A collection of essays by the novelist Rachel Cusk, gathering personal pieces on driving, rudeness, motherhood, family and home alongside criticism of art and literature. The final section turns to classics and bestsellers, with essays on Edith Wharton, D. H. Lawrence, Olivia Manning, Natalia Ginzburg, Kazuo Ishiguro and others.
Books mentioned in Coventry (39)
Philoctetes by Sophocles: “In Sophocles' play Philoctetes, the man who suffers most is also the man with the most powerful weapon, an infallible bow”
The Oresteia by Aeschylus: “We discuss the Oresteia, in which two children, Electra and Orestes, murder their mother, Clytemnestra”
Medea by Euripides: “I'm currently writing a version of Euripides' Medea for a theatre in London”
Moby-Dick by Herman Melville: “Woolf and De Beauvoir agree that a woman could never have written Moby-Dick or War and Peace”
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy: “a woman – even a woman with her own room – could never have written Moby-Dick or War and Peace”
The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir: “Two books – Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex and Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own – bring these thoughts to mind”
A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf: “In A Room of One's Own Woolf asserts two things: first, that the world is demonstrably male”
Three Sisters by Anton Chekhov: “Recently, reading Chekhov's Three Sisters, it struck me that the question of female self-expression becomes confused”
To Room Nineteen by Doris Lessing: “Doris Lessing enlarges on these themes in her story 'To Room Nineteen'”
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen: “it was because Austen wrote behind the door in the shared sitting room that Pride and Prejudice is the flawless novel it is”
The Beautiful and Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald: “In F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel The Beautiful and Damned, the writer Dick Caramel tells of a conversation with his uncle from Kansas”
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald: “Scott Fitzgerald, for instance, virtually described his own funeral in The Great Gatsby”
Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald: “something other than hard work had produced Tender is the Night and The Great Gatsby”
Swann's Way by Marcel Proust: “'The past is hidden outside the realm,' writes Proust in Swann's Way”
The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri: “Dante summed up the situation in The Divine Comedy: Once, Cimabue thought to hold the field In painting”
The Lives of the Artists by Giorgio Vasari: “Reading Vasari's Lives of the Artists, one begins to notice a minor consistency of an unexpected sort”
Canticle of the Creatures by Francis of Assisi: “he wrote the 'Canticle of the Creatures', a love poem to the unpopulated earth, to the sun and wind and water”
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton: “But unlike her other major novels... The Age of Innocence is not a story of contemporary America. The New York that is its subject was as dead, when Wharton wrote it”
The Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton: “unlike her other major novels, The Custom of the Country and The House of Mirth, The Age of Innocence is not a story of contemporary America”
The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton: “unlike her other major novels, The Custom of the Country and The House of Mirth”
The Golden Bough by James George Frazer: “She had been reading The Golden Bough and Freud, and found in the concepts of tribalism and taboo a whole language”
The Rainbow by D. H. Lawrence: “The Rainbow came into the world more or less without literary antecedents. Nothing like it had been written before”
Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence: “The Rainbow was originally conceived as a much longer novel... the second of which is Women in Love”
Ulysses by James Joyce: “the same can be said of Joyce's Ulysses, with which The Rainbow was contemporaneous”
Bonjour Tristesse by Françoise Sagan: “In that book, Bonjour Tristesse, she described the hedonism and amorality of youth”
A Certain Smile by Françoise Sagan: “Sagan's second novel, A Certain Smile, is in many ways a sequel to Bonjour Tristesse”
The Balkan Trilogy by Olivia Manning: “'I haven't any parents,' says Harriet Pringle, heroine and presiding spirit of Olivia Manning's Balkan Trilogy”
Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert: “There's a running gag in Elizabeth Gilbert's bestselling memoir of breakdown and recovery... The book's actual title, Eat, Pray, Love, is sincere”
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro: “My name is Kathy H. I'm thirty-one years old, and I've been a carer now for over eleven years (essay on Never Let Me Go)”
The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro: “In Kazuo Ishiguro's 1995 novel The Unconsoled, Ryder, a pianist, is due to give an important concert in a foreign city”
The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro: “His most popular novel, The Remains of the Day, recommended itself to readers by the purity of its translation of that perennial English favourite, the period piece”
Family Lexicon by Natalia Ginzburg: “the most famous of which, Family Lexicon, is a history of a family whose observational core remains opaque”
The Little Virtues by Natalia Ginzburg: “The essays in The Little Virtues, written separately and in distinct circumstances between 1944 and 1960, comprise an autobiography of sorts”
Winter in the Abruzzi by Natalia Ginzburg: “'Winter in the Abruzzi' describes a period in which the author, then a young wife and mother, was exiled in wartime”
My Vocation by Natalia Ginzburg: “'And then my children were born,' she writes in 'My Vocation'”
Bridget Jones's Diary by Helen Fielding: “this is a well-worn mode of female literary expression – Bridget Jones's Diary is a good example”
The Road by Cormac McCarthy: “as in Cormac McCarthy's The Road, the novel's horrific imaginings almost become a perverse kind of sentimentality”
The Plague by Albert Camus: “it has more in common with a novel such as Camus's The Plague, in which a dystopian but familiar reality dramatises the dilemmas of the age”
The Fall by Albert Camus: “Albert Camus, more eerily, foretold precisely the manner of his death in La Chute”