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    The Country Life
    The Country Life
    The Country Life
    Audiobook13 hours

    The Country Life

    Written by Rachel Cusk

    Narrated by Jenny Sterlin

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Winner of England's Whitbread Award for Saving Agnes and the prestigious Somerset Maugham Award, Rachel Cusk has won popular and critical acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic. This young British author's beguiling novel is both poignant and hilarious. When Stella leaves London for a small village in Sussex, she hopes that the country life will be conducive to her journey toward self-discovery. She'll have no more insipid lover, dead end job, or controlling parents to endure. But, as an au pair for a dispiriting family, she's stalked by bad-tempered people, misfortune from weather and wildlife, and unwelcome suitors. Spunky and resourceful, she manages to keep a stiff upper lip, even when her darkest secret manages to catch up with her. Jenny Sterlin sparkles in her role as the irrepressible Stella. Even in the face of Stella's angst and touching vulnerability, you will find it impossible to stifle your laughter.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateAug 22, 2008
    ISBN9781436145046
    The Country Life
    Author

    Rachel Cusk

    Rachel Cusk read English at New College, Oxford. Her first novel Saving Agnes won the Whitbread First Novel Award in 1993. She reviews regularly for The Times and TLS.

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    Reviews for The Country Life

    3.5/5

    91 ratings8 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Started this book three times, and finally got through - it was worth the trouble. The main character's internal dialogue, and her actions, are difficult to relate to except in the broadest sense, and I didn't really understand why other readers think her work funny. The gradual reveal (not a full reveal) of why she has left her place and gone to be a carer for a teenage boy was annoying. But the overall effect of being inside such a character was so wonderful I'll be seeking out her other books!
    • 4/5
      On one level this is a very enjoyable farce that is consciously reminiscent of Cold Comfort Farm. On another it is a nightmarish tale of a naive and hapless woman trying to escape her life by accepting a position as a companion to the disabled son of an argumentative and dysfunctional upper middle class family on a remote farm in Sussex, despite an obvious lack of qualifications and experience. Cusk does not spare any of her characters much sympathy, so the comedy is pretty dark in places, and like all of her books it is stylish and beautifully written.
    • 4/5
      I quite liked this book, although I didn't ever take it very seriously. It wasn't at all realistic, IMHO. The blurb calls it "subtle"....I agree if you call a sledge hammer subtle. There was humour, but much of it was almost slapstick.I have no idea whether the people described could actually exist in England, but they're certainly not in my life.
    • 2/5
      I stayed up late to finish this book last night. I’d finally gotten to about page 300 and thought: finally, something is about to happen . . . we’re getting to the point. But alas, no. Literally, when I finished the last page of the book, I turned the page and said: is my book defective? Because it couldn’t possibly end there. But after I checked the page count on Amazon, I realized that it was in fact over. And then I wanted to give a frustrated shriek.

      The book was an odd one for me. I often have a difficult time getting into a book. In fact, it’s the very rare book that I don’t fight with at least the first 30-50 pages trying to get into it. But when I do, it’s usually next to impossible to get me to set it down before it’s done. The Country Life didn’t get me interested until about 150 pages into it. And I only kept reading because I thought it was a “city girl deals with transformation into country life and this is how it happened” kind of book, which I usually adore. But it wasn’t really a book about that at all.

      The whole book was about some neurotic, if not actually truly unbalanced, woman who ran away from her life. We’re told that she did it because she saw her life fully mapped out before her and she wanted to escape that. But you never get the feeling that that was it. I think the handicapped charge that she is companion to in the country ultimately hits it on the head toward the end of the book: she’s a coward and she’s selfish. The story starts with Stella, the neurotic escapist, writing some rather scathing letters to people in her soon-to-be former life. And I understood that. I think we’ve all had a moment or two where writing such a letter sounded awfully satisfying. Ms. Cusk makes them deliberately vague so that she has somewhere to take the book later on. But she doesn’t.

      The whole story is a series of random things that the author mentions once or twice that seem relevant, possibly important to the story, and then she never brings them up again. By the end of the story, I think that Stella is merely a lush and wonder if she is actually going to end up bedding her charge at some point either in a drunken moment or in some contrived situation that sounds unselfish but is in fact the ultimate in selfishness.

      This book gets two thumbs down from me. A total waste of my time. The writing was sometimes well-done and at others truly horrendous. The plot ebbs and flows along until you realize that there actually is no plot. The story isn’t plausible and by the end, it’s not that you care what happens, you just have a 350 page investment upon which you feel entitled to having something be delivered. Boo.
    • 5/5
      Rachel Cusk's novel is reminescent of Jane Austen, both in her exact style of writing and in her comedy of manners. I really identified with Stella's chaotic thought patterns. Highly recommended
    • 5/5
      Serendipity at the local library led me to devour my first ever Rachel Cusk novel, and I am now ravenous for more. (Searching for a book by Jim Crace, the nearby name Rachel Cusk jumped out at me from the shelf.) As another reviewer has stated, her writing absorbs you so fully into the mind of her protagonist that you forget you are reading. Stella Benson is a klotz of sorts, prone to injury and to so overthinking her every decision and move that she perceives threat, danger, and embarassment at every turn. More often than not, such fear of embarassment leads to a more unfortunate yet comical outcome than she had feared. Through Cusk's impeccable prose, we see through Stella's eyes this world fraught with hidden agendas and misinterpreted motives. Cusk writes with precise observation of the minutia around us, and we must nod knowingly that her observations are so spot on - whether she's describing the ancient tins of food lining the shelves of a provincial shop, or the entitled self-regard of the privileged class. Her characters are so vividly articulated that they nearly emerge from the page fully formed.
    • 3/5
      What an odd little book! It clearly takes some inspiration from Cold Comfort Farm, except that here the family is upper class and the intruder a very odd, lonely girl called Stella, who has left her family in London and come to look after a disabled adolescent. The style is very quirky, staid and rather pompous. It veers from Jane Eyre through Jane Austen to Evelyn Waugh. Stella is a walking disaster; everything she attempts seems to go drastically wrong, culminating in a near-death experience. It's entertaining at times, and it was interesting to gradually uncover what had happened, but Stella is a rather infuriating character, and the book is horribly overwritten in places. In fact all the characters were irritatitng except for the disabled adolescent Martin, who seemed the most mature and level-headed of the lot. But then one of the themes is how infuriating families can be, so this was certainly deliberate.So it was OK but I'm not sure I'd read anything else by Cusk.
    • 2/5
      city girl moves to english countryside to care for rich family's disabled son. she feels like a duck out of water.