Kudos is the third instalment of Rachel Cusk’s trilogy following her earlier novels, Outline and Transit.
In Kudos , Faye, a British writer is on her way to an unspecified city in Europe to attend a literary event with a view to promote the book she has just published. The chain of narratives are made up of the conversations that Faye has with the characters whom she encounters. On the plane, she listens to the stranger seated next to hers telling her the story of his life : his work his marriage and the harrowing night he has just spent burying the family dog before flying off. At the literary festival, she meets her young publisher, writers and translators and they have all these conversations about art, about family, about politics, about love, about sorrow and joy, about justice and injustice all the questions that we humans ask. From these conversations, you only learn that Faye is divorced and has since remarried. She has two sons and the city that she is in is one that she once visited with her son. She serves as a conduit for the characters that she encounters and narrates the conversations that she has with them. There is this fascinating exchange between a young guide and Faye that I find relatable.
The young guide’s mother is the festival’s director. Herman is his name and his mother has decided to make use of his unusual navigational abilities to guide participants around the city. ‘His recollection of pretty much every place he’d been in his life was entirely clear, as well as that of many places he hadn’t been, since he liked to study maps in his spare time and to set himself topographical challenges that were often very satisfying to resolve. He had never visited Berlin, for instance, but he was fairly sure that if he were dropped in the middle of it he’d be able to find his way around and might even outwit some of the natives in getting, say, from the swimming pool in Plötzensee to the Berlin public library in the shortest possible time.’
I wish I could have a fraction of his navigational abilities as I have poor sense of directions and I cannot quite recollect every place I have been in my life. From the conversation, we know that his mother has encouraged him to read books.
‘All his life his mother had encouraged him to read books, not because she was one of those people who believed reading books improved people but because she had pointed out that studying imaginative works would at least enable him to follow certain conversations and not mistake them for reality. As a child he had found stories very upsetting, and he still disliked being lied to, but he had come to understand that other people enjoyed exaggeration and make-believe to the extent that they regularly confused them with the truth. He had learned to absent himself mentally in such situations, he added, by going over passages he had memorised from philosophical texts and revisiting certain maths problems, or sometimes by just reciting some of the more obscure bus timetables in his repertory, until the moment passed.’
Herman goes to a specialised school for maths and the sciences. He is an excellent student and he is popular with the other pupils as he is able to help them with revision for the public exams. He has not got on all that well with his teachers and he hears his mother be criticised on his account but she has never criticised him. His mother said this :
‘It was human nature for people to wish cruelty on one another simply because they have been shown cruelty themselves : the repetition of behavioural forms was the curious panacea with which most people sought to relieve the suffering caused by precisely those same forms. He had tried to find a way of expressing this contradiction in mathematical terms, but since it was inherently illogical he had not yet succeeded. As far as he knew a problem couldn’t be solved simply by infinitely restating it, unless you relied on infinity itself to break certain factors down.’
Herman tells Faye that he ‘concluded that most questions were nothing more than an attempt to ascertain conformity, like rudimentary maths problems. According to his mother he had been completely silent until the age of three : she had got into the habit of talking to herself aloud with no expectation of a reply, and she was therefore very surprised when one day as she was looking for her keys and asking herself where she’d put them, he informed her from his highchair that the keys were in the pocket of her coat, which was hanging in the hall. After that he had talked non-stop.’
Herman also tells Faye that the college gave a special award called ‘Kudos’ to its most outstanding male and female student. He says,
‘It was interesting that in conferring this award, the fact of gender was retained beyond that of excellence: at first it had struck him as illogical, but then he had decided that having never personally found gender to be a factor, he was perhaps not in a position to fully understand its significance.’
Herman won the award. He asks Faye if her children are good at Maths. When Faye expresses her concern that neither of them has pursued that subject and she sometimes worries that it was the consequence of her own interests lying in a different direction, so that she had involuntarily made some aspects of the world seem realer and more important to them than others. Herman responds that such an idea is impossible and there is no reason to trouble herself on that account ‘ since research had proved that parental influence over personality outcomes was virtually nil. A parent’s effect lay almost entirely in the quality of his or her nurture and of the home environment, much as a plant will wilt or thrive according to where it is placed and how it is cared for, while its organic structure remains inviolable.’
He elaborates that his interest in maths pre-existed any attempt to encourage or thwart him. Faye argues that she has known many people whose ambitions were the result of parental influence, and many others who had been prevented from becoming what they had wanted to be.
Herman believes that Nietzsche ‘had taken for his motto a phrase of Pindar’s : become what you are.’ He recognises that he has been fortunate in that no one,as yet, has tried to stop him being what he is.
It is incredible that such wisdom has come from a young person like Herman.
In Kudos, Faye’s inner life is illustrated through her observations on the landscape, conversations with the young guide, the other writers at the festival, the journalist, the publisher and also her son who called.
Splendid writing, beautiful prose, insightful and thought-provoking .
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