“Send someone to Coventry” – this English phrase, to which the title of Rachel Cusk’s volume of essays refers, describes a strategy of exclusion: punishing a relative or friend with persistent silence, banishing them to a social landscape of ruins reminiscent of that of German bombers destroyed city of Coventry remembered.
However, this punishment requires stubbornness and patience in the implacability of the sanctioning part: "If you neither see the victim every day nor live with him, a lot of time can pass before he even notices that he has been deported." Often it is a family matter Early form of cancel culture.
Cusk describes how, as a teenager, she was repeatedly “sent to Coventry” by her parents as a “troublemaker”, which she now understands as a helpless attempt to regain slipping control.
But through her own Coventry experience she also developed a sense of what freedom means, namely "to live in shambles and ruins, in the desecrated past".
Well, on the other hand, we know that the internationally renowned writer Rachel Cusk,
In her essay “Installing”, Cusk deals with houses and their interior design – mostly determined by women.
Since “the home is both viewed and lived in”, there is an exciting duality of residential value and visual value.
The aspired concurrence of reality and appearance can be deceptive, as in those photos showing writers at desks in front of rich bookshelves.
They serve the "illusion that intellectual processes can be publicly displayed, as if a book were not the work of a person who is capable of all the shame, deviousness and coldness of heart in the world."
The Semantics of “Road Rage”
Cusk always starts from personal experiences and transfers them to the general with both casual and haunting acuity.
Due to the high proportion of reflection, her novels have something essayistic;
their essays, on the other hand, possess narrative qualities.
As a character reader of everyday life, she once again proves herself in the essay “Driving a car as a metaphor”.
A traffic jam, for example, can be experienced as an obstacle or as an art exhibition: "If you walk past such a traffic jam, the long line of human faces, framed by car bodies and trapped behind windshields, looks as impressive as the work of a portrait painter." Such a sentence could also come from Marcel Proust.
Cusk has a similar talent for bold, illuminating comparisons.
In this essay she deals with the psychological background of overtaking maneuvers and the semantics of "road rage" - the uninhibited aggression in closed driver's cabs: "As soon as you sit in the car, you can evaluate the people outside the car and their appearance and behavior with a commenting on shamelessness unthinkable in other situations.
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But if the car loses its power - at a red light, for example - and the occupants are suddenly exposed, they usually cannot maintain their violent aggressiveness."