Cusk is one of those incredibly good, cool, clever, and insightful British essayists/novelists.  Along with Geoff Dyer, Clive James, Christopher Hitchens, Julian Barnes, Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, and many more, I am enchaned by her store of knowledge, wide span of reading and thinking, and ability to put that knowledge and thought into words.

I loved Cusk’s trilogy ‘Outline’, ‘Transit’ and ‘Kudos’ as well as her non-fiction, and enjoyed this interesting partnership between her and Kontos, a Greek photographer and founder of Kennedy magazine.  The book is published by Molonglo, a firm interested in ‘theoretical discussions about the built environment and how these ideas can be applied in practice.”

To that end, Cusk explores the physical and cultural life of marble, a material that is itself the product of metamorphosis coming into existence through the enormous pressure exerted on limestone in the earth’s crust.  Using the thousands of years old marble quarries on Tinos as her base, she explores how marble is extracted from the earth, how its color, veining, and strength result from the processes of its creation deep in the earth, how ironically, the change that produces marble from limestone results in a material that is changeless until an artist extracts the sculptural figure from the block.  As she writes ,”…an artist is a person who has found a way to bind their intentions to the object they create.”  She quotes Michelangelo who regarded marble as ‘the most formidable of all prisons, of the human idea’ saying, “The greatest artist has no conception which a single block of marble does not potentially contain within its mass, but only a hand obedient to the mind can penetrate to this image.”

Cusk makes these observations on the island of Tinos in the Cyclades off of Greece, and Kontos supplements her essay with beautiful color photographs of the island and the stone artists who work there today following traditions that are several thousand years old.  Kontos adds photos of marble used in buildings and statues in modern Athens.

This is a strange book, perhaps best summarized by the unsettling photo on the cover . It shows a marble sculpture “Sleeping Girl” created by Yannoulis Chalepas, a notable marble sculptor of modern Greece. He suffered a breakdown after completing “Sleeping Girl” and the struggle he must have experienced as he weighed the tension between time and timelessness of the marble and the sleep that restores and the eternal sleep that is death.

Read this book to enjoy the style, craft, and wisdom of Cusk and the beauty of the marble creations captured by Kontos.