“Second Place" by Rachel Cusk - review

 “Second Place” by Rachel Cusk:

A woman, interested in art, invites a painter whom she always admired to visit and live in the solitary other house on her premises, the Second Place, situated in a beautiful landscape on a remote coastal marsh region where she lives together with her husband. She hopes that the painter’s artistic vision will somehow alter her life.

Her expectations clash with reality and she is forced to question her perception of her own life, her womanhood, her motherhood and her tender fragile relationships. 

Her trust in art as a transformative power or even a revelatory description of the ineffability of life suffers serious blows and she comes to understand that nothing exists except what one creates for oneself, meaning that one has to say goodbye to dreams. Life is a struggle and not a dance.

Despite these nihilistic realizations the book provides an interesting set, a good warm read and insightful philosophical pondering. 

I admit being slightly disappointed by the limited access one is offered to the painter‘s frame of mind, especially in his artistic approach towards the landscape he’s been put in, for that was what sparked my interest in the book in the first place. But then it’s not my book and not my story and the towering, all encompassing, perspective of the narrative is not his but that of the woman.

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