddle, or the judgement feels unfair. Describing a honeymooning American couple:
They lie side by side on their loungers, glancing around self-consciously, estranged somehow, in spite of their common aesthetic purpose. It is as though they are impersonating a pair of rich East Coast newlyweds, but there is no reason to think that is not what they are…. The girl [goes] to the water and steps carefully in. She is so self-conscious she can barely swim…
Well you would be, wouldn’t you, with Cusk glaring at you from behind her sunglasses?
Sometimes her cultural pronouncements seemed off. I don’t know Italy much at all, but I live in Catalonia and I know how often the pronouncements of educated English people on the national character are reductive or just dead wrong, and sometimes I caught a whisper of that here. And other times I didn’t. She’s always an interesting writer.
Meanwhile, the Madonnas add up. Cusk and family visit galleries and museums and more galleries and more museums. She clearly loves art and looks at it carefully (I like museums but am much more of a vague drifter). I enjoyed her deconstructions of all the pictures of Mary/the Madonna, the close readings of their faces, clothes, and body language with regards to the Christ child. And as the mentions mounted I realized how much this is a continuation of her book about motherhood, that she is looking for an answer to how a woman with children must be, in the world and in art.
And then, late in the text we return to Lawrence and his wife Frieda:
Frieda, who had left her three young children in order to live with Lawrence, and caused such a scandal thereby that she was forbidden from ever seeing or contacting them, must truly have felt herself to be far inside the labyrinth of separation, every new move cutting her ties with England, though Sardinia was no further away than Sicily. Lawrence, perhaps, wanted to sever Frieda from her past, with its rival mother-love, but in every new place they went, her longing for her children was there. How many places would you have to move before you forgot who you were?
The family runs out of money and moves back to England. I am unsurprised that the marriage broke down shortly afterwards. Cusk learned that freedom does not come from living abroad. And she is not prepared to take Frieda’s step towards freedom. Something, naturally, had to give.
Well, I was going to give this three stars but I seem to have talked myself into rounding it up. And interesting, imperfect book. Makes a great companion to her 2021 novel Second Place.
I had just finished a book about slavery and started one about the Holocaust when I thought, you know what? I think I’ll go to Italy instead.
I went with Rachel Cusk, which is a guaranteed way not to just relax and enjoy but that’s okay, that’s how I travel too.
Cusk’s 2009 memoir is more than a summer holiday. It begins with a quote by D.H. Lawrence, one of her favourites, and one of mine.
Comes over one an absolute necessity to move. And what is more, to move in some particular direction. A double necessity then: to get on the move, and to know whither.
Lawrence led a nomadic existence for much of his life. He lived in Italy, and in Australia, and in America, both in the desert and the mountains. And in Germany, and in France, where he died.
Cusk lives in Bristol when the book begins, and appears to be brewing up a midlife crisis. “There has to be a reckoning, an accounting,” she remarks on a tangential issue. There has, at some point, to be the truth.” And so the children are removed from school, and Cusk’s family of four moves to Italy for a summer, fleeing real life, searching for real life, only time will tell. They move around, and as always, Cusk dissects her surroundings and the people they meet with no particularly kind eye.
She’s one of my favourite writers, but many people seem to hate her. In part because of the unlovely motherhood book that dared to find babies horrifying, in part because of the coy divorce book, but largely I think because she is unforgiving of foibles, and of fools, and it doesn’t take much to be seen a fool by Rachel Cusk. An early run of this book was pulped after someone recognized themselves and threatened to sue, and I’m amazed that none of the people who remain have sued, frankly. Presumably they don’t read.
Apart from her hard, frank glare, this wasn’t my favourite because it tries over-hard to be philosophical and profound. Occasionally, there are moments of transcendence. Returning from a day observing famous paintings of anonymous young women, Cusk sees some older women on a train.
They are returning to their rented villa in the hills. They are in their early sixties, smartly dressed, with hair cut short and firmly styled. They seem to have outlived the world of men, of marriage and motherhood and children. They laugh hilariously at anything any one of them says. They are a third sex, these happy materialists. They have outlived it all, the mystery of men and women: it has passed like the day’s heat has passed and left behind its warm, tolerable aftermath of evening.
This is a wonderful, intimate moment relayed by an observer in the middle ground, neither flawless young painter’s model nor survivor of life’s mystery; simply a woman in her late thirties with two youngish children. Too often though, the philosophizing descends into muddle, or the judgement feels unfair. Describing a honeymooning American couple:
They lie side by side on their loungers, glancing around self-consciously, estranged somehow, in spite of their common aesthetic purpose. It is as though they are impersonating a pair of rich East Coast newlyweds, but there is no reason to think that is not what they are…. The girl [goes] to the water and steps carefully in. She is so self-conscious she can barely swim…
Well you would be, wouldn’t you, with Cusk glaring at you from behind her sunglasses?
Sometimes her cultural pronouncements seemed off. I don’t know Italy much at all, but I live in Catalonia and I know how often the pronouncements of educated English people on the national character are reductive or just dead wrong, and sometimes I caught a whisper of that here. And other times I didn’t. She’s always an interesting writer.
Meanwhile, the Madonnas add up. Cusk and family visit galleries and museums and more galleries and more museums. She clearly loves art and looks at it carefully (I like museums but am much more of a vague drifter). I enjoyed her deconstructions of all the pictures of Mary/the Madonna, the close readings of their faces, clothes, and body language with regards to the Christ child. And as the mentions mounted I realized how much this is a continuation of her book about motherhood, that she is looking for an answer to how a woman with children must be, in the world and in art.
And then, late in the text we return to Lawrence and his wife Frieda:
Frieda, who had left her three young children in order to live with Lawrence, and caused such a scandal thereby that she was forbidden from ever seeing or contacting them, must truly have felt herself to be far inside the labyrinth of separation, every new move cutting her ties with England, though Sardinia was no further away than Sicily. Lawrence, perhaps, wanted to sever Frieda from her past, with its rival mother-love, but in every new place they went, her longing for her children was there. How many places would you have to move before you forgot who you were?
The family runs out of money and moves back to England. I am unsurprised that the marriage broke down shortly afterwards. Cusk learned that freedom does not come from living abroad. And she is not prepared to take Frieda’s step towards freedom. Something, naturally, had to give.
Well, I was going to give this three stars but I seem to have talked myself into rounding it up. And interesting, imperfect book. Makes a great companion to her 2021 novel Second Place.
July 1, 2025
Disgruntled with Bristol - its routine, its slaving past - and beset by a desire for transformation, Cusk sets off for a summer in Italy with her husband and children. This is a moody travelogue, stuck in its author’s head and tangled in description and similes, under skies that are glowering or white hot. Cusk scrutinizes artworks and the people around her. The family cycles, burns their feet on the sand, collects souvenirs, and sits in cafes, but it’s all immensely interior. As she recounts conversations with people she meets along the way, I’m reminded of her narrator’s lengthy accounts of conversations in Outline, though here perhaps the shadowiest of outlines remain her husband and children. I was alternately in love with the language and its descriptiveness and oppressed by its claustrophobically observant stance, its brooding. Wherever you go, there you are? 3.5.
“Go we must: go we would. But where? In the novels I read, people were forever disappearing off to Italy at a moment’s notice, to wait out unpropitious seasons of life in warm and cultured surroundings. It was a cure for everything: love, disappointment, stupidity, strange vaporous maladies of the lungs. And for disenchantment, too, perhaps, for claustrophobia, and boredom; and for a hunger that seemed to gnaw at the very ligaments of my soul, whose cause was as hidden from me as were the means of its satisfaction.”
“Go we must: go we would. But where? In the novels I read, people were forever disappearing off to Italy at a moment’s notice, to wait out unpropitious seasons of life in warm and cultured surroundings. It was a cure for everything: love, disappointment, stupidity, strange vaporous maladies of the lungs. And for disenchantment, too, perhaps, for claustrophobia, and boredom; and for a hunger that seemed to gnaw at the very ligaments of my soul, whose cause was as hidden from me as were the means of its satisfaction.”
September 30, 2010
My sense is that there are lots of books out there about going to Italy (or Provence) and how wonderful it is, and how it can change your life. And though I haven't read any of those books, one thing I love about Rachel Cusk's memoir is that I am sure it's completely unlike all of them. The way she looks at the world is so weird (in the best possible way)--this is evident in her novels and also in this beautiful, strange, wondrous travel book. It's so hard to describe her style; there's something detached about it, and dark, and sometimes disturbing and sometimes very funny. And always very, very intelligent, searching, intense. I particularly loved her musings on beauty (and the lack of it in most parts of our world) and on art; paintings are alive to her, and her relationships with the works of art she sees in Italy are alive, as well, and deeply resonant. Going to Italy does actually seem to have changed her life, but she would never come out and say so. Another reason to love her.
August 9, 2010
The Last Supper is a memoir by Rachel Cusk of a summer spent in Italy with her husband and two children. I could not connect with the author in this book at all. She shares no background information or any personal information about her or her family and writes in a very detached, dreamy style. She never even refers to her daughters by name, just "the children". In reading a memoir, I expect to be able to form some kind of connection with the author and I felt none with Rachel.
Her metaphors are very creative but she spends paragraphs describing the minutest things in very descriptive, melodramatic detail and never really gets to the point. And that's what I wondered when I finally made it to the end, "What was the point?"
Her metaphors are very creative but she spends paragraphs describing the minutest things in very descriptive, melodramatic detail and never really gets to the point. And that's what I wondered when I finally made it to the end, "What was the point?"
August 9, 2025
Rachel Cusk stelt nooit teleur en verveelt geen seconde. Ook niet als ze de lethargie van een langer verblijf in Italië met haar gezin beschrijft, niettegenstaande af en toe een dipje. 'The Last Supper' zou je kunnen lezen als een reisverslag, maar net zo goed als een zelfstudie over escapisme, een kunsthistorisch essay of een existentieel commentaar rond jezelf thuis en/of ontheemd voelen.
Ik moet toegeven dat ik de persoonlijk hoofdstukken, zeker die over de heen- en terugreis, het meest beklijvend vond. Als Rachel Cusk dicht op haar eigen huid en die van haar gezin schrijft - vooral haar twee toen nog jonge dochters, haar partner blijft de hele tijd buiten beeld - weet ze het sterkst te raken en herken je als lezer (of ik althans) toch veel.
Wanneer ze het heeft over de plekken waar ze verblijven, vooral hun eerste adresje op de grens tussen Toscane en Umbrië, komt de romancier in haar boven en groeien de mensen die ze in dat Italiaanse dorp uitgebreider en diepgaander leren kennen uit tot onvergetelijke romanpersonages. Toch lukt dat ook in de kortere ontmoetingen met de uitbaters van de pensions, B&B's en hotels die ze onderweg aandoen.
Maar de titel geeft het al aan: ook de Italiaanse renaissanceschilders en hun werk en leven krijgen een plek in dit boek. Nieuwsgierig en geïntrigeerd verdiept Cusk zich in hun kunstenaarslevens en probeert ze aan de hand van hun oeuvre te doorgronden wat deze illustere figuren moet hebben gedreven en welke invloeden er werkzaam waren. Eigenlijk precies hetzelfde als wat ze met zichzelf doet en met haar dochters.
Die zelfstudie op existentieel niveau kent enkele boeiende hoogtepunten, vooral naar het einde toe, in een onvergetelijke scène waar Cusk in haar hoedanigheid van moeder van een rotspartij (bezaaid met zee-egels) in zee springt zonder na te denken over hoe en waar ze terug aan wal kan en een van haar dochters haar ook nog eens in een vlaag van zelfoverwinning achterna springt. De tegenstrijdige gevoelens én de situatie zorgen voor een onthutsende, psychologisch suspense die tegelijk ontwapent omwille van de tegendraadse kwetsbaarheid die de schrijfster/moeder hier etaleert. Straffe, confronterende scène, en zo kom je er nog wel een paar tegen.
Dus ja, schreef ik het al? Rachel Cusk stelt nooit teleur.
Ik moet toegeven dat ik de persoonlijk hoofdstukken, zeker die over de heen- en terugreis, het meest beklijvend vond. Als Rachel Cusk dicht op haar eigen huid en die van haar gezin schrijft - vooral haar twee toen nog jonge dochters, haar partner blijft de hele tijd buiten beeld - weet ze het sterkst te raken en herken je als lezer (of ik althans) toch veel.
Wanneer ze het heeft over de plekken waar ze verblijven, vooral hun eerste adresje op de grens tussen Toscane en Umbrië, komt de romancier in haar boven en groeien de mensen die ze in dat Italiaanse dorp uitgebreider en diepgaander leren kennen uit tot onvergetelijke romanpersonages. Toch lukt dat ook in de kortere ontmoetingen met de uitbaters van de pensions, B&B's en hotels die ze onderweg aandoen.
Maar de titel geeft het al aan: ook de Italiaanse renaissanceschilders en hun werk en leven krijgen een plek in dit boek. Nieuwsgierig en geïntrigeerd verdiept Cusk zich in hun kunstenaarslevens en probeert ze aan de hand van hun oeuvre te doorgronden wat deze illustere figuren moet hebben gedreven en welke invloeden er werkzaam waren. Eigenlijk precies hetzelfde als wat ze met zichzelf doet en met haar dochters.
Die zelfstudie op existentieel niveau kent enkele boeiende hoogtepunten, vooral naar het einde toe, in een onvergetelijke scène waar Cusk in haar hoedanigheid van moeder van een rotspartij (bezaaid met zee-egels) in zee springt zonder na te denken over hoe en waar ze terug aan wal kan en een van haar dochters haar ook nog eens in een vlaag van zelfoverwinning achterna springt. De tegenstrijdige gevoelens én de situatie zorgen voor een onthutsende, psychologisch suspense die tegelijk ontwapent omwille van de tegendraadse kwetsbaarheid die de schrijfster/moeder hier etaleert. Straffe, confronterende scène, en zo kom je er nog wel een paar tegen.
Dus ja, schreef ik het al? Rachel Cusk stelt nooit teleur.
October 28, 2016
In the same detached style that Rachel Cusk has used in her fiction she writes about an extended family vacation to Italy. I really enjoyed her commentary on travel and I think she really captured what it would feel like to be a foreigner. I loved the parts about the art and appreciated the inclusion of the pictures. I also really liked the last part when they were camping. That part felt the most authentic to me. Oh and the gelato, let's not forget that! I definitely prefer Cusk's is fiction but this was an enjoyable read.
March 29, 2015
I should love this book, since relocating to Italy for a few months is one of my favorite fantasies, and Cusk is interested in many of the same places and pictures that I am. But I could not bear her tone, her disdain for just about everybody she meets, the gloomy superiority that she seems to feel her sensibility entitles her to. I seem to remember liking something else she wrote...was she perhaps suffering from clinical depression when she went to Italy? Or is she just one of those people who can't enjoy traveling unless they can continually reassure themselves that they're more insightful and less of a tourist than anyone else they encounter (including the locals)?
September 6, 2013
What a horrible read. This author made me so mad reading this book. She hasn't got a nice thing to say about anybody that she meets along her magical journey in Italy. She doesn't go into any detail about her family who are travelling with her. She refers to them as: husband and children. All we know is that she has 2 daughters. It's like as if that was one of the conditions that her family allowed her to write this book about their journey, they must know how she describes people.
It was so uncomfortable to read the part when she met the English couple who run the hotel in Tuscany, and the full chapter dedicated to their tennis matches. Scottish Jim makes such a big contribution to the book - does she think that he'll never find a copy of it?
The descriptions of the art was the only thing that kept me continuing with the read, but as she seems to have gotten most of her information from Vasari's 'The Lives of the Artists' ... I would recommend reading that instead.
She seems to be damaged from her catholic upbringing, but her intollerance of the pilgrims in Assisi is just too over the top.
I know Italy well, and if anyone wants to read about Italy please do not read this book. This author spent a full summer in Italy, with her family, what a treat! What does she do? She complains about 'tourists', from Tuscany to Rome to Positano, this author just has an uncanny way of being irritated by everyone that she meets.
A description of the American lady that she met in Liguria towards the end of the book: The mother comes across to look us over. She is tall, powerfully built, with a slouching, cowboyish gait; but she is strangely pale and flaccid-looking.
Ok... I've gotten this off my chest now. Phew!
It was so uncomfortable to read the part when she met the English couple who run the hotel in Tuscany, and the full chapter dedicated to their tennis matches. Scottish Jim makes such a big contribution to the book - does she think that he'll never find a copy of it?
The descriptions of the art was the only thing that kept me continuing with the read, but as she seems to have gotten most of her information from Vasari's 'The Lives of the Artists' ... I would recommend reading that instead.
She seems to be damaged from her catholic upbringing, but her intollerance of the pilgrims in Assisi is just too over the top.
I know Italy well, and if anyone wants to read about Italy please do not read this book. This author spent a full summer in Italy, with her family, what a treat! What does she do? She complains about 'tourists', from Tuscany to Rome to Positano, this author just has an uncanny way of being irritated by everyone that she meets.
A description of the American lady that she met in Liguria towards the end of the book: The mother comes across to look us over. She is tall, powerfully built, with a slouching, cowboyish gait; but she is strangely pale and flaccid-looking.
Ok... I've gotten this off my chest now. Phew!
March 10, 2021
Cusk is so brilliant. Utterly compelling in her brilliance. To see through her eyes for the time it takes to devour her books is a privilege.
July 3, 2016
I had read Cusk's novel Outline, which I liked, so decided to try her nonfiction - what a great idea! Normally, a book about a British family in Italy would seem ... overdone, but she's a terrific observer, of both Italians and foreigners. While there's no way she could have planned it that way, the events of the last day of their trip made for a prefect ending to the story. Highly recommended!
September 27, 2023
〝I think of how fortunate it is that there is a word–holiday–which not only explains the experience of going to bed in strange rooms but decrees it to be pleasurable.〞
★★★★
in this astonishing memoir cusk describes a three-month journey around italy with her husband and two children. she uncovers the mystery of a foreign language, the perils and pleasures of unbelonging, and the strange involvement of the personal and the universal. both sharp and humane in its exploration of the desire to travel and to escape, of art and its inspirations, beauty and ugliness, and of the challenge of balancing domestic life with creativity.
if you ever want that holiday feeling without spending a fortune on a actual holiday; this is what you should read. I started reading this while in italy and finished it after being home for a couple weeks and cusk's descriptions and the atmosphere she depicted brought me back so much that I started dreaming about italy again and forgetting where I was when I woke up. her writing is absolutely stunning and together with her beautifully composed but still accessible thoughts and observations about an already beautiful landscape and culture; I was just blown away. she truly reminded me of de beauvoir in that sense.
it was also so refreshing to read a memoir on the more happy/cozy side. I feel like most memoirs centers hardships and trauma (which I love to read about, don't get me wrong) but it was like a breath of fresh air to read about a long family vacation, them making new friends, exploring and appreciating a new culture and her journey to find her creativity again. it all felt so mundane and relatable and I really appreciated that. it's like a cozy memoir.
if you need something to escape the upcoming cold and dark seasons; this would definitely do the trick. or if you're like me an love the fall and winter I would put this on my tbr and wait for next summer or maybe even a holiday to italy to really get the full experience. either way; I highly recommend picking this up.
cawpile: 7.50
ig: @winterrainreads
★★★★
in this astonishing memoir cusk describes a three-month journey around italy with her husband and two children. she uncovers the mystery of a foreign language, the perils and pleasures of unbelonging, and the strange involvement of the personal and the universal. both sharp and humane in its exploration of the desire to travel and to escape, of art and its inspirations, beauty and ugliness, and of the challenge of balancing domestic life with creativity.
if you ever want that holiday feeling without spending a fortune on a actual holiday; this is what you should read. I started reading this while in italy and finished it after being home for a couple weeks and cusk's descriptions and the atmosphere she depicted brought me back so much that I started dreaming about italy again and forgetting where I was when I woke up. her writing is absolutely stunning and together with her beautifully composed but still accessible thoughts and observations about an already beautiful landscape and culture; I was just blown away. she truly reminded me of de beauvoir in that sense.
it was also so refreshing to read a memoir on the more happy/cozy side. I feel like most memoirs centers hardships and trauma (which I love to read about, don't get me wrong) but it was like a breath of fresh air to read about a long family vacation, them making new friends, exploring and appreciating a new culture and her journey to find her creativity again. it all felt so mundane and relatable and I really appreciated that. it's like a cozy memoir.
if you need something to escape the upcoming cold and dark seasons; this would definitely do the trick. or if you're like me an love the fall and winter I would put this on my tbr and wait for next summer or maybe even a holiday to italy to really get the full experience. either way; I highly recommend picking this up.
cawpile: 7.50
ig: @winterrainreads
August 12, 2019
Having moved away from Bristol, Cusk and her family (a husband and two children) decided to spend a summer in Italy before deciding where to go next. They took the boat to France then drove, made a stop in Lucca, and settled into a rented house on the eastern edge of Tuscany. It proceeded to rain for 10 days. Cusk learns to speak the vernacular of football and Catholicism – but Italian eludes her: “I too feel humbled, feel childlike and impotent. It is hard to feel so primitive, so stupid.” They glory in the food, elemental and unpretentious; they try a whole spectrum of gelato flavors. And they experience as much culture as they can: “we will learn to fillet an Italian city of its artworks with the ruthless efficiency of an English aristocrat de-boning a Dover sole.” A number of these masterpieces are reproduced in the text in black and white. In the grip of a heatwave, they move on to Rome, Naples and Capri.
If I’d been able to get hold of this for my trip to Milan (it was on loan at the time), I might have enjoyed it enough to read the whole thing. As it is, I just had a quick skim through. Cusk can write evocatively when she wishes to (“We came here over the white Apuan mountains, leaving behind the rose-coloured light of the coast … up and up into regions of dazzling ferocity where we wound among deathly white peaks scarred with marble quarries, along glittering chasms where the road fell away into nothingness and we clung to our seats in terror”), but more often resorts to flat descriptions of where they went and what they did. I’m pretty sure Transit was a one-off and I’ll never warm to another Cusk book.
If I’d been able to get hold of this for my trip to Milan (it was on loan at the time), I might have enjoyed it enough to read the whole thing. As it is, I just had a quick skim through. Cusk can write evocatively when she wishes to (“We came here over the white Apuan mountains, leaving behind the rose-coloured light of the coast … up and up into regions of dazzling ferocity where we wound among deathly white peaks scarred with marble quarries, along glittering chasms where the road fell away into nothingness and we clung to our seats in terror”), but more often resorts to flat descriptions of where they went and what they did. I’m pretty sure Transit was a one-off and I’ll never warm to another Cusk book.
December 16, 2023
Cuskin kyky tavoittaa kaunetta arjesta, taiteesta, siirtymistä ja ihmismielestä on aivan vastustamattoman upeaa, uskomatonta, hienoa, lähentelee jopa nerokasta. Miten joku voikin saada harmaan meren päällä lipuvan autolautan, kuluneen vanhan kupoliteltan tai tavallisen roomalaisen kadun niin vahvasti eloon, niin esteettisesti olemassa olevaksi, että tuollaisten muille jopa huomaamattomien hetkien koko aistimaailma äänistä tuoksuihin ja visuaalisesta kaikkeudesta jäljentyy lukijalle "pelkkien" sanojen avulla. Cusk kirjoittaa taidetta, hienovaraista ja vähäeleistä, tämä hänen matka- ja taide-esseekokoelmansa on yksi tähän asti lukenani Cuskin tuotannon vahvimpia, taitavampia, kokonaisvaltaisimpia.
August 3, 2025
need to go to italy asap.
July 21, 2010
A billboard in Bristol, England asking the author, "Is there more to life than this?' seems to be all it takes for her and her family, who are "afflicted with restlessness and with a love of the unknown", to sell their belongings and move to Italy for 3 months of culture, art and epicurean delights.
Cusk’s memoir starts off rather slowly with no formal introduction to her husband and 2 young daughters. They are unnamed and have been given no character traits nor personalities. I would have liked to have known my travelling companions a little bit better. She does, however, want to make sure the reader does know exactly what she is seeing throughout her travels for she is very heavy handed with the metaphor. The reader may not need to envision a tiered tower as "the lace on an old lady's mantilla" or nuances and puns are lost in translation "like the bags and umbrellas and knitted scarves that accumulate in the Lost Property office at Claphan Junction." What I really need is clarification of Claphan Junction!
That said, it is the middle of Cusk's book that is the succulent portion, like the tenderloin, the filet mignon at its cooked perfection. (It had to be said) What she lacks in familial intimacy she makes up in concise and detailed descriptions of Italy, specifically the towns of Lucca, Ventigmilia, the Piero della Francesca Trail, Pompeii and Florence. In each town, there is a corresponding artist whose works must be viewed. There is Tintoretto's Last Supper in Lucca, Piero della Francesca in Sansepolcro, Cimabue in Assisi and Raphael in Florence. Hopefully, the Black and White photos in this ARC will be replaced with color plates in the final printing.
Their travels are interspersed with delightful stories of people whom they become acquainted, of Ms. Cusk's struggles learning the Italian language and tennis in addition to thoughts about pureed truffles and the artistry that is gelato.
The conclusion, like the beginning, is a bit lackluster. Perhaps because this portion also centers on her family unit of which we know so little. With all due respect, the author has penned eight previous books and perhaps she did not want to bore the audience with the retelling of particulars which her following may be familiar.
A nice armchair traveler read and tempts me to add Italy to my bucket list.. ( )
Cusk’s memoir starts off rather slowly with no formal introduction to her husband and 2 young daughters. They are unnamed and have been given no character traits nor personalities. I would have liked to have known my travelling companions a little bit better. She does, however, want to make sure the reader does know exactly what she is seeing throughout her travels for she is very heavy handed with the metaphor. The reader may not need to envision a tiered tower as "the lace on an old lady's mantilla" or nuances and puns are lost in translation "like the bags and umbrellas and knitted scarves that accumulate in the Lost Property office at Claphan Junction." What I really need is clarification of Claphan Junction!
That said, it is the middle of Cusk's book that is the succulent portion, like the tenderloin, the filet mignon at its cooked perfection. (It had to be said) What she lacks in familial intimacy she makes up in concise and detailed descriptions of Italy, specifically the towns of Lucca, Ventigmilia, the Piero della Francesca Trail, Pompeii and Florence. In each town, there is a corresponding artist whose works must be viewed. There is Tintoretto's Last Supper in Lucca, Piero della Francesca in Sansepolcro, Cimabue in Assisi and Raphael in Florence. Hopefully, the Black and White photos in this ARC will be replaced with color plates in the final printing.
Their travels are interspersed with delightful stories of people whom they become acquainted, of Ms. Cusk's struggles learning the Italian language and tennis in addition to thoughts about pureed truffles and the artistry that is gelato.
The conclusion, like the beginning, is a bit lackluster. Perhaps because this portion also centers on her family unit of which we know so little. With all due respect, the author has penned eight previous books and perhaps she did not want to bore the audience with the retelling of particulars which her following may be familiar.
A nice armchair traveler read and tempts me to add Italy to my bucket list.. ( )
February 7, 2013
A more straightforward memoir than the mothering one or the divorce one, maybe a less fraught subject, so less hiding? And the sense of this real person who gets competitive at tennis and yells at her kids, sometimes when they don't deserve it, who feels alienated in most groups of people; I am grateful for this human-ness in the midst of achey beautiful passages and phrases that I copy out into my journal. And it doesn't hold together as a single travel narrative so much or maybe I just had to read it in small bites to take it in like over-rich food, and I'm suddenly longing to fill a suitcase and leave everything behind. But, this... "Go we must: go we would. But where? In the novels I read, people were forever disappearing off to Italy at a moment's notice, to wait out unpropitious seasons of life in warm and cultured surroundings. It was a cure for everything: love, disappointment, stupidity, strange vaporous maladies of the lungs. And for disenchantment, too, perhaps; for claustrophobia, and boredom; and for a hunger that seemed to gnaw at the very ligaments of my soul, whose cause was as hidden from me as were the means of its satisfaction." I love her for that list alone.
March 21, 2010
Ugh. Remember the guy on Channel 9 in the '80s with the big afro who painted a nature picture each episode. "Fluffy little clouds"...he bugged me, his voice really bugged me, but I couldn't help myself from tuning in - JUST TO REMEMBER WHY HE BUGGED ME.
This book has the same effect and why I keep picking it up. The author's sentences are cumbersome, overly full and annoying. Example describing a beach scene: "There is a couple nearby, American, young & blond & groomed as gods. The boy has the faux-heroic look of a Kennedy, with his snob patrician face and sculpted nimbus of hair. The girl is classical, farouche as a Jamesian heroine: she discloses her body in its spotless white swimming costume shyly, like a marble nymph." Ugh (we're not F. Scott here!)
BTW, this is about an English family who took a summer holiday in Italy. Now that I've ranted, I'm quitting the book - life is too short for an annoying (impulse) read.
This book has the same effect and why I keep picking it up. The author's sentences are cumbersome, overly full and annoying. Example describing a beach scene: "There is a couple nearby, American, young & blond & groomed as gods. The boy has the faux-heroic look of a Kennedy, with his snob patrician face and sculpted nimbus of hair. The girl is classical, farouche as a Jamesian heroine: she discloses her body in its spotless white swimming costume shyly, like a marble nymph." Ugh (we're not F. Scott here!)
BTW, this is about an English family who took a summer holiday in Italy. Now that I've ranted, I'm quitting the book - life is too short for an annoying (impulse) read.
June 2, 2013
Having read reviews on the British press I was eager to read this book. I was not disappointed, it is an uneven gem of travelogue very idiosyncratic and subjective. The use of the English language is erudite and complex and that may dissuade some readers who are more middle-brow.
I did not have handy a map of Italy to follow visualy the path that Rachel Cusk and her family took, visiting such diverse places as Florence, Naples, Pompey and Rome among others. The author introduces those places through the artists that lived there, the character of the modern inhabitands and also the way modern tourists act when being in those places. This hotchpotch of impressions intermingled with the perceptions of the narrator as well as the doings of her family create a peculiar but interesting way of seing Italy under western eyes.
Extensive passages are devoted to the lives and descriptions of the paintings of famous painters such as Raphael to name the most famous. Anecdotes and descriptions abound with references to Vasari's "Lives of the Artists" as well as to the religious experiences and opinions of the author which do not adhere to the Roman Catholic orthodoxy of her upbringing. There is whole chapter on Italian food and its significance as a manifestation of the Italian national character; I was somewhat reminded of certain passages of Eat, Pray, Love- the bestseller made to a movie starring Julia Roberts. Another important aspect of the book has to do with the people Cusk's family meet on their journey Italian or British or French- most of them characters to be remembered or described as such.
It is a very subjective and personal book, full of archaisms and elaborate phraseology, anecdote and autobiography. I suspect it will enjoy cult status among some while others will be discouraged or even alienated by this style- but it will not create a lukewarm reaction for sure.
I did not have handy a map of Italy to follow visualy the path that Rachel Cusk and her family took, visiting such diverse places as Florence, Naples, Pompey and Rome among others. The author introduces those places through the artists that lived there, the character of the modern inhabitands and also the way modern tourists act when being in those places. This hotchpotch of impressions intermingled with the perceptions of the narrator as well as the doings of her family create a peculiar but interesting way of seing Italy under western eyes.
Extensive passages are devoted to the lives and descriptions of the paintings of famous painters such as Raphael to name the most famous. Anecdotes and descriptions abound with references to Vasari's "Lives of the Artists" as well as to the religious experiences and opinions of the author which do not adhere to the Roman Catholic orthodoxy of her upbringing. There is whole chapter on Italian food and its significance as a manifestation of the Italian national character; I was somewhat reminded of certain passages of Eat, Pray, Love- the bestseller made to a movie starring Julia Roberts. Another important aspect of the book has to do with the people Cusk's family meet on their journey Italian or British or French- most of them characters to be remembered or described as such.
It is a very subjective and personal book, full of archaisms and elaborate phraseology, anecdote and autobiography. I suspect it will enjoy cult status among some while others will be discouraged or even alienated by this style- but it will not create a lukewarm reaction for sure.
May 4, 2024
I live in a comfortable middle-class suburb in a neighborhood that is designed to evoke Tuscany, with houses and gardens designed in a faux-Italianate style. I know that its falsity borders on the ridiculous, but it is also serene and lovely. A picturesque retreat from the feverish vices for which my city is known. I love my pseudo-Mediterranean bubble, absurdity and all. From this illusory vantage point, and with spring careening into summer, I thought this would be the perfect moment to read Rachel Cusk's Italian travel memoir, ever so easily imagining that I am there with her...
Cusk's gaze pierces the very fabric of reality which she then transcribes for the reader in the most piquant prose. Eloquent, witty, with just the right amount of humor and just the right amount of heartbreak. There are innumerable travel memoirs. Innumerable travel memoirs about Italy. But, I promise you, Rachel Cusk does it differently. She does it better. Art, food, tennis, road weariness, bald remarks about her fellow vacationing countrymen. She writes from the center of experience and, yet, from beyond it at the same time in a manner that is difficult to explain.
If you're impatiently waiting for your own summer holiday adventures, take a few days to escape into this enchanting memoir.
Cusk's gaze pierces the very fabric of reality which she then transcribes for the reader in the most piquant prose. Eloquent, witty, with just the right amount of humor and just the right amount of heartbreak. There are innumerable travel memoirs. Innumerable travel memoirs about Italy. But, I promise you, Rachel Cusk does it differently. She does it better. Art, food, tennis, road weariness, bald remarks about her fellow vacationing countrymen. She writes from the center of experience and, yet, from beyond it at the same time in a manner that is difficult to explain.
If you're impatiently waiting for your own summer holiday adventures, take a few days to escape into this enchanting memoir.
September 21, 2009
I have read more than my share of glowing travel narratives about Italy, and I expected much the same from this book--rosy observations on the countryside, the people, rapturous chapters about the glories of olive oil and pasta. This book was not what I expected, and I loved that about it. Rachel Cusk wrote about an extended family vacation in Italy, but this is not really a story about a family--they were sort of vaguely there, but the book is more of an an exploration of the experience through the sharp mind and precise language of the woman who wrote it. The author, for me, brilliantly captured the feeling of being a foreigner in another country. And rather than rhapsodizing about those things that the rest of the world adores about Italy, she tended to mention them, and then (sometimes pointedly) analyze them--often with a perspective that was entirely new to me, but one that nonetheless rang true to some of my experiences traveling in Italy. Her chapters on art I found particularly interesting; the book contains some images that she talks about, but others are not pictured, and I did wish I had them in front of me. (I knew I kept Gardner's Art Through The Ages for a reason...)
March 17, 2016
This book arrived in the mail a few weeks ago from LibraryThing. It's a memoir of a time the author spent traveling around Italy with her husband and two young children. I like travel stories, usually, but this one was quite different from my typical travel story. Cusk seems removed from the story, aloof, distant. Her children are not named, for example, and do not feel like people but concepts. Cusk is vague about the reasons for her trip to Italy and even more unclear about what she took away from the experience. As a result, I felt disassociated from the story and the characters as well.
September 7, 2010
Ugh, this book... It's filled with trying to be high-brow description and just comes across as so pretentious. And how come the animals can have names, but the family can't?
The only reason it gets even a star is that I actually enjoyed the chapter entitled Gianfranco's Store, which was about Italian food.
First Reads win
The only reason it gets even a star is that I actually enjoyed the chapter entitled Gianfranco's Store, which was about Italian food.
First Reads win
September 18, 2011
Barely srapped three stars! She only went for 3 months! Not such a massive sell-up and go risk as she makes out. She does seem incredibily fond of her own important thoughts. Some of it is well wrtitten, much is a tourist's surface comprehension. She should have stayed for 3 years - then she would have earned the right to write about it (and she might have learnt the language). Mainly irritating.
September 18, 2015
I very much loved her funny, poetic, sensuous, careful scrutiny of haunts ranging from grand houses to campgrounds. I loved her psychologizing of Raphael less.
September 20, 2020
Having thoroughly enjoyed Cusk’s magnificent Outline trilogy, I have made a conscious effort to discover her backlist. Last year I read Coventry, a collection of previously published pieces of essay and non-fiction writing and found her distinct cool and detached voice that I adored in the Outline trilogy present again.
The Last Supper follows Cusk and her husband and two children bored and unfulfilled with their lives in Bristol, England and (rather spontaneously) deciding to sell their belongings and spend three months in Italy with no real expectations or agenda. The goal is to experience a new vibrant culture in hopes of finding more to life.
Reading a travelogue in the midst of a pandemic that has rendered international travel nearly nonexistent, it was enjoyable reading Cusk’s apt descriptions of art, food and tourism. It also distinctly feels of a bygone era. Despite her travels taking place in 2006, there is a quality here—meandering, old-fashioned (this is pre-iPhone) that seems inconceivable in 2020 with al the technological tools at our fingertips and detailed travel itineraries being the norm.
I particularly loved the passages where Cusk is attempting to learn Italian and her wry observations on the language lessons in her textbook. It immediately brought me back to my years studying Italian in college. Cusk has a strong command of her language and vocabulary—it’s impressive and reveals just how gifted she is as a writer. Despite some slight deviations and tangential musings, this a very worthwhile read for those interested. 4/5
The Last Supper follows Cusk and her husband and two children bored and unfulfilled with their lives in Bristol, England and (rather spontaneously) deciding to sell their belongings and spend three months in Italy with no real expectations or agenda. The goal is to experience a new vibrant culture in hopes of finding more to life.
Reading a travelogue in the midst of a pandemic that has rendered international travel nearly nonexistent, it was enjoyable reading Cusk’s apt descriptions of art, food and tourism. It also distinctly feels of a bygone era. Despite her travels taking place in 2006, there is a quality here—meandering, old-fashioned (this is pre-iPhone) that seems inconceivable in 2020 with al the technological tools at our fingertips and detailed travel itineraries being the norm.
I particularly loved the passages where Cusk is attempting to learn Italian and her wry observations on the language lessons in her textbook. It immediately brought me back to my years studying Italian in college. Cusk has a strong command of her language and vocabulary—it’s impressive and reveals just how gifted she is as a writer. Despite some slight deviations and tangential musings, this a very worthwhile read for those interested. 4/5
March 16, 2023
I did a fair bit of traveling as a child: six months around Europe when I was eight, six months across Asia and around Europe when I was eleven, summers spent traveling around America and Western Canada during my high school years. Not so much, since. In my limited adult travels, I share a concern that Rachel Cusk seems to express here: the realization that one can't pass for a citizen of the places one visits, but one must strive not to be a tourist; the space one wants to occupy is slightly transitory and anomalous. Which is of course the feeling of the film "Lost In Translation". The best policy is to steer clear of expats and one's fellow tourists.
May 2, 2024
Cusk is an exceptionally gifted writer who has the knack of writing all about her life without actually giving too much away. You feel held at a distance by her words, and that she, herself writes to give herself this space to analyse what is happening. This charts a summer spent in Italy, taking their two daughters out of school and immersing themselves in Italy for three months. It's about what happens when you cease to be a tourist but you're not really a local. It's about art and why it is still meaningful, even in modern times. It is about family and what your preconceptions are of what your family should be and do, and what happens if you try to shake off those conventions. It's beautiful
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