Pressed to name the most influential novel of the past decade, you could do worse than Rachel Cusk’s Outline, which laid a blueprint for fashionably decluttered fiction about barely-there narrators wafting through random encounters in unspecified European cities.
Jhumpa Lahiri (Whereabouts) and Katie Kitamura (Intimacies) have well-thumbed copies, at a guess, and it seems a safe bet that the Turkish-born Ayşegül Savaş, who writes in (American) English, also had one close at hand while composing this oddly enthralling tale about a postgrad student bearing witness to an artist’s marital breakdown.
Its unnamed protagonist comes to an unnamed city to spend a year viewing gothic nude sculptures as research for a thesis on medieval views of nakedness. She’s renting a flat from Pascal, an academic who lives in a nearby town with his wife, Agnes, a middle-aged painter. A couple of months into the narrator’s tenancy, Agnes turns up to join her in the flat, in a supposedly brief return to the city to plan a new exhibition of work inspired (coincidentally) by local sculpture.
