Outline

Liz has already written so well about Outline (and its follow-up, Transit), that I'm not sure what I have to add, but I just want to say that I fully expected to love Outline, and I did love it, fully. It's hard to explain why. The premise itself is unpromising (a middle-aged English writer flies to Athens to teach a short writing course), but from the first sentences you know you are in good hands. You learn little about the writer, Faye, except that, for reasons she doesn't explain, "I had decided to want nothing at all." Instead you hear the stories of the people she meets, held at the arm's length of her considerable, opaque intelligence. The effect is much like in those great novels of W.G. Sebald, in which that second-hand distance creates an almost unbearable sense of observation and loss. I can't wait to catch up to the next two books in Faye's strange trilogy.