Rating: 
Summary: A Huge Disappointment
Review: If you plan to purchase a book based on its literary value, this may be the book for you. If you want a book that contains down-to-earth, real-life experiences and philosophies, do NOT buy this book. It is the complete opposite of a personal insight to motherhood. It was certainly a disappointment to me, and I plan to recoup some of my costs in either a yard sale. If not, I may cut my losses and give it to the local library.
Rating: 
Summary: Feminist Prose
Review: It is a fascinating look not at motherhood, but at the character flaws that have developed in many in our privileged, liberal, chattering classes. The descriptions of motherhood don't resemble those of our own or of any of those of our friends. Her grasp of literature is good, though, and she uses it to good effect in detailing her perceived loss of her self identity and other feminist angst issues. Not bad for conservatives who want to understand the latest in feminist anti-family thinking, but it is not a good book for the new mother.
Rating:
Summary: Ugh
Review: Prospective mothers should read this book, because it is one of the few that doesn't gloss over the trials of being a mother to an infant. Yes, you love your baby, but caring for an infant is a draining task, and in our society (US or England) is usually done by one woman alone. It's also beautifully written at the sentence level. (I agree that the chapters as a whole seem disjointed.)
The best book on new motherhood I've read!
Rating: 
Summary: Motherhood Reality Check
Review: Prospective mothers should read this book, because it is one of the few that doesn't gloss over the trials of being a mother to an infant. Yes, you love your baby, but caring for an infant is a draining task, and in our society (US or England) is usually done by one woman alone. It's also beautifully written at the sentence level. (I agree that the chapters as a whole seem disjointed.)
The best book on new motherhood I've read!
Rating:
Summary: Thought-provoking for anyone considering motherhood
Review: Rachel Cusk certainly doesn't make motherhood sound appealing, and I thank her for that. I've always sensed parents don't tell the whole truth about having children, but Cusk seems to be an exception. She blows the lid of what she calls the "Darwinian" conspiracy of silence concerning just how difficult it can be. Sure, it's solipsistic, but it's not intended as a childcare manual. It's a fascinating study of how becoming a mother dramatically changes a woman's identity.
Rating:
Summary: Pompous and self-important
Review: Rachel Cusk is a novelist and this book is a series of essays covering the period from just before the birth of her daughter until her daughter is approximately one year old. The essays tend to focus on Rachel's internal struggle to come to terms with motherhood rather than giving much insight on her daughter's development (I never even picked up on her daughter's name, so peripheral is she to the narrative).Rachel is obviously very bright and well read and struggles to come to terms with her new identity. Occasionally her writing shines with humor or insight. Usually she comes across as pompous, and disdainful of anyone else she comes into contact with - other mothers, health workers, nannies. She frequently quotes great literature which I suppose is meant to shed insights into facets of motherhood. Instead these smacked to me of self-importance and usually I struggled to see their relevance - it was more like they were there to say: "hey! I've read Coleridge/Jane Austen/Edith Wharton et al, I'm not just an "ordinary" mother". Because the narrative is so internal, it felt very circular and increasingly tedious. About all that I can say that is positive about this book is that at least it's a quick read. A better book covering similar ground - but with real humour and personal development - is "Operating Instructions" by Anne Lamott.
Rating:
Summary: Pompous and self-important
Review: Rachel Cusk is a novelist and this book is a series of essays covering the period from just before the birth of her daughter until her daughter is approximately one year old. The essays tend to focus on Rachel's internal struggle to come to terms with motherhood rather than giving much insight on her daughter's development (I never even picked up on her daughter's name, so peripheral is she to the narrative). Rachel is obviously very bright and well read and struggles to come to terms with her new identity. Occasionally her writing shines with humor or insight. Usually she comes across as pompous, and disdainful of anyone else she comes into contact with - other mothers, health workers, nannies. She frequently quotes great literature which I suppose is meant to shed insights into facets of motherhood. Instead these smacked to me of self-importance and usually I struggled to see their relevance - it was more like they were there to say: "hey! I've read Coleridge/Jane Austen/Edith Wharton et al, I'm not just an "ordinary" mother". Because the narrative is so internal, it felt very circular and increasingly tedious. About all that I can say that is positive about this book is that at least it's a quick read. A better book covering similar ground - but with real humour and personal development - is "Operating Instructions" by Anne Lamott.
Rating: 
Summary: The truth about motherhood that we don't articulate
Review: Rachel Cusk is the first writer I know of to describe how disorienting it is to become a mother. She doesn't complain, but she articulates the strangeness of the experience and brought back vivid memories for me. Learning to nurse is a challenge -- it only LOOKS natural! Like her I had a colicy baby, which everyone treats as if it is a benign condition while you as the mother are faced with a fiercely inconsolable child. She describes the oddness of arriving home from the hospital with the baby, a new person totally dependent on you, and looking around at your home that encompasses your former life, the life that is gone forever. And the common feeling pre-baby, that life will continue as it is and the baby will fit in, is shown as it changes, as Rachel can't leave her child for an evening out without calling so often that she is finally forced to return home to her screaming child.
When a mother says, "Why doesn't anyone tell you what it's really like?" she should be given this book.
Rating:
Summary: An insightful, sometimes hilarious account
Review: Rachel Cusk's A Life's Work is an insightful, honest, and sometimes hilarious account of pregnancy and early motherhood. The author tells the story of her own metamorphosis from independent entity to "motherbaby" unit in rough chronological order: from the alarmist literature of pregnancy, which "bristles with threats and the promise of reprisal" for expectant mothers who violate dietary prescriptions; to the propaganda of natural childbirth advocates ("Some women find birth the most intensely pleasurable experience of their lives"), those souls who maintain that a procedure akin to, say, squeezing a cantaloupe out of one's anus can be rendered nearly pain-free, indeed "pleasurable", by the simple adoption of an embarrassing breathing technique; to a mother's shocking, sudden immersion into an alien world of sleeplessness and isolation. (The immediacy of the metamorphosis is brought home to the author soon after she delivers her daughter by caesarian: "Do you want to try putting her to the breast? the midwife enquires as I am wheeled from the operating theatre. I look at her as if she has just asked me to make her a cup of tea, or tidy up the room a bit. I still inhabit that other world in which, after operations, people are pitied and looked after and left to recuperate." ) Cusk's account is a quick read, her prose very often elegant. She hits a number of nails squarely on the head--in her descriptions of the constant demands made on breastfeeding mothers, for example, or the drama and tension inherent in bringing a baby out into the public, or one's cautious anticipation of freedom when it looks like the kid may finally sleep. She talks about the parents' eventual containment in a single, safe room once the baby changes "from rucksack to escaped zoo animal," an alteration in lifestyle that expectant parents, reading the standard parenting books, would not likely anticipate. Cusk describes, perfectly, the "mess and endemic domestic chaos" of a child-occupied house, "which no amount of work appears to eradicate." And she details for the non-parent, wont to lie in of a Saturday morning, what weekends are like for parents: "What the outside world refers to as 'the weekend' is a round trip to the ninth circle of hell for parents.... You are woken on a Saturday morning at six or seven o'clock by people getting into your bed. They cry or shout loudly in your ear. They kick you in the stomach, in the face." Cusk is at her best when describing parenthood in scenes such as the above. Less successful are the more philosophical passages of the book (the female is "a world steeped in its own mild, voluntary oppression, a world at whose fringes one may find intersections to the real: to particular kinds of unhappiness, or discrimination, or fear, or to a whole realm of existence both past and present that grows more individuated and indeterminate and inarticulatable as time goes by") and the strange inclusion and discussion of parenthood-related literary passages culled, for example, from Jane Eyre and Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth. A lot of people could benefit from reading Cusk's account. New mothers will find solace, perhaps, in its pages, validation of their own feelings of isolation and resentment. Working fathers ought to read it, so they can better understand the complaints of their shut-in wives, for whom "work is considered an easy, attractive option." And the childless friends of parents will find the book a highly readable explanation of what is happening in their friends' lives.
Rating:
Summary: the real deal
Review: Rachel Cusk's novel "The Country Life" is a favorite of mine-so I was eager to read her thoughts on new motherhood, being the mother of a young child myself. I found the book somewhat disjointed, and felt like she was writing in a stream of consciousness form sometimes. However-I have never read someone so accurately describe the intense feelings of bewilderment that life with a baby can induce in you (speaking for myself). The combination of devoted love and attachment one feels for a child & at the same time longing for freedom lost, resentment at times too; Rachel Cusk conveys this conflict successfully, especially in the last few chapters. I do not think anyone who is not a mother should read this-I would think it sound too scary. Ms Cusk even says in the intro that this book is mainly for people who are already mothers-as the description of parenting "loses something in the translation" to non parents. I couldn't agree more.
|
