Ilse’s Reviews > Outline > Status Update
Ilse
is on page 113 of 249
When she does see women wearing such shoes, it makes her feel sad. She had believed, until now, that this was because she found such women pitiful, but in fact when she thinks about it honestly it is because she feels excluded or disbarred from the concept of womanhood the shoes represent. She feels, almost, as if she isn't a woman at all. But if she isn't a woman, what is she?
— Aug 06, 2025 09:36AM
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Ilse’s Previous Updates
Ilse
is on page 218 of 249
I was suddenly filled with the most extraordinary sense of existence as a secret pain, an inner torment it was impossible to share with others, who asked you to attend to them while remaining oblivious to what was inside you, like the mermaid in the fairy story who walks on the knives that on one else can see.
— Aug 18, 2025 04:00AM
Ilse
is on page 206 of 249
She remembered a piece of music by Olivier Messiaen, written during his internment in a prisoner-of-war camp during the Second World War. Some of it was based, or so she had understood, on the patterns of birdsong he had heard around him while under detention there. It struck her that the man was caged while the birds were free, and that what he had written down was the sound of their freedom.
— Aug 15, 2025 03:42AM
Ilse
is on page 164 of 249
At the wedding, asked by friends what it was she saw in him - a pertinent enough question, he conceded, at the time - she had replied, I find him interesting.
I said that it didn't sound such a bad reason to marry someone.
— Aug 13, 2025 09:31AM
I said that it didn't sound such a bad reason to marry someone.
Ilse
is on page 160 of 249
It is interesting how keen people are for you to do something they would never dream of doing themselves, how enthusiastically they drive ou to your own destruction. Perhaps we are all like animals in the zoo, and once we see that one of us has got out of the enclosure we shout at him to run like mad, even though it will only result in him becoming lost.
— Aug 11, 2025 05:45AM
Ilse
is on page 150 of 249
‘Music’, she said, in a langerous and dreamlike manner. ‘Music is a betrayer of secrets, it is more treacherous even than dreams, which at least have the virtue of being private’.
— Aug 09, 2025 02:35AM
Ilse
is on page 124 of 249
Children leave or children stay depending on their ambitions: their lives are their own. Somehow we become convinced that if we say even a word out of place we’ve marked them forever, but of course that is ridiculous, and in any case, why should their lives be perfect? It is our own idea of perfection that plagues us, and it is rooted in our own desires.
— Aug 07, 2025 03:28AM
Ilse
is on page 105 of 249
I wasn't sure it was possible, in marriage, to know what you actually were, or indeed to separate what you were from what you had become through the other person. I thought the whole idea of a 'real' self might be illusory: you might feel, in other words, as though there were some separate, autonomous self within you, but perhaps that self didn't actually exist.
— Aug 04, 2025 08:57AM
Ilse
is on page 83 of 249
There was no such thing as an unblemished childhood, though people will do everything they can to convince you otherwise. There was no such things as a life without pain.
— Aug 02, 2025 02:46AM
Ilse
is on page 73 of 249
I felt that I could swim for miles, out into the ocean: a desire for freedom, an impulse to move, tugged at me as though it were a thread fastened to my chest. It was an impulse I knew well, and I had learned that it was not the summons from a larger world I used to believe it to be. It was simply a desire to escape from what I had.
— Jul 27, 2025 08:28AM
Ilse
is on page 41 of 249
What Ryan had learned from this is that your failures keep returning to you, while your successes are something you always have to convince yourself of.
— Jul 26, 2025 05:18AM
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Tirui
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Aug 06, 2025 09:42AM
Funny, I want to know the type of shoes she’s referring to here. I know it’s not the main point but gosh I wanna know. Love the use of the word « Outline. »
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Is she referring to high heels, Ilse? It must be excruciating to wear those things...
It's probably high heels. haha. I hate them and have wore them only twice in my life, both reluctantly at weddings.
Tirui wrote: "Funny, I want to know the type of shoes she’s referring to here. I know it’s not the main point but gosh I wanna know. Love the use of the word « Outline. »"Tirui, she is referring to "delicate shoes", as a kind of shoes that for her character represent something forbidden, a type of shoes she would never wear herself - shoes that force you to stand still, instead of the flat shoes with rubber soles, supremely practical and supremely ugly, that mothers in Berlin wear when they are running to work, to school, for exercising, to the supermarket - women she depicts as utterly elegant, apart from their shoes. In her eyes, these shoes are the key to the 'whole mystery of their nature, for they were the shoes of a woman without vanity'.
Somehow, I could relate to that feeling of being excluded from a certain kind of womanhood (even if rarely wearing 'practical shoes', I often feel the proverbial bull in the china shop in a group of women :-), and you?
On that 'outline', I also like how it is translated in my native tongue, Contouren, in the plural, capturing the multitude of voices in the novel.
Thank you for your interest, Tirui!
P.E. wrote: "Is she referring to high heels, Ilse? It must be excruciating to wear those things..."P-E, she refers to 'delicate shoes', not really mentioning the height of the heels, but definitely shoes that are not comfortable but tend to make you stand still instead of running around freely and swiftly. On wearing high heels, I've done so in periods, although often cheating by flipflopping to work and changing shoes there (not much torture when sitting down to work :). Lately I have tried a couple of times to wear them all the way to work and back and such was more than unwise - my vanity - hoping for a more elegant and slender silhouette - was cruelly punished by bleeding feet!
Helga wrote: "It's probably high heels. haha. I hate them and have wore them only twice in my life, both reluctantly at weddings."Helga, Cusk doesn't specify if high heels or not, but likely many of them fall under the category "delicate shoes" :D. Those heels, especially when walking around the cobble stone streets where we live, can be so fragile and quickly broken ;). I started wearing them because my husband was forty cm taller than me and for a long time I wouldn't even think of going back to flat shoes - even getting back pain when wearing them when having long walks on holiday. Lately such has changed though, it is such a relief and surprise to run around freely on flat shoes!
Ilse wrote: "Helga wrote: "It's probably high heels. haha. I hate them and have wore them only twice in my life, both reluctantly at weddings."Helga, Cusk doesn't specify if high heels or not, but likely many ..."
I believe it's a matter of habit. I grew up wearing comfortable sneakers and tennis shoes. My parents never bought me any other style. Now, it's the same with my daughter. She likes to wear sport shoes, even with dress. haha
