Book of the Week: PARADE by Rachel Cusk — Winner of the 2024 Goldsmiths Prize
Rachel Cusk's remarkable novel has just been awarded the 2024 GOLDSMITHS PRIZE (for works that expand the horizons of the novel form). In this book, Cusk continues her project of kicking away traditional novelistic crutches to force herself and her readers to engage differently with fiction and to the ‘real world’ to which it relates. Forensic in approach and coolly crystalline in style, Parade splices a series of observations by a narrator who exists only as a gap in the text with a carousel of ‘biographical’ sketches of artists (fictional — all named ‘G’ — but often sharing qualities and trajectories with identifiable artists in the ‘real world’) to explore, distill, and complicate issues of narrative, character, gender politics (especially as transacted in the arts), the irreconcilable ambivalence of intergenerational relations, the problem of subjectivity, and the performance of power and persona that both characterises and occludes collective life on both the personal and societal scales. Undermining our expectations of cohesion on personal, artistic and societal levels — and with regard to the forms of what we think of as fiction — Parade provokes and enlivens the reader’s own literary faculties and makes them an active participant in this exercise of awareness and destabilisation. {Thomas}
“Examining the life of the artist and the composition of the self, Rachel Cusk’s Parade exposes the power and limitations of our alternate selves. Probing the limits of the novel form and pushing back against convention, this is a work that resets our understanding of what the long form makes possible.” —Abigail Shinn, Chair of Judges, Goldsmiths Prize
"Every sentence in Parade seems to grapple with an idea. People die, perspective shifts, scenery changes, and yet there remains a clear, sharp line of thought that holds the reader. In effortlessly beautiful prose Cusk challenges the conventions of the novel form as well as addressing the relationship between literature and visual art, and of how each can exist alongside the ordinariness of life. Parade is a ferociously illuminating novel that embraces the exquisite cruelty of the world at this present moment." —Sara Baume, judge, Goldsmiths Prize