Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor\u2019s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Rachel Cusk is no stranger to provocation. \u201cI annoy everybody,\u201d she once said in an interview. Her memoirs A Life\u2019s Work\u00a0(2001) and\u00a0Aftermath (2012) were ahead of the trend of books challenging society\u2019s rose-tinted view of motherhood and marriage. Parade, her 12th novel, continues to divide opinion: The Times found it like \u201cwalking over shards of broken glass\u201d. I, for one, remain in camp Cusk.From her 1993 debut,\u00a0Saving Agnes, which won the Whitbread First Novel Award, Cusk\u2019s early novels were praised for their style. But her divorce and the vitriolic backlash to Aftermath led to what she called a \u201ccreative crisis\u201d. Her mode of autobiography had been misunderstood, she felt, yet fiction had become \u201cfake and embarrassing\u201d, Cusk said in 2014.From the ashes of this artistic death arose a complete revamp of the novel form. Cusk\u2019s widely acclaimed trilogy of novels, Outline\u00a0(2014), Transit (2016) and\u00a0Kudos\u00a0(2018), was narrated by a writer whose personality emerges solely in relation to monologues by the interlocutors she encounters \u2014 her contours formed by negative space.Rachel Cusk calls attention to the juxtaposition between the visibility of art and the invisibility of female artistsThe Outline trilogy was followed by Second Place\u00a0(2021), loosely inspired by Lorenzo in Taos, a 1933 memoir by the arts patron Mabel Dodge Luhan about hosting DH Lawrence in New Mexico. While its narrator is more audible than that of the trilogy, her frustrated ambitions stand in sharp contrast to the \u201caura of male freedom\u201d of the egotistical male painter she invites to stay in her guest house.In Parade, Cusk continues her inquiry of authorship and identity within the visual arts. Organised in four parts, Parade weaves together the stories of various artists, each referred to only by the initial \u201cG\u201d. These are interspersed with first-person observations \u2014 sometimes \u201cI\u201d, sometimes \u201cwe\u201d \u2014 from a narrator that shape-shifts between sections.In \u201cThe Stuntman\u201d, which was published in\u00a0The New Yorker\u00a0last year, a male painter begins to paint the world upside down. His wife believes it \u201cinadvertently expressed something disturbing about the female condition\u201d. The paintings described are by Georg Baselitz, an artist who began to represent his subjects inverted in 1969, marrying figuration and abstraction. The story of that G is braided with a narrative about a woman who is attacked in the street by a mentally unstable female assailant, inspired by an incident that happened to Cusk.\u00a0The second part, \u201cThe Midwife\u201d, a version of which ran in the FT Magazine last month, features a wild-child female artist married to a controlling man who inspires the same feelings of shame as her parents. He disdains her autobiographical work but enjoys its commercial success. The effects of domineering parents and partners are a recurring motif in Parade: \u201cThe sound of his disapproval was that of something longlost but familiar,\u201d recounts one character of her ex-husband.In \u201cThe Diver\u201d, the exhibition of an artist reminiscent of Louise Bourgeois is closed when a viewer jumps from a railing to his death. Cusk calls attention to the juxtaposition between the visibility of art and the invisibility of female artists. The exhibition \u201cwas a memorial in thread and cloth, a knitted cathedral,\u201d she writes. \u201cHow could the female sex be commemorated in stone? Its basis lies in repetition without permanence.\u201d\u201cThe Spy\u201d features a filmmaker resembling \u00c9ric Rohmer who assumes a pseudonym to stay anonymous to his parents. His story is interwoven with that of siblings indifferent to the death of their mother. Other artists are mentioned in passing in Parade, including a late-19th-century painter who died in childbirth at 31, seemingly Paula Modersohn-Becker, and a Black male painter \u201cexhibited after his death alongside that of certain female contemporaries, as though marginality were itself an identity\u201d.In the essay \u201cShakespeare\u2019s Sisters\u201d, included in her 2019 collection Coventry, Cusk referred to Virginia Woolf\u2019s exhortation that female writers would need to devise new forms to represent their reality, as even the structure of the sentence was subject to male conventions. Cusk successfully emancipated herself from the constructs inherited from the Victorian novel \u2014 including character and plot \u2014 with her trilogy. In Parade, the narration continues to favour observation over omniscience \u2014 a singularity of perspective no longer possible, she has argued.Whatever their medium, artists are ultimately trying to make sense of the world. As that world makes increasingly less sense, their task becomes more complicated, and more necessary. The essayistic reflections on the female condition in Parade may irk or intrigue, but as its narrator remarks, \u201cart is the pact of individuals denying society the last word\u201d.Parade by Rachel Cusk Faber & Faber \u00a316.99, 208 pages Join our online book group on Facebook at FT Books Caf\u00e9 and subscribe to our podcast Life & Art wherever you listen\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor\u2019s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Rachel Cusk is no stranger to provocation. \u201cI annoy everybody,\u201d she once said in an interview. Her memoirs A Life\u2019s Work\u00a0(2001) and\u00a0Aftermath (2012) were ahead of<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-105228","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-culture"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105228","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=105228"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105228\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":105229,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105228\/revisions\/105229"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=105228"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=105228"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=105228"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}