Brendan’s review of What We Can Know > Likes and Comments

Love that paragraph on Rachel Cusk, Brendan!

Thanks for your thoughts on this book, Brendan, some of which I share. So you think Mary Sheldrake was definitely Rachel Cusk? I wasn't sure for lots of reasons. But looking at the 'ar' and 'shel' in MS's name I can see that they can form the same sound as Rachel. Maybe 'cusk' means some kind of duck;-)

Thanks Meike! And I had my doubts initially too, Fionnuala, but the more he described her, the more the name “Cusk” kept ringing in my head. It wasn’t just his description of her fiction, fiction that I happen to quite like actually, but his depiction of Sheldrake herself, which seemed to me like a parody of Cusk’s own narrator in the Outline trilogy. I could be wrong of course, maybe there’s another novelist I haven’t read who fits the bill just as well, but combined with his obvious distaste for the literary minimalism that is so clearly an essential part of Cusk’s style, it just felt like it fit.