Outward appearances are calmly noted: the grey classroom with its humming computer "projecting a blank blue rectangle on to the wall" the faces and gestures of the students themselves, one with "a demolished beauty she bore quite regally", one "whose expression I had watched grow sourer and sourer as the hour passed", each of them a study in shyness, charm, naivety, smugness or some other sharply observed quality. But Cusk, who has a gift for making the most mundane situations compelling, plunges right in, emerging with a miniature tour de force of human portraiture and storytelling virtuosity. It doesn't perhaps sound like the most riveting premise for a scene, and there must be plenty of people in the creative writing business who have resisted doing their own version of it, wary of the risks of literary shop-talk. I n one of many remarkable passages in Rachel Cusk's new novel, the narrator, an English writer who has flown to Athens for a few days to teach a writing workshop, gives a detailed account of her first class, in which she asks each of the 10 students to talk about something they noticed on their way in.
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