Parade
Rachel CuskMidway through his life, an artist begins to paint upside down. Eventually, he paints his wife upside down. He also makes her ugly. The paintings are a great success.
In Paris, a woman is attacked by a stranger in the street. Her attacker flees, but not before turning around to contemplate her victim, like an artist stepping back from a canvas.
When a mother dies, her children confront her the stories she told; the roles she assigned to them; the ways she withheld her love. Her death is a kind of freedom.
An artist takes on a series of pseudonyms to conceal his work from his mother and father. His brother does the opposite. They share the same parents, but they’ve inherited different things.
Parade is a story that confronts and demolishes the conventions of storytelling. It surges past the limits of identity, character, and plot to tell a true story—about art, family, morality, gender, and how we compose ourselves. Rachel Cusk is a writer and visionary like no other, who turns language upside down to show us our world as it really is.
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Rachel Cusk is a Canadian novelist & writer. Her 2005 novel In the Fold was longlisted for the Booker Prize. She is also the author of the Outline trilogy, the memoirs A Life’s Work & Aftermath, & several other works of fiction & non-fiction. She is a Guggenheim fellow & lives in Paris.