The death of a parent frees many to realise that there are no authorities, says best-selling author Rachel Cusk

Successful author Rachel Cusk says that growing older is liberating. Writing the novel The Procession, she felt freer than ever to seek a new form.

– Sex is violence. Identity is violence. It is violent to be someone’s child. It is violent to be someone’s parent. We just absorb it all, as part of this contract called life.

Rachel Cusk is best known for her original *Curves* trilogy. She has been described as “the most perplexing and philosophically astute” of contemporary British writers.

Cusk’s latest work *Passage* (S

The book’s observations on humanity are merciless. * The characters in the procession* pain in prisoners of their internal and external chains. There is hardly any happiness, and there is no ability to love.

* The procession* makes you wonder how we people adapt to external expectations and start implementing someone else’s conventional manuscript of life.

– It’s amazing how that trap is tuned. Man purposefully attracts himself to it.

The conflicting legacy of mothers

\”To what extent a person is an individual, and to what extent he is his family and his home country,\” Cusk asks.

According to the author, the structures surrounding us are determined by the author. How much does a person have him?

Cusk, 58, says, for example, that women of their own generation have received contradictory demands from their mother.

– They pushed us to work and succeed at school. I had to settle for traditional gender roles and institutions, had to get married and become a mother – and at the same time stay free, avoiding that not all achievements were lost.

This has resulted in deep confusion.

With age, one learns to question authority. According to Cusk, the death of their own parents makes many eyes open.

– It’s like sitting in a theater stadium, and suddenly someone would light the lights on the stage. Authority loses its strength – be it benevolent or malicious.

When fiction is no longer enough

In his books, Rachel Cusk has described her life, divorce, motherhood of two children, joint custody, writer’s everyday life.

– My books are always reactions to life.

When writing the*outline*trilogy, he realized that traditional fiction was no longer working for him.

\”I could no longer be able to express what I wanted to express. It became insurmountably difficult,\” Cusk said in Helsinki in 2019.

For Cusk, the question of a form is essential. First, you have to outline, separated from the rest of your life what you want to tell. Then you have to find the right shape and language for this topic.

\”It’s all the time harder,\” Cusk says.

He feels that as age grows, life has become more freer, more formless, and, on the other hand, anonymous.

What kind of literary form would you describe the life that you feel is formless?

He says that writing * a procession * was more difficult than any of his previous books. He had to write the book again and again.

\”I felt free to try something less outrageous, something strange than in my previous books,\” Cusk says.

An artist called G

Cusk thought it was fun to look for a form of writing that would approach the abstract of visual arts. He was interested in how differently the visual artist and the writer structure life around him.

– The image can be abstract, rather than performing.

– Painting depicts life, but it is not, or it should not be, a description of something we already know.

What kind of text could do the same?

Many of the characters in the procession are artists, or people who work in art. The characters experience the works of art strongly, and through the works, they also see themselves more.

In the novel, the name of the artists is simply G.

Each of the artists described really exists, but their identity is hidden.

Cusk wanted to give the reader space to break away from his preconceptions.

If Cusk had said in his novel the names and works mentioning well -known artists, the reading experience would be quite different.

* In the procession* Cusk strives to get a grip on that silence. It is as difficult as the wording of an effect caused by a painting is.

– Literature is also based on the agreement between the reader and the author. There is no book if no one sticks to it and spends their time with it, finding the text in their lives, themselves.

Hope is in the children

* There is a lot of suffering in the procession*: non -meeting, self -deception, mental violence.

But there is hoping for hippie. It can be found in children, those who are free and not yet trap.

– One good thing about our time is that faith in authority has disappeared.

Many people are ready to accept that adults learn from their children, not the other way around, Cusk says.

– I think there is a lot of hope for hope.

Then even those who have not been loved as children could learn to love through their own children.

– I definitely think so.

– It may be that only true love makes a person free. And only a free person can be equal. If one of these three is missing, it may be impossible to get others.