What do you think?
Rate this book
Indelicacy
A ghostly feminist fable, Amina Cain’s Indelicacy is the story of a woman navigating between gender and class roles to empower herself and fulfill her dreams.
In "a strangely ageless world somewhere between Emily Dickinson and David Lynch" (Blake Butler), a cleaning woman at a museum of art nurtures aspirations to do more than simply dust the paintings around her. She dreams of having the liberty to explore them in writing, and so must find a way to win herself the time and security to use her mind. She escapes her lot by marrying a rich man, but having gained a husband, a house, high society, and a maid, she finds that her new life of privilege is no less constrained. Not only has she taken up different forms of time-consuming labor—social and erotic—but she is now, however passively, forcing other women to clean up after her. Perhaps another and more drastic solution is necessary?
Reminiscent of a lost Victorian classic in miniature, yet taking equal inspiration from such modern authors as Jean Rhys, Octavia Butler, Clarice Lispector, and Jean Genet, Amina Cain's Indelicacy is at once a ghost story without a ghost, a fable without a moral, and a down-to-earth investigation of the barriers faced by women in both life and literature. It is a novel about seeing, class, desire, anxiety, pleasure, friendship, and the battle to find one’s true calling.
In "a strangely ageless world somewhere between Emily Dickinson and David Lynch" (Blake Butler), a cleaning woman at a museum of art nurtures aspirations to do more than simply dust the paintings around her. She dreams of having the liberty to explore them in writing, and so must find a way to win herself the time and security to use her mind. She escapes her lot by marrying a rich man, but having gained a husband, a house, high society, and a maid, she finds that her new life of privilege is no less constrained. Not only has she taken up different forms of time-consuming labor—social and erotic—but she is now, however passively, forcing other women to clean up after her. Perhaps another and more drastic solution is necessary?
Reminiscent of a lost Victorian classic in miniature, yet taking equal inspiration from such modern authors as Jean Rhys, Octavia Butler, Clarice Lispector, and Jean Genet, Amina Cain's Indelicacy is at once a ghost story without a ghost, a fable without a moral, and a down-to-earth investigation of the barriers faced by women in both life and literature. It is a novel about seeing, class, desire, anxiety, pleasure, friendship, and the battle to find one’s true calling.
176 pages, Kindle Edition
First published February 11, 2020
About the author
Amina Cain
10 books273 followersAmina Memory Cain is the author of the novel Indelicacy, a New York Times Editors’ Choice and staff pick at the Paris Review, published in February 2020 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, and two collections of short fiction, Creature, out with Dorothy, a publishing project, and I Go To Some Hollow, with Les Figues Press. Her writing has appeared in Granta, The Paris Review Daily, n+1, BOMB, Full Stop, the Believer Logger, and other places.
She has also co-curated literary events, such as When Does It or You Begin?, a month long festival of writing, performance, and video at Links Hall in Chicago, Both Sides and The Center, a summer festival of readings and performances enacting various levels of proximity, intimacy, and distance at the MAK Center/Schindler House in West Hollywood, and the Errata Salon, a talk/lecture series at Betalevel in Los Angeles’ Chinatown.
She lives in Los Angeles and is a literature contributing editor at BOMB. You can sometimes find her online on Twitter (@aminamemory) & Instagram (@amina_memory).
She has also co-curated literary events, such as When Does It or You Begin?, a month long festival of writing, performance, and video at Links Hall in Chicago, Both Sides and The Center, a summer festival of readings and performances enacting various levels of proximity, intimacy, and distance at the MAK Center/Schindler House in West Hollywood, and the Errata Salon, a talk/lecture series at Betalevel in Los Angeles’ Chinatown.
She lives in Los Angeles and is a literature contributing editor at BOMB. You can sometimes find her online on Twitter (@aminamemory) & Instagram (@amina_memory).
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 1,104 reviews
February 17, 2020
Damn! What an accomplishment. There’s more to unpack in this slim 160 pages than most books can achieve with 500. The whole time I kept thinking of all my friends who would gobble this up like me, in one breathless sitting. I want to loan out my copy to everyone I know so we can talk about it—but I’m also scared they won’t want to give it back. Ahh! What a dilemma.
I would try to describe the gist of it, but that’s basically impossible and the less you know going in the better. I will only say that it’s full of quirky humor with a dark fog that unsettles throughout. Any comparisons are unfair, but it’s almost like an Iain Reid mystery with Sylvia Plath’s characters. It’s none of those things, however, and there’s really no point trying to find an equal novel to point to. This is its own thing.
As for target audience, I will say those who enjoy literary fiction with some bite will appreciate this most. If you’re a writer, you will really identify with the peculiar protagonist. Perhaps more than you want to.
Though I didn’t want it to end, the ending is good. Not fully satisfying, but even that feels right. It’s one of the few novels where, after finishing the last page, I immediately want to go back to the first and experience it all over again. I know there are key lines I missed or will experience differently the second time around. I’ll want to highlight and add pencil marks in the margins. Though it’s a short book, every sentence has weight. You don’t want to breeze through it.
If anybody else reads this, please leave a comment! I’m dying to talk about it with someone.
I would try to describe the gist of it, but that’s basically impossible and the less you know going in the better. I will only say that it’s full of quirky humor with a dark fog that unsettles throughout. Any comparisons are unfair, but it’s almost like an Iain Reid mystery with Sylvia Plath’s characters. It’s none of those things, however, and there’s really no point trying to find an equal novel to point to. This is its own thing.
As for target audience, I will say those who enjoy literary fiction with some bite will appreciate this most. If you’re a writer, you will really identify with the peculiar protagonist. Perhaps more than you want to.
Though I didn’t want it to end, the ending is good. Not fully satisfying, but even that feels right. It’s one of the few novels where, after finishing the last page, I immediately want to go back to the first and experience it all over again. I know there are key lines I missed or will experience differently the second time around. I’ll want to highlight and add pencil marks in the margins. Though it’s a short book, every sentence has weight. You don’t want to breeze through it.
If anybody else reads this, please leave a comment! I’m dying to talk about it with someone.
July 13, 2024
‘I will die if I can’t write and then I will have wasted my life.’
‘Can a story be like a painting, Amina Cain ponders in an interview with fellow author Renee Gladman, ‘what happens when a narrative allows us to spend time with an image longer than we are “supposed” to?’ In many ways her novel Indelicacy is an expression of this question, filled with frequent ekphrastic moments and short, staccato chapters—often only a page in length—that linger on an idea. It is a novel propelled by images more so than plot, following Vitória from being ‘saved’ from her working class life cleaning an art museum to her general discontent in a life of fancy society. Through it all, the desire to be a writer overrides everything and she continuously shoves everything aside to create space regardless of ‘how indelicate’ her behavior is perceived or her husband’s annoyance that she would choose to labor over literature instead of quietly submit to a life of leisure. Though Cain writes in a sparse prose style, it feels almost magical how vast the imagery is that emits from her slender sentences. A rather haunting, stylistically stunning and very interior novel that registers more as a visual experience, Indelicacy examines the artistic life in conjunction with social status, gender expectations and the ways we must often elbow out our own space to create.
‘Still in the process of becoming, the soul makes room.’
I often find that the novels with the barest of plots make space to let the details really shine. It is like a quiet evening, when all the bustle of the day dies down and, instead of simply darkness and silence, we suddenly hear the cacophonous choirs of insects under a dazzling display of starshine. Such is the case with Indelicacy where within its own quiet spaces we can truly hear her language sing. I read this alongside her book on writing, A Horse at Night: On Writing (read my review here), which made for a truly illuminating experience, seeing how her ideas lead into her sentences and her sentences into her ideas back and forth across both books. Most notably are the ways Vitória’s excavations of self, such as questioning ‘what part of me is false?’ in order to cut those aspects from her life and further engage in her writing, aligns with Cain’s own efforts to parse down her language for the most economical effect and authenticity. As she writes in A Horse at Night: ‘going further into my writing means being vigilant about shedding what is false, even the smallest bit of it.’ Cain excels at embedding imagery into her writing and transports us into the space, not unlike the way Vitória feels she would like to ender the ‘wooden buildings meant to conjure the street of a village’ she sees on a ballet stage or how ‘you look at the painting and you want to go farther into the room.’ And the sparseness of words opens a room to be projected into:
Her writing projects into our minds like the ways Vitória says she sees handwriting projected onto the faces of others. This is all the more impressive considering the vague time period this is set—we hear of carriages and candle-lit rooms but the texture of time seems it could be any time, all times, or no time but its own yet it feels so visually vivid nonetheless. It is an exquisite form of creation and we feel as if, like a painting, our eyes are lingering on a canvas more than reading words on a page.
‘Writing was not the only thing I wanted to do, but the important thing, I thought, was that I wanted to do it more than anything else.’
This is not a typical story of art life, of trying to find a story and create it (we never do learn much of what she writes about) but more about having to create a space for it to occur. Which, honestly, I vibed with way too hard. Life is so full and your focus is being hooked from all angles all demanding full attention at the same time and sometimes you just have to really shove your own space. At the novels start we find our narrator working in a museum scrubbing floors with her only friend, Antoinette, looking at art the same way she looks at society: from the outside wishing she could go in. She wants to be a writer and it is what gives her pleasure and purpose—‘In books I found even more strongly my desire to write, to write back to them and their jagged, perfect words. I found life that ran close to my own’—and a sudden twist of fate finds her married to a wealthy man and freed of her working class woes (admittedly this is a bit of a shoehorned plot point, but whatever I read a lot of fairy tales and can cope).
While Simone de Beauvoir wrote that women must have financial mobility in order for liberation, Virginia Woolf adds a second necessity: ‘A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.’ Vitoria enjoys the comforts of her new status but just wants to write (which is strongly against her husband’s wishes). There is also the element of Solange, the maid, reminding her at all times of where she came from and feels twinges of guilt seeing as the symbol of the working class clearly detests her. Cain borrowed the character name from Jean Genet’s play The Maids, writing in A Horse at Night that she did this
There is also the aspect that the narrator wants to remove anything false from her life. She spends much of the novel reflecting on the sacrifices women have made, such as her thoughts about women who work at a factory turning horses into glue:
But with the presence of Solange, can she really feel this affinity to the working class is an authentic self in her new status? Yet she also cannot find her position as a women of wealth to be authentic either, admitting to eating ‘like a pig’ and other poor manners such as her brusque way of dealing with others and embracing her eccentricities for which her husband accuses her of doing because she believes herself better than everyone else (she is, she retorts). In a world where every step is judged, especially if one is a woman, how can you feel authentic? And how can you find space to create (her plan, which arrives at the end of the novel, is quite the twist).
‘...saw me only in relation to property and propriety. To be domestic first and then to be a shallow vessel out and about in the world. Didn’t he understand that was not who I was?’
What I love most about this novella was how much it felt like a classic novel. There is a lot of Virginia Woolf in the general vibes, most notably when after attending an author event between two men who spend the whole time counting their accolades she tells them to their faces ‘when you open your mouths, you are male worms eating from a toilet.’ I especially enjoyed the tender passages describing various paintings, each pointing towards something thematic in the novel through its juxtaposition with the text, and how this tied into the narrator’s artistic struggles as well as she ‘wanted to write about paintings, but I wasn’t seen as someone who could say something interesting about art.’ The way this novel knots all its ideas about writing together with the expressions of her creative journey is rather breathtaking and it is so stylistically stunning I could not tear my thoughts away from it for days. Indelicacy is a quiet novel with a loud voice that packs a wealth of imagery into the tiniest of spaces. A lovely read and I would highly recommend reading this alongside A Horse at Night: On Writing as I found both enhanced by doing so.
4/5
‘I had created an experience for someone; I hadn’t been sure I could actually do that.’
‘Can a story be like a painting, Amina Cain ponders in an interview with fellow author Renee Gladman, ‘what happens when a narrative allows us to spend time with an image longer than we are “supposed” to?’ In many ways her novel Indelicacy is an expression of this question, filled with frequent ekphrastic moments and short, staccato chapters—often only a page in length—that linger on an idea. It is a novel propelled by images more so than plot, following Vitória from being ‘saved’ from her working class life cleaning an art museum to her general discontent in a life of fancy society. Through it all, the desire to be a writer overrides everything and she continuously shoves everything aside to create space regardless of ‘how indelicate’ her behavior is perceived or her husband’s annoyance that she would choose to labor over literature instead of quietly submit to a life of leisure. Though Cain writes in a sparse prose style, it feels almost magical how vast the imagery is that emits from her slender sentences. A rather haunting, stylistically stunning and very interior novel that registers more as a visual experience, Indelicacy examines the artistic life in conjunction with social status, gender expectations and the ways we must often elbow out our own space to create.
‘Still in the process of becoming, the soul makes room.’
I often find that the novels with the barest of plots make space to let the details really shine. It is like a quiet evening, when all the bustle of the day dies down and, instead of simply darkness and silence, we suddenly hear the cacophonous choirs of insects under a dazzling display of starshine. Such is the case with Indelicacy where within its own quiet spaces we can truly hear her language sing. I read this alongside her book on writing, A Horse at Night: On Writing (read my review here), which made for a truly illuminating experience, seeing how her ideas lead into her sentences and her sentences into her ideas back and forth across both books. Most notably are the ways Vitória’s excavations of self, such as questioning ‘what part of me is false?’ in order to cut those aspects from her life and further engage in her writing, aligns with Cain’s own efforts to parse down her language for the most economical effect and authenticity. As she writes in A Horse at Night: ‘going further into my writing means being vigilant about shedding what is false, even the smallest bit of it.’ Cain excels at embedding imagery into her writing and transports us into the space, not unlike the way Vitória feels she would like to ender the ‘wooden buildings meant to conjure the street of a village’ she sees on a ballet stage or how ‘you look at the painting and you want to go farther into the room.’ And the sparseness of words opens a room to be projected into:
‘Why is empty space a comfort and a relief? It’s not because I project myself there, it's because I can’t. It shows me my projections but they haven’t left my mind. Empty space remains empty, always. And for a little while a small part of me can be empty too.’
Her writing projects into our minds like the ways Vitória says she sees handwriting projected onto the faces of others. This is all the more impressive considering the vague time period this is set—we hear of carriages and candle-lit rooms but the texture of time seems it could be any time, all times, or no time but its own yet it feels so visually vivid nonetheless. It is an exquisite form of creation and we feel as if, like a painting, our eyes are lingering on a canvas more than reading words on a page.
‘Writing was not the only thing I wanted to do, but the important thing, I thought, was that I wanted to do it more than anything else.’
This is not a typical story of art life, of trying to find a story and create it (we never do learn much of what she writes about) but more about having to create a space for it to occur. Which, honestly, I vibed with way too hard. Life is so full and your focus is being hooked from all angles all demanding full attention at the same time and sometimes you just have to really shove your own space. At the novels start we find our narrator working in a museum scrubbing floors with her only friend, Antoinette, looking at art the same way she looks at society: from the outside wishing she could go in. She wants to be a writer and it is what gives her pleasure and purpose—‘In books I found even more strongly my desire to write, to write back to them and their jagged, perfect words. I found life that ran close to my own’—and a sudden twist of fate finds her married to a wealthy man and freed of her working class woes (admittedly this is a bit of a shoehorned plot point, but whatever I read a lot of fairy tales and can cope).
While Simone de Beauvoir wrote that women must have financial mobility in order for liberation, Virginia Woolf adds a second necessity: ‘A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.’ Vitoria enjoys the comforts of her new status but just wants to write (which is strongly against her husband’s wishes). There is also the element of Solange, the maid, reminding her at all times of where she came from and feels twinges of guilt seeing as the symbol of the working class clearly detests her. Cain borrowed the character name from Jean Genet’s play The Maids, writing in A Horse at Night that she did this
‘not with the intent to rewrite her, but because I was interested in the currents that often remain invisible, that aren’t usually acted out as they are in The Maids...I wanted my Solange to carry within her…a dark history of maids throughout time.’
There is also the aspect that the narrator wants to remove anything false from her life. She spends much of the novel reflecting on the sacrifices women have made, such as her thoughts about women who work at a factory turning horses into glue:
‘We should memorialize the horses, remember them truthfully, and the women who have to spend their days in that way....I have benefited from a woman who never stops working, walking back from the factory in the morning and the night.’
But with the presence of Solange, can she really feel this affinity to the working class is an authentic self in her new status? Yet she also cannot find her position as a women of wealth to be authentic either, admitting to eating ‘like a pig’ and other poor manners such as her brusque way of dealing with others and embracing her eccentricities for which her husband accuses her of doing because she believes herself better than everyone else (she is, she retorts). In a world where every step is judged, especially if one is a woman, how can you feel authentic? And how can you find space to create (her plan, which arrives at the end of the novel, is quite the twist).
‘...saw me only in relation to property and propriety. To be domestic first and then to be a shallow vessel out and about in the world. Didn’t he understand that was not who I was?’
What I love most about this novella was how much it felt like a classic novel. There is a lot of Virginia Woolf in the general vibes, most notably when after attending an author event between two men who spend the whole time counting their accolades she tells them to their faces ‘when you open your mouths, you are male worms eating from a toilet.’ I especially enjoyed the tender passages describing various paintings, each pointing towards something thematic in the novel through its juxtaposition with the text, and how this tied into the narrator’s artistic struggles as well as she ‘wanted to write about paintings, but I wasn’t seen as someone who could say something interesting about art.’ The way this novel knots all its ideas about writing together with the expressions of her creative journey is rather breathtaking and it is so stylistically stunning I could not tear my thoughts away from it for days. Indelicacy is a quiet novel with a loud voice that packs a wealth of imagery into the tiniest of spaces. A lovely read and I would highly recommend reading this alongside A Horse at Night: On Writing as I found both enhanced by doing so.
4/5
‘I had created an experience for someone; I hadn’t been sure I could actually do that.’
June 24, 2020
Very interesting stylistically. Ruminative.
February 18, 2023
I saw a city filled with people I didn’t know, would probably never know. It didn’t bother me; it’s the same for everyone. When people look at me, they also see a stranger.
Vitória works in a museum (as a cleaner) and becomes obsessed with writing critiques of the art. Her writings are detailed, sensitive, and frequently disturbing. I was continuously gripped by the rich and frequently eerie cultural details Cain writes into this story, on nearly every page. Vitória meets her husband in front of paintings by Caravaggio and Goya, two artists famous for their lovingly detailed paintings of gruesome suffering. A detailed story of women working in a glue factory seems metaphorical at first mention, and then appears again as memory, and then morphs into a meditation on cruelty to horses and finally into an aversion to eating meat. Is it a horror story? I think it is. Not in a classic sense. But through the character of Vitória, Cain creates a perfect, suffocating, horrifying argument, that to be alive is to be alone. Chilling, remarkable, unforgettable.
Vitória works in a museum (as a cleaner) and becomes obsessed with writing critiques of the art. Her writings are detailed, sensitive, and frequently disturbing. I was continuously gripped by the rich and frequently eerie cultural details Cain writes into this story, on nearly every page. Vitória meets her husband in front of paintings by Caravaggio and Goya, two artists famous for their lovingly detailed paintings of gruesome suffering. A detailed story of women working in a glue factory seems metaphorical at first mention, and then appears again as memory, and then morphs into a meditation on cruelty to horses and finally into an aversion to eating meat. Is it a horror story? I think it is. Not in a classic sense. But through the character of Vitória, Cain creates a perfect, suffocating, horrifying argument, that to be alive is to be alone. Chilling, remarkable, unforgettable.
April 5, 2020
The quote that opens this novella, this debut by Amina Cain, made me jump back. "Oh, NO!" I cried. "Clarice Lispector? Not HER!"
It's true. It was a major put off. Clarice Lispector scares me (because of THIS, and THIS). Her plot-less-ness puts me into a panicky, page-ripping state of mind. And her self-absorbed philosophizing gives me butt-kicking ideas.
Fortunately, Amina Cain's book doesn't go quite into Lispector's black void. There IS a plot, although it's very airy, as plots go. And there are THINGS and CHARACTERS and PLACES, and I delighted in those tangible luxuries.
However, it's obvious that Lispector's spirit is present in these pages. There's an impenetrable nature to the main character, who is so introspective, so deeply private and alone, by choice. She wants to write, but doesn't care if anyone ever reads it. She writes mainly about herself, looking at paintings. (Good thing she doesn't care if anyone ever reads it!) She has meaningful friendships with a few women, but the reader doesn't learn anything new about her through these relationships. She marries, though we never really find out why. She likes her husband for as long as she likes him, and then does what she needs to do to achieve what it is she wants. She participates on the surface of life, with a numb detachment that is more than a little bewildering.
There's an individualistic darkness that I enjoyed, and celebrated, in these pages. But I didn't find it inspiring, as an artist. Maybe because her art was so personal to her, and not compelling to me? Also, I didn't find this work feminist, not in the least, especially given how she achieves her "independence" at the end.
How am I to connect with this mediocre writer, whose narcissism keeps her happily in her head, delighting in her own thoughts? It makes it hard to discern what I am to take away with this work, which presumably has a lot to say about art, class, friendship, sex, and devotion to one's passion in life.
I'm going to take the easy way out and say it's all Clarice's fault.
It's true. It was a major put off. Clarice Lispector scares me (because of THIS, and THIS). Her plot-less-ness puts me into a panicky, page-ripping state of mind. And her self-absorbed philosophizing gives me butt-kicking ideas.
Fortunately, Amina Cain's book doesn't go quite into Lispector's black void. There IS a plot, although it's very airy, as plots go. And there are THINGS and CHARACTERS and PLACES, and I delighted in those tangible luxuries.
However, it's obvious that Lispector's spirit is present in these pages. There's an impenetrable nature to the main character, who is so introspective, so deeply private and alone, by choice. She wants to write, but doesn't care if anyone ever reads it. She writes mainly about herself, looking at paintings. (Good thing she doesn't care if anyone ever reads it!) She has meaningful friendships with a few women, but the reader doesn't learn anything new about her through these relationships. She marries, though we never really find out why. She likes her husband for as long as she likes him, and then does what she needs to do to achieve what it is she wants. She participates on the surface of life, with a numb detachment that is more than a little bewildering.
There's an individualistic darkness that I enjoyed, and celebrated, in these pages. But I didn't find it inspiring, as an artist. Maybe because her art was so personal to her, and not compelling to me? Also, I didn't find this work feminist, not in the least, especially given how she achieves her "independence" at the end.
How am I to connect with this mediocre writer, whose narcissism keeps her happily in her head, delighting in her own thoughts? It makes it hard to discern what I am to take away with this work, which presumably has a lot to say about art, class, friendship, sex, and devotion to one's passion in life.
I'm going to take the easy way out and say it's all Clarice's fault.
June 8, 2020
"You're almost like an animal," he said. "I never know what you will do."
"I know."
A red squirrel climbing a tree.
"But in reality you're a woman."
I laughed. "What does that mean?"
"It isn't nice to call your wife an animal, is it?"
"I think it's interesting."
But then my husband was annoyed with me, for I had taken the conversation too far, even though I had hardly taken it far at all. "You try to make yourself abnormal on purpose," he said. "You think it makes you better than the other people around you."
"I do no such thing, and still I am better."
I know how that sounded, but I couldn't help saying it, and I suppose I did think I was better than him. If I'm being honest. If I'm being shallow. pg. 64
This is a strange little book.
You float around inside this novel kind of like you would in a dream. It's not clear-cut, there's not much dialogue.
Everyone speaks to each other as if they aren't humans, but rather aliens who have come down to Earth and put on their meat suits, desperately hoping to pass as human. If I didn't know better, I'd say it was translated from the French, or the Korean, or some other language in a clumsy way.
Ostensibly this is about Vitória, a maid who cleans in a museum. She is a writer - not a published one. She marries a rich man and suddenly has not only time to write, but a lavish lifestyle she could only dream of previously.
That sounds like a cohesive plot, but the book doesn't really have much of a plot.
The book values female friendship, but sees men as just props in women's life. One wonders, while reading this book, if a woman can ever truly befriend a man or see a man as a person. Vitória loves and cherishes her female friends, and speaks to women as equals, but sees her husband as something to tolerate. A burden. A source of money. Someone not very bright who wants to fuck her and fund her lifestyle. Men are on the periphery, women are in the spotlight and they are the ones who matter. Women are the ones who think critically. Men just dominate and enjoy. (According to this book.) Actually, her husband is not even given a name in this book. That's how little he matters as a human being.
People have claimed this book is feminist, or a feminist work, but that's not how I would label it. I feel like Cain wants to be in the vein of The Bell Jar, but IMO she just does not accomplish it. I think the reason she doesn't accomplish it is not because she is not a feminist or doesn't understand feminism, but because she makes this book so claustrophobic, so surreal, and doesn't allow any character to develop or be truly explored.
Vitória was always a strong, independent woman, but becoming rich emboldens her and gives her power. The book toys with the idea of materialism - how poor women dream that owning things will make them happy. Vitória's friend Antoinette, who works with her as a maid, loves to daydream and list all the things she will own, 'one day.' Of course, she won't. She's poor and she'll always be poor. (SEE ALSO: Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America) But of course, material possessions don't make you happy. And with wealth comes some burdens, burdens Vitória has a hard time dealing with.
Vitória marrying a rich man is just a crutch - a contrived plot device on the part of Cain. We have no idea how this marriage happened. It's ridiculous. This rich man materializes out of thin air and marries a maid he meets at a museum! No thought or attention is given to this because it's simply a way for Vitória to become rich and leave her life in poverty behind.
Vitória now feels she can say and do things she couldn't before. The only chapter that made me laugh, in fact, is the one where Vitória attends an author-reading by an author she admires. After the reading, he is to be interviewed by a second author.
At the reading, the author spoke in a loud voice that was also dramatic, yet he wasn't reading a dramatic part. Every so often, he looked at the audience with a great amount of purpose. It was difficult to want to look back. The few times he looked at me, I looked immediately past him, to the window with the night sky in it. At least I had something else on which to focus my attention, something open and calm. Or I looked at the wastebasket, completely still. I didn't like him, and I hadn't expected that. I didn't like the man who interviewed him either, who spoke out of turn, I thought, of his own success, both at the start of the interview and then again sometime in the middle of their conversation.
That second author said, "When you are first given accolades for your work, it is tremendously exciting, but it soon becomes tiresome." I didn't believe him. If it were true, why would he be saying it now? It meant something to him to be able to say it. He probably hadn't been able to stop himself, as I sometimes had trouble not saying something I later regretted. Or maybe he would never regret it, thought it important to the conversation he and the author were having.
I wanted to lock them in the room after the reading was over and make them listen to each other forever. Let them look at the sky when they got tired, or at the wastebasket. I thought they deserved that. I wanted to tell them how terrible the reading had been, that it had ruined the writing, how shallow the interview was, how much I had hated all of it.
When I walked out of the room, I said simply, "You're both worms," and they looked at me, not knowing how to respond to a statement like that. "Of the worst kind. When you open your mouths, you are male worms eating from a toilet."
I was dying laughing, but you can see what I mean both about the dreamy (as in dream-like, not as in 'awesome') writing and the bizarre dialogue. Every time people have conversations in this novel... and granted it is not very often... it's bizarre.
I won't tell you how the book ends, but IMO the ending is pretty ho-hum.
TL;DR The book wasn't unpleasant. I balked at the beginning because it was so fucking weird, but after you get used to it it's okay. Not wonderful, but okay. Cain definitely has a few things she wants to say, which saves this from simply being a bizarre stream-of-consciousness novel. Although the plot and the characters are dim (as in not-shining) and the book rambles around willy-nilly with no seemingly obvious course, there are three or four passages in here that are interesting and in which I think Cain was trying to express something.
It's quite short, so if you are interested by what I said in this review, give it a go. The 'chapters' are sometimes only a page long.
NAMES IN THIS BOOK
"I know."
A red squirrel climbing a tree.
"But in reality you're a woman."
I laughed. "What does that mean?"
"It isn't nice to call your wife an animal, is it?"
"I think it's interesting."
But then my husband was annoyed with me, for I had taken the conversation too far, even though I had hardly taken it far at all. "You try to make yourself abnormal on purpose," he said. "You think it makes you better than the other people around you."
"I do no such thing, and still I am better."
I know how that sounded, but I couldn't help saying it, and I suppose I did think I was better than him. If I'm being honest. If I'm being shallow. pg. 64
This is a strange little book.
You float around inside this novel kind of like you would in a dream. It's not clear-cut, there's not much dialogue.
Everyone speaks to each other as if they aren't humans, but rather aliens who have come down to Earth and put on their meat suits, desperately hoping to pass as human. If I didn't know better, I'd say it was translated from the French, or the Korean, or some other language in a clumsy way.
Ostensibly this is about Vitória, a maid who cleans in a museum. She is a writer - not a published one. She marries a rich man and suddenly has not only time to write, but a lavish lifestyle she could only dream of previously.
That sounds like a cohesive plot, but the book doesn't really have much of a plot.
The book values female friendship, but sees men as just props in women's life. One wonders, while reading this book, if a woman can ever truly befriend a man or see a man as a person. Vitória loves and cherishes her female friends, and speaks to women as equals, but sees her husband as something to tolerate. A burden. A source of money. Someone not very bright who wants to fuck her and fund her lifestyle. Men are on the periphery, women are in the spotlight and they are the ones who matter. Women are the ones who think critically. Men just dominate and enjoy. (According to this book.) Actually, her husband is not even given a name in this book. That's how little he matters as a human being.
People have claimed this book is feminist, or a feminist work, but that's not how I would label it. I feel like Cain wants to be in the vein of The Bell Jar, but IMO she just does not accomplish it. I think the reason she doesn't accomplish it is not because she is not a feminist or doesn't understand feminism, but because she makes this book so claustrophobic, so surreal, and doesn't allow any character to develop or be truly explored.
Vitória was always a strong, independent woman, but becoming rich emboldens her and gives her power. The book toys with the idea of materialism - how poor women dream that owning things will make them happy. Vitória's friend Antoinette, who works with her as a maid, loves to daydream and list all the things she will own, 'one day.' Of course, she won't. She's poor and she'll always be poor. (SEE ALSO: Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America) But of course, material possessions don't make you happy. And with wealth comes some burdens, burdens Vitória has a hard time dealing with.
Vitória marrying a rich man is just a crutch - a contrived plot device on the part of Cain. We have no idea how this marriage happened. It's ridiculous. This rich man materializes out of thin air and marries a maid he meets at a museum! No thought or attention is given to this because it's simply a way for Vitória to become rich and leave her life in poverty behind.
Vitória now feels she can say and do things she couldn't before. The only chapter that made me laugh, in fact, is the one where Vitória attends an author-reading by an author she admires. After the reading, he is to be interviewed by a second author.
At the reading, the author spoke in a loud voice that was also dramatic, yet he wasn't reading a dramatic part. Every so often, he looked at the audience with a great amount of purpose. It was difficult to want to look back. The few times he looked at me, I looked immediately past him, to the window with the night sky in it. At least I had something else on which to focus my attention, something open and calm. Or I looked at the wastebasket, completely still. I didn't like him, and I hadn't expected that. I didn't like the man who interviewed him either, who spoke out of turn, I thought, of his own success, both at the start of the interview and then again sometime in the middle of their conversation.
That second author said, "When you are first given accolades for your work, it is tremendously exciting, but it soon becomes tiresome." I didn't believe him. If it were true, why would he be saying it now? It meant something to him to be able to say it. He probably hadn't been able to stop himself, as I sometimes had trouble not saying something I later regretted. Or maybe he would never regret it, thought it important to the conversation he and the author were having.
I wanted to lock them in the room after the reading was over and make them listen to each other forever. Let them look at the sky when they got tired, or at the wastebasket. I thought they deserved that. I wanted to tell them how terrible the reading had been, that it had ruined the writing, how shallow the interview was, how much I had hated all of it.
When I walked out of the room, I said simply, "You're both worms," and they looked at me, not knowing how to respond to a statement like that. "Of the worst kind. When you open your mouths, you are male worms eating from a toilet."
I was dying laughing, but you can see what I mean both about the dreamy (as in dream-like, not as in 'awesome') writing and the bizarre dialogue. Every time people have conversations in this novel... and granted it is not very often... it's bizarre.
I won't tell you how the book ends, but IMO the ending is pretty ho-hum.
TL;DR The book wasn't unpleasant. I balked at the beginning because it was so fucking weird, but after you get used to it it's okay. Not wonderful, but okay. Cain definitely has a few things she wants to say, which saves this from simply being a bizarre stream-of-consciousness novel. Although the plot and the characters are dim (as in not-shining) and the book rambles around willy-nilly with no seemingly obvious course, there are three or four passages in here that are interesting and in which I think Cain was trying to express something.
It's quite short, so if you are interested by what I said in this review, give it a go. The 'chapters' are sometimes only a page long.
NAMES IN THIS BOOK
February 12, 2020
Indelicacy is a very unusual book. My conventional mind tried very hard and failed to put it within any time and place constraints, and then decided it didn't matter. As the blurb rightly suggests, there is something Victorian about it, something about male and female attitudes, the protagonist having people to wait on her and other people to entertain, or perhaps the idea that the only way to escape a life of poverty and endless floors to mop is to marry a rich man?
At the beginning of the book Vitoria works in a museum as a cleaning lady and a maid. She doesn't mind her life and enjoys an easy frienship with Antoniette and, above all, the possibility to admire paintings, landscapes, portraits and still nature, old and new ones, finished and unfinished ones- Vitoria is able to appreciate them all. She has a consuming need to write about the paintings she sees as if she is trying to carve out new imaginary experiences. One day she is noticed by a rich man who marries her after a very brief courtship. Suddenly, she is free to live a life of privelege in a beautiful house. Her requests are never denied, although she still has to ask for everything of any importance. This life of relative luxury wasn't something she wanted or cared about, it just dropped in her lap. Vittoria is trying to experience and make sense of it all- being able to write any time she wants, although her husband doesn't take it seriously, meeting new interesting people, dance lessons and the freedom of movement, sensual pleasures of making love with her husband Eventually she outgrows it and becomes stifled by the marriage without true companionship or understanding.
The writing is powerful in its seeming simplicity. Vitoria is ingenuine, selfish and honest. She doesn't want and doesn't see a need to conform to what other people around her expect her to be or desire. Extremely sensitive to every single detail, she rejects the notion of 'delicacy' in her quest for the truth of real experiences.
It is a very short book which can be read in under an hour. It left me feeling unsettled, as if I took a dive into deep sea full of mysterious shadows I struggled to make out, and then came up gasping for breath to realise that the world around me is still bright and full of colours.
Thank you to Edelweiss and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for the review copy provided in exchange for an honest opinion.
At the beginning of the book Vitoria works in a museum as a cleaning lady and a maid. She doesn't mind her life and enjoys an easy frienship with Antoniette and, above all, the possibility to admire paintings, landscapes, portraits and still nature, old and new ones, finished and unfinished ones- Vitoria is able to appreciate them all. She has a consuming need to write about the paintings she sees as if she is trying to carve out new imaginary experiences. One day she is noticed by a rich man who marries her after a very brief courtship. Suddenly, she is free to live a life of privelege in a beautiful house. Her requests are never denied, although she still has to ask for everything of any importance. This life of relative luxury wasn't something she wanted or cared about, it just dropped in her lap. Vittoria is trying to experience and make sense of it all- being able to write any time she wants, although her husband doesn't take it seriously, meeting new interesting people, dance lessons and the freedom of movement, sensual pleasures of making love with her husband Eventually she outgrows it and becomes stifled by the marriage without true companionship or understanding.
The writing is powerful in its seeming simplicity. Vitoria is ingenuine, selfish and honest. She doesn't want and doesn't see a need to conform to what other people around her expect her to be or desire. Extremely sensitive to every single detail, she rejects the notion of 'delicacy' in her quest for the truth of real experiences.
It is a very short book which can be read in under an hour. It left me feeling unsettled, as if I took a dive into deep sea full of mysterious shadows I struggled to make out, and then came up gasping for breath to realise that the world around me is still bright and full of colours.
Thank you to Edelweiss and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for the review copy provided in exchange for an honest opinion.
March 9, 2020
Almost from the first words of this tiny novel, my brain began percolating, popping, and screaming:
Amina Cain—she did it! She did it! She made a story (at times, an unexpectedly hilarious one) out of the nothing of being a writer. She told all sides by splitting it into two or multiple characters, or maybe they're all the same, who knows, I don't care … This is like when I was a professional mole, doing solitary jobs that nobody else wanted: cleaning, typing labels, taking care of office plants, working nights alone or Sunday afternoons in a shut-down building—all jobs where nobody ever saw me and I saw everything! Jobs I specialized in because I coveted time for my "real life," an interior one that I alone inhabited, but if I went too deep, I knew I would die from lack of oxygen. … This is about finally getting free of jobs and then … , this is like, this reminds me of …
I couldn't get enough of it. I wanted to read slowly because I wanted it to last. I wanted to read fast because it felt like a favorite food I'd never tasted before but suddenly realized I craved.
This is a book for writers and particularly female writers. If you are or know such a person, this is a gift to give yourself or them. Or maybe painters. Or maybe any artists. Or anybody with a strong interior life and people who thrive in creating something out of nothing. It's just a terrific, unique, and incredibly well-made book.
Amina Cain—she did it! She did it! She made a story (at times, an unexpectedly hilarious one) out of the nothing of being a writer. She told all sides by splitting it into two or multiple characters, or maybe they're all the same, who knows, I don't care … This is like when I was a professional mole, doing solitary jobs that nobody else wanted: cleaning, typing labels, taking care of office plants, working nights alone or Sunday afternoons in a shut-down building—all jobs where nobody ever saw me and I saw everything! Jobs I specialized in because I coveted time for my "real life," an interior one that I alone inhabited, but if I went too deep, I knew I would die from lack of oxygen. … This is about finally getting free of jobs and then … , this is like, this reminds me of …
I couldn't get enough of it. I wanted to read slowly because I wanted it to last. I wanted to read fast because it felt like a favorite food I'd never tasted before but suddenly realized I craved.
This is a book for writers and particularly female writers. If you are or know such a person, this is a gift to give yourself or them. Or maybe painters. Or maybe any artists. Or anybody with a strong interior life and people who thrive in creating something out of nothing. It's just a terrific, unique, and incredibly well-made book.
February 11, 2020
I read this novella mainly because it’s so brief (took me about 45 minutes); I found it quite bizarre in its lack of emotion, and wouldn’t have persisted had it been longer. It’s the narrative of a woman named Vitória who works as a cleaner in a museum, dreams of being a writer, then eventually marries a wealthy man. It is typical of the book that this is all she says about her wedding:
The style is economical in the extreme. It’s unclear when or where this story is taking place, or indeed why it is called Indelicacy (perhaps the title is ironic?). Little happens to or around Vitória. She narrates her life without any sense of attachment to what is happening in it; there is always a distance and a numbness to what she relates; she barely seems to be involved, really.
The blurb calls it ‘a ghost story without a ghost’. I’d say Vitória is a ghost in her own life. But the claims that this is a ‘story of a woman navigating between gender and class roles to empower herself and fulfill her dreams’ and ‘a novel about seeing, class, desire, anxiety, pleasure, friendship, and the battle to find one’s true calling’ seem like a huge stretch. It reminded me most of the similarly cold How to Be a Good Wife (minus the plot). Hausfrau navigates similar themes more successfully.
Had I not read this as a review copy, I would have returned it; it’s far too insubstantial to be described (and priced) as a novel.
I received an advance review copy of Indelicacy from the publisher through Edelweiss.
TinyLetter
We were married at the start of the summer and hardly anyone attended—a few of his friends, a cousin from Brazil. No one knew I was there. While our vows were being said, I looked at him and wondered, Who are you?
The style is economical in the extreme. It’s unclear when or where this story is taking place, or indeed why it is called Indelicacy (perhaps the title is ironic?). Little happens to or around Vitória. She narrates her life without any sense of attachment to what is happening in it; there is always a distance and a numbness to what she relates; she barely seems to be involved, really.
The blurb calls it ‘a ghost story without a ghost’. I’d say Vitória is a ghost in her own life. But the claims that this is a ‘story of a woman navigating between gender and class roles to empower herself and fulfill her dreams’ and ‘a novel about seeing, class, desire, anxiety, pleasure, friendship, and the battle to find one’s true calling’ seem like a huge stretch. It reminded me most of the similarly cold How to Be a Good Wife (minus the plot). Hausfrau navigates similar themes more successfully.
Had I not read this as a review copy, I would have returned it; it’s far too insubstantial to be described (and priced) as a novel.
I received an advance review copy of Indelicacy from the publisher through Edelweiss.
TinyLetter
March 25, 2020
My husband picked up his spoon again; then to my great surprise, I imagine because he was jealous, he said we could smoke hashish together.
“When?” was the only thing I managed to say. How indelicate.
Indelicacy is another ARC I brought into self-isolation without knowing much (other than some great reviews) about it. Now I wonder: What was the fuss? And I need to conclude: This is a book for other writers; based on the reviews, perhaps only they who live in their minds and who sweat out words on the page really connect with what Amina Cain has crafted here. As for me: Right over my head. (Note: I read an ARC and passages quoted may not be in their final form.)
I didn't write for a month: my mind was somewhere else. But I was writing a book; I knew that now. I had been writing it for two years. The problem was that it would make little sense to most people, and how would that work out? Everyone always wants sense.
In its blurb, Indelicacy is described as “a down-to-earth investigation of the barriers faced by women in both life and literature. It is a novel about seeing, class, desire, anxiety, pleasure, friendship, and the battle to find one’s true calling.” But I really don't think it's that universal. We have a woman, eventually learning her name is Vitória, who while working as a custodian at an art museum, caught the eye of a rich man and became his wife. And while she thought this would finally give her the time and leisure to really focus on her writing, her husband insists that she put away all forms of labour and just enjoy resting, as the wife of a rich man ought. Vitória writes anyway. And she attends concerts and walks frequently to the museum she used to work at; takes ballet lessons and makes awkward friendships. We also learn early on that Vitória will eventually leave her husband – the timeline dips forwards and back – but she's such a passive character that she accepts whatever comes along, never works for anything. I learned nothing, really, about “the barriers faced by women in both life and literature”.
“You try to make yourself abnormal on purpose,” he said. “You think it makes you better than the other people around you.”
“I do no such thing, and still I am better.”
I know how that sounded, but I couldn't help saying it, and I suppose I did think I was better than him. If I'm being honest. If I'm being shallow.
As for the title: The only indelicate character – as in “unladylike”, I suppose – is Vitória herself. She tells us, more than once, that she eats like a pig. When she used to clean the museum's bathroom, it was all she could do to stop herself from throwing her bucket of water at the patrons. When she attends an author's reading event at the library, and is bored by what had been a favourite novelist's interview by another writer, she tells them before leaving that they're a pair of worms, “when you open your mouths, you are male worms eating from a toilet.” And when she decides to leave her husband, she creates a situation in which he'll feel the need to support her; she'll never need to work again, other than the writing.
And Vitória really is passionate about the writing. For the most part, she stares at paintings in the museum and describes them on the page. And I got nothing from these passages:
One day I looked for a while at a small painting and saw something in it. A man and a boy in muted suits doing their engraving work, the background behind them completely dark. We are not meant to see anything beyond this task, their concentration on it. Yet we want to know, it is only a scrap. What is in the darkness?
We're in an unnamed country and time period – there is no technology mentioned beyond trains – and there's no way of knowing what the societal expectations are for a young and uneducated woman such as Vitória. We learn that in the beginning she was happy living in one plainly furnished room because it was so peaceful compared to the large, loud family she had escaped from, but once she's married to the rich man, she's quick to take a life of luxury as her due. She is forever writing about interiors and exteriors, waves and the leaves of plants, the progressing seasons, empty spaces and “clumping”. And it all went right over my head. On the other hand, there was quite a bit that was darkly amusing and otherwise intriguing in the writing:
After that, the winter dragged itself through its January, its February, its March, with its dirty snow and frozen mud. I felt I was dragging myself through as well. I hated March more than any other month, with its promises of warmth that never came.
But it didn't add up to much for me. Another wishy-washy three stars.
![Profile Image for Dann [Hiatus].](https://cdn.statically.io/img/i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/users/1706531120i/75605765._UX200_CR0,0,200,200_.jpg)
September 26, 2023
I am no longer in the business of thinking I need to like literary-type books just because they're literary and "deep".
This is about a woman who cleans museums and gets married to a wealthy guy. She wants to be a writer. She loves art. She has some friends. That's pretty much it.
I did not care about these people and this story. Turns out I'm a plot-oriented reader, and if there's no particular plot, the characters have to be really intriguing. This fell short for me on both accounts.
This is about a woman who cleans museums and gets married to a wealthy guy. She wants to be a writer. She loves art. She has some friends. That's pretty much it.
I did not care about these people and this story. Turns out I'm a plot-oriented reader, and if there's no particular plot, the characters have to be really intriguing. This fell short for me on both accounts.
April 6, 2020
’In books I found even more strongly my desire to write, to write back to them and their jagged, perfect words. I found life that ran close to my own.’
A relatively short rags-to-riches tale of a woman who works as a cleaning woman at an art museum, spending her free time writing about her feelings about the art on the walls in between scrubbing walls and floors and toilets.
’While I dusted, I listened to the music and afterward wanted to describe it in my notebook. I was thinking things that I was afraid I would forget. Also, I had become interested in my handwriting. I wanted to see it there, in its own way, alive.’
And then one day when she meets a man, a fairly wealthy man who becomes her husband. Her lifestyle changes drastically as she moves from a tiny flat to a rather grand house, with her own room to write in, and a maid to handle the chores. And yet, she feels less fulfilled than before, and begins to yearn for her former freedom, the simple friendships, acceptance and understanding that she had among her former friends.
While I don’t think this is a story that will appeal to all, for those who appreciate lovely, spare prose, with thought-provoking themes, this was a story shared through deceptively simple prose that touches on a range of topics about women’s roles vs. men’s roles, society’s influence, and the pursuit of one’s own idea of personal happiness.
Many thanks to my goodreads friend Betsy, whose review brought this book to my attention.
Betsy’s review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
February 22, 2020
I’ll be thinking about this 160-page novella for longer than I will most 400-page novels. Cain has written a contemporary mini Victorian novel about roles and societal expectations of women and how to liberate ourselves from class, gender and our own anxieties. Her deployment of narrative distancing techniques combines beautifully with her intimate writings where she puts us in paintings and nature. It’s all completely intriguing and thought provoking.
October 13, 2022
Прекрасно малко, кратко, книжно бижу!
Посегнах към “Нетактичност”, заради красивата корица и кратката, но изчерпателна анотация. Издателство “Кръг” са ми изключително любими!
Нямах никакви очаквания, но книгата ме изненада и страшно много ми хареса.
На пръв поглед твърде кратка и обикновена история, която ни запознава с Витория - чистачка в музей, която по случайност (или поне аз останах с такива впечатления) се омъжва за богат съпруг. Проследяваме отрязък от живота и в рамките на 3 години. Не става ясно от какво семейство идва и как точно започва връзката със съпруга си, но сякаш нямах нужда от тези подробности.
Книгата е написана много красиво. Според мен е доста умозрителна, философска и насочена към хора с афинитет към изкуството във всичките му форми. Аз лично я възприех като дневник на главната героиня, която описва трансформацията, която настъпва у нея след като се омъжва и има възможност да се отдаде изцяло на писането. Потънах изцяло във вътрешния и свят и някак за пръв път не усещам, че нещо липсва в книга с такъв обем.
Определено попадение!
Посегнах към “Нетактичност”, заради красивата корица и кратката, но изчерпателна анотация. Издателство “Кръг” са ми изключително любими!
Нямах никакви очаквания, но книгата ме изненада и страшно много ми хареса.
На пръв поглед твърде кратка и обикновена история, която ни запознава с Витория - чистачка в музей, която по случайност (или поне аз останах с такива впечатления) се омъжва за богат съпруг. Проследяваме отрязък от живота и в рамките на 3 години. Не става ясно от какво семейство идва и как точно започва връзката със съпруга си, но сякаш нямах нужда от тези подробности.
Книгата е написана много красиво. Според мен е доста умозрителна, философска и насочена към хора с афинитет към изкуството във всичките му форми. Аз лично я възприех като дневник на главната героиня, която описва трансформацията, която настъпва у нея след като се омъжва и има възможност да се отдаде изцяло на писането. Потънах изцяло във вътрешния и свят и някак за пръв път не усещам, че нещо липсва в книга с такъв обем.
Определено попадение!
October 2, 2020
There have been many novels about writers grappling with the process of writing. So much so that it's almost become an eye-rolling cliché and could be considered the ultimate form of navel-gazing. But Amina Cain's “Indelicacy” does something very different with this well trodden subject matter. It's a retrospective tale narrated by Vitória who worked as a cleaner in a museum before marrying a wealthy man. Throughout her life she's been driven by a passionate desire to write. The form of her writing changes over time. She jots down striking observations and interpretations about the paintings she sees in the museum and many of these are reproduced in the text of Cain's novel. In doing so, this story builds to a fascinating meditation about the creative process and the way the imagination interacts with our subjective reality. It also shows how the impulse to create can be a motivation that both sustains and debilitates us as it can supersede every other form of human desire. This novel is also a fascinating character study of an abrasive personality who sometimes struggles or fails to connect with women and men in enticingly dramatic ways.
Read my full review of Indelicacy by Amina Cain on LonesomeReader
Read my full review of Indelicacy by Amina Cain on LonesomeReader
December 31, 2020
When the protagonist of this novel, Vitória, gets annoyed by people she reacts like the French soldier in “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” when the soldier said to King Arthur “I fart in your general direction.” 😮
This is what she says…
• …when she is out and about and minding her own business and too many men ask her what she is doing she says “Your face looks like the butt of a wolf and it’s interfering with my concentration.”
• …when she is annoyed at a reading by the pretentiousness of two authors and as she is leaving the reading she tells them, “You’re both worms. Of the worst kind. When you open your mouths, you are male worms eating from a toilet.”
I guess she knows how to tell people off!
Vitória used to be a cleaning women at an art museum, and she likes art, and she likes to write, and one day a man walks into the museum and they hit it off and before you know it they get married and the novel is about the several years after that. All of sudden she does not have to work…she can wear fancy clothes…she has plenty of time to write, but the maid Solange makes dinners with meat even though Vitória tells her she does not eat meat. 🤔
I liked the structure of the book given its substance (it was light fare to me) — each chapter 2-3 pages, with the whole novel (novella?) being 161 pages.
After I was finished reading the novel I was remembering what was on the inner flap of the book jacket of the front cover — “Reminiscent of a lost Victorian classic in miniature, yet taking equal inspiration from such modern authors as Jean Rhys, Octavia Butler, Clarice Lispector, and Jean Genet, Amina Cain’s Indelicacy is at once a ghost story without a ghost, a fable without a moral, and a down-to-earth investigation of the barriers faced by women in both life and literature.” And I was puzzled as to how, whoever wrote that, they saw the book being a ghost story without a ghost, and a fable without a moral. Perhaps when I get to the reviews I will be enlightened.
Anyhoo, then I was thinking of how I might have ended the novel, i.e., an alternative ending. And that got me to thinking….are there novels out there such as experimental fiction in which, say, a certain number of chapters of a book are written and then the author presents a number of different endings? So let’s say there are 6 alternative endings. That way you would be reading 6 novels in one. I like that concept — has any author done that? Can someone let me know? Maybe Kate Atkinson’s “Life After Life” is like that, but I am not sure. If nobody has done that, maybe I will and then become a world-famous person. 😏
I thought this book had the potential to be much better than it was…it was OK as is and I must accept what the author wrote and judge the book by its existing content, not what I would like it to be. But still, I bet it could have been better with an alternative twist at the end. I just didn’t see a punch line, a zinger, something unexpected, and/or perhaps a bit of closure. I’ll leave it at that. 2.5 stars.
Reviews (they all liked it):
• https://www.theguardian.com/books/202...
• https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/t...
• https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/11/bo...
• https://fictionwritersreview.com/revi...
This is what she says…
• …when she is out and about and minding her own business and too many men ask her what she is doing she says “Your face looks like the butt of a wolf and it’s interfering with my concentration.”
• …when she is annoyed at a reading by the pretentiousness of two authors and as she is leaving the reading she tells them, “You’re both worms. Of the worst kind. When you open your mouths, you are male worms eating from a toilet.”
I guess she knows how to tell people off!
Vitória used to be a cleaning women at an art museum, and she likes art, and she likes to write, and one day a man walks into the museum and they hit it off and before you know it they get married and the novel is about the several years after that. All of sudden she does not have to work…she can wear fancy clothes…she has plenty of time to write, but the maid Solange makes dinners with meat even though Vitória tells her she does not eat meat. 🤔
I liked the structure of the book given its substance (it was light fare to me) — each chapter 2-3 pages, with the whole novel (novella?) being 161 pages.
After I was finished reading the novel I was remembering what was on the inner flap of the book jacket of the front cover — “Reminiscent of a lost Victorian classic in miniature, yet taking equal inspiration from such modern authors as Jean Rhys, Octavia Butler, Clarice Lispector, and Jean Genet, Amina Cain’s Indelicacy is at once a ghost story without a ghost, a fable without a moral, and a down-to-earth investigation of the barriers faced by women in both life and literature.” And I was puzzled as to how, whoever wrote that, they saw the book being a ghost story without a ghost, and a fable without a moral. Perhaps when I get to the reviews I will be enlightened.
Anyhoo, then I was thinking of how I might have ended the novel, i.e., an alternative ending. And that got me to thinking….are there novels out there such as experimental fiction in which, say, a certain number of chapters of a book are written and then the author presents a number of different endings? So let’s say there are 6 alternative endings. That way you would be reading 6 novels in one. I like that concept — has any author done that? Can someone let me know? Maybe Kate Atkinson’s “Life After Life” is like that, but I am not sure. If nobody has done that, maybe I will and then become a world-famous person. 😏
I thought this book had the potential to be much better than it was…it was OK as is and I must accept what the author wrote and judge the book by its existing content, not what I would like it to be. But still, I bet it could have been better with an alternative twist at the end. I just didn’t see a punch line, a zinger, something unexpected, and/or perhaps a bit of closure. I’ll leave it at that. 2.5 stars.
Reviews (they all liked it):
• https://www.theguardian.com/books/202...
• https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/t...
• https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/11/bo...
• https://fictionwritersreview.com/revi...
February 22, 2020
This was a very unsatisfying read for me. The author seems to be trying to write a story with the gender roles flipped. The writing, however, is spare and comes across as very distant. There is no sense of time or place in this book and the main character lacks depth. I also found her quite unlikeable. She leaves her family because she wants to be on her own and become a writer. She gets married to a wealthy man mainly to provide her with financial support while she pursues her creative passions. When she’s tired of him, she schemes to get him to leave her. This seems to be an intentional gender-role reversal, and it’s just as unattractive here as it is in the traditional story of a man supported in his goals by a wife. Perhaps the lack of depth in this character made me dislike the book, even though I think this was also intentional. I know it was meant to illuminate how the same behavior in a woman may seem more offensive than it does in a man, but the reading experience was flat without much depth in the characters or any idea of where and when the story takes place. 2.5⭐️
October 6, 2019
I’m the first person to review this book and I’d hate to be indelicate about it (buh dum dum), but it isn’t the sort of thing that’s easy to recommend. Even the official description of it…the fable without a moral, the ghost story without a ghost…it’s meant to be clever and alluring, but when you think about it, it just kind of spotlights the insubstantiality of the entire thing. Personally, I didn’t really think of it as either of those descriptors, I’m not sure what it was. In was hoping for something as terrific as the timeless classic Yellow Wallpaper. But no, this wasn’t it. This was…well, it was a story about a young woman who aspires to be a writer, but doesn’t have much to say, so jots down descriptions of things (such as her looking at works of art) instead. She works as a cleaner in a museum alongside another woman, whom she thinks of as a friend, although abandons completely when a wealthy man comes in and sweeps (oh no, the cleaning pun, hopeless) her off her feet. Now she has the means to live the life of luxury with a man she doesn’t love, but at least enjoys sexually and financially, and pursue her writing. Just like that, one chance meeting, and she jumps many steps on the class ladder in a society where class is determined strictly by income. Eventually, though, she becomes dissatisfies with luxury. Poignantly, her cleaner friend, with whom she reconnects, has married for love and seems to be happy despite financial straits. If there is a moral to be found in this book, that would be it. But this doesn’t seem to be a moral driven story, I’m not sure what drives it, actually. It’s nicely written, but it has a weird ethereal gauzy quality to it. Which is heavily reinforced by giving the characters foreign names and not establishing a specific geographic location of an era to the story. It’s a balloon just waiting to float away connected to a reader by nothing but a thin string. Which, frankly, isn’t an optimal level of reader/book connectivity. I was in a weird enough mood that somehow I didn’t mind it, especially since it’s such a quick read, maybe 80/85 minutes tops. But when I say it reads like a dream, I mean it literally, not like woohoo, this is awesome, but more like oh wow, ok, weird, what was that all about. It’s the sort of novel that makes you go in the end…yeah and. And there’s nothing. The author seems to specialize in short stories until now and that’s what this book reads like, a stretched out short story. It’s nice in its odd way, but certainly not for everyone. Thanks Netgalley.
July 29, 2021
What does a person do when she has too much of herself.
“I see myself then, a figure in the street, walking to the museum. To look out from my window and see myself like that. Moving in and out of experience.”
A state of trance. Almost. Looking at things, looking within. Seeing oneself looking at those things.
Vitoria watches herself like a figure walking in the street, looking at paintings and dances and faces of friends. What she sees, she captures into words. Writing, even if it is only meant for herself.
The experience of reflecting at art and the subsequent emotions is subjective. Rarely does it have a place for notions of others. And when the art transcends living, its exploration turn still more solitary, the rest obscured from view. Or not deliberately looked at because it’s unnecessary. Quite a hindrance really.
In this uncanny and yet bewitching novel, Cain explores a mind so entranced by the idea of seeing oneself as still in the constantly shifting and moving world that the rest ceases to be significant. Though Vitoria’s carefully plotted act of estranging herself from her husband in such a way that it ensures a comfortable living for her, because of her otherwise meager means, presents a contradiction with this idea of stillness.
The impulse of looking at oneself looking at the world found a home in me, my reveries at times resembling that trance like state and perhaps even striving, like Vitoria, to be able to hold them longer. It may be vain an exercise, still it brings a heightened sense of being alive, of somehow being more conscious of our passage through this life.
“I see myself then, a figure in the street, walking to the museum. To look out from my window and see myself like that. Moving in and out of experience.”
A state of trance. Almost. Looking at things, looking within. Seeing oneself looking at those things.
Vitoria watches herself like a figure walking in the street, looking at paintings and dances and faces of friends. What she sees, she captures into words. Writing, even if it is only meant for herself.
The experience of reflecting at art and the subsequent emotions is subjective. Rarely does it have a place for notions of others. And when the art transcends living, its exploration turn still more solitary, the rest obscured from view. Or not deliberately looked at because it’s unnecessary. Quite a hindrance really.
In this uncanny and yet bewitching novel, Cain explores a mind so entranced by the idea of seeing oneself as still in the constantly shifting and moving world that the rest ceases to be significant. Though Vitoria’s carefully plotted act of estranging herself from her husband in such a way that it ensures a comfortable living for her, because of her otherwise meager means, presents a contradiction with this idea of stillness.
The impulse of looking at oneself looking at the world found a home in me, my reveries at times resembling that trance like state and perhaps even striving, like Vitoria, to be able to hold them longer. It may be vain an exercise, still it brings a heightened sense of being alive, of somehow being more conscious of our passage through this life.
April 6, 2023
Amina Cain's novel Indelicacy is about a nameless female narrator who above all else, wants to write. It’s about her small struggles to carve out a place in a world for herself to be free and do what she is passionate about.
The novel is not set in any certain time or place and it gives it an alluring feeling of floating somewhere unknown. The main character is not grounded, not tied down by an era or specific country. Another layer of dreaminess is added by the descriptions of what writing means to her. Cain has used the exact precise words to show how writing is being alone behind your table but at the same time being with everyone you have ever met in all the places you have ever been to.
And the prose is pure like crystal. Stripped of all excess, the sentences are bare which makes them vulnerable and so very honest. Something I have come to enjoy more and more stylistically and Cain is very good at it.
Despite the sparse prose, the book has a strong impact. It has little pockets of wisdom hidden in its relatively simple plot. It shows better perhaps than anything I've read before, how writing is like an ocean that washes over you, shaking pebbles and sand on a beach inside you, you thought long abandoned, scratching your soul and stirring up memories.
The novel is not set in any certain time or place and it gives it an alluring feeling of floating somewhere unknown. The main character is not grounded, not tied down by an era or specific country. Another layer of dreaminess is added by the descriptions of what writing means to her. Cain has used the exact precise words to show how writing is being alone behind your table but at the same time being with everyone you have ever met in all the places you have ever been to.
And the prose is pure like crystal. Stripped of all excess, the sentences are bare which makes them vulnerable and so very honest. Something I have come to enjoy more and more stylistically and Cain is very good at it.
Despite the sparse prose, the book has a strong impact. It has little pockets of wisdom hidden in its relatively simple plot. It shows better perhaps than anything I've read before, how writing is like an ocean that washes over you, shaking pebbles and sand on a beach inside you, you thought long abandoned, scratching your soul and stirring up memories.
January 18, 2020
To read Amina Cain is to enter tide pools of the mind. On its surface, her fiction is quiet, lovely, contained, but sit with any passage and that which seems still uncoils and comes alive. The reach of her fiction is an invitation to peer deep into our inner worlds.
In the tradition of the Künstlerroman, Cain’s debut novel Indelicacy follows the maturity and growth of an artist, and like Proust’s In Search of Lost Time or Atwood’s Cat’s Eye, it is a novel interested in consciousness, identity, the passage of time, art, and freedom. Indelicacy tells the story of a woman who desires a life beyond her janitorial duties, a life where she can nurture her writing aspirations and the friendships she holds dear; however, to focus on plot alone would deny the narrative its inner depth. Like Cain’s short story collections, I Go to Some Hollow (Les Figues Press, 2009) and Creature (Dorothy, 2013), the space the novel inhabits is largely interior, yet the longer form opens the narrative up to a grander investigation of self and society. Cain has said that “inner life can propel a narrative forward as much as plot,” and indeed what animates Indelicacy is the thrill of experiencing the narrator’s mind attuning to both her inner and outer worlds with equal parts agency and wonder.
Cain’s magic act is her ability to write the interior life without tumbling into the traps of isolation, solipsism, or spiraling self-obsession. Instead, Cain writes into the expansiveness of the narrator’s thought processes, not in isolation but in concert with her surrounding environment. While working as a cleaning woman in an art museum, the narrator starts to see herself reflected in the art: “When I was supposed to be cleaning, I would look out the windows of the museum, the paintings behind me reflected in the glass. It meant something to me to see myself with them.” Seeing her reflection blurred with the art elevates the narrator’s sense of self. The memory situates the narrator in her own narrative—while she is looking outside herself (through the window, but also at the painting reflected in the window) she is simultaneously staring back at her reflection, gazing within.
While Indelicacy orbits themes of identity, social class, female friendship, creativity, and desire, it is ultimately a story of a woman claiming her freedom. Vitória, the narrator, lives in an unspecified time and place that could be nineteenth century England (she is expected to marry, clean, cook, entertain, and raise children) if it weren’t for the slippage that occurs in details like the books the narrator reads or the art she describes. Where naming a specific year and setting might help ground readers in a narrative, the purposeful ambiguity of Indelicacy creates an eerie unmoored effect. Vitória, like the art she describes, exists both in and out of time.
Vitória’s arc of self-discovery begins when she stops laboring and starts thinking. Throughout the novel, Vitória spurns social norms—she writes when she is supposed to be working, she questions authority, she experiments with drugs. These small but deliberate transgressions are necessary in her process of understanding her own subjectivity. Close friendships are also significant in Vitória’s development. Though the novel is slow to reveal Vitória’s name, her friends, Antoinette and Dana, are named and described in loving detail. We are never told the name of the rich patron from the art museum whom Vitória marries, but we are told the name of their house maid, Solange.
Cain focuses on what matters to Vitória, what she values—writing, reading, art, female friendship, and a desire to live her own life. Often this takes place in quiet, everyday moments: “Lately, I’ve had a vision of drinking a glass of water while lying in a bath. Or a grouping of vegetables on a counter meant for preparing a vegetable soup. I think about the things we need to live.” Introspective, poetic, and full of longing, this passage is reminiscent of another Künstlerroman, Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. Like Woolf’s Lily Briscoe, who desires “to be on a level with ordinary experience” and yet to also know that “it’s a miracle, it’s an ecstasy,” so too does Cain’s Vitória desire to see and reflect, to be both inside and outside of the moment. The complication of being present yet also a witness to one’s own life is evident in the following passage:
To be alive and sometimes grieving. To eat dinners and sit in restaurants. To sleep with my husband and then tell Solange which rooms need cleaning. To clean my own study and then read in it. To sit in a dark theater with a lit stage in front of me. To walk with Antoinette and then with Dana. Walking along the lake, the snow falling on my boots, my hat.
The effect, for both Lily and Vitória, is living the complicated struggle while at once being removed from it. Here, the dispassionate distancing allows the subject agency over her alienation.
Imagination connects Vitória to the sacredness of the world. She imagines a life where she no longer has to clean the art museum and she, indeed, is able to have that life with her new rich husband, but not without cost. Her husband tolerates her writing but he is hardly supportive. She lives comfortably, but she feels a tremendous amount of guilt with her new class status whenever she engages with Solange. It isn’t until she befriends Dana, a dancer, that Vitória starts to see just how unhappy she is. Then, one day when she visits an art museum, she begins to feel deserving of freedom and devises a plan.
Indelicacy is a hopeful story, told hauntingly. Vitória says at the beginning that she is stalking her own soul, and certainly, in looking back at her life, there is a sense of mystery and awe. If we think about Vitória imagining herself into being, then it makes sense that her attempt to reflect back and write of this emergence may appear hazy, haunted, a carbon copy of what was. While this troubles memory, it is also the condition of women—any freedom imagined cannot be a freedom outside the patriarchal structure that Vitória was born into.
For Vitória, true freedom is found in the space between artist and world—being in connection to something “flowing” toward something else. The theme of connection and flow recurs throughout the book; notably, in the ballet studios, she says, “when I am here, I am like the streamers. I’m connected to something, but also connected to something else. It is always like that. I am flowing toward it.” It is in this liminal space that Vitória feels most attuned to herself but also connected to something that is not self—her purpose of living and existence, her very being in and of the world rises from a type of nonbeing, as sound from silence.
Like the moment when Vitória sees herself blurred with the art, Indelicacy, too, has this effect on the reader. Now, as I write this, I feel unmoored in time—as much a part of the text as it is of me—yet also strung together in some larger constellation. I feel somehow connected to Vitória at her desk, to the tangelos in a wire basket that hangs in my kitchen, to a past-self whispering with my friend, Sarah Rose, in an art history class over twenty years ago, to my fingers, to this computer, to the structures that both allow and condemn this privilege to write, and also to something that is me and not me—a purpose that propels me forward.
Review published in The Rumpus, January 8th, 2020
In the tradition of the Künstlerroman, Cain’s debut novel Indelicacy follows the maturity and growth of an artist, and like Proust’s In Search of Lost Time or Atwood’s Cat’s Eye, it is a novel interested in consciousness, identity, the passage of time, art, and freedom. Indelicacy tells the story of a woman who desires a life beyond her janitorial duties, a life where she can nurture her writing aspirations and the friendships she holds dear; however, to focus on plot alone would deny the narrative its inner depth. Like Cain’s short story collections, I Go to Some Hollow (Les Figues Press, 2009) and Creature (Dorothy, 2013), the space the novel inhabits is largely interior, yet the longer form opens the narrative up to a grander investigation of self and society. Cain has said that “inner life can propel a narrative forward as much as plot,” and indeed what animates Indelicacy is the thrill of experiencing the narrator’s mind attuning to both her inner and outer worlds with equal parts agency and wonder.
Cain’s magic act is her ability to write the interior life without tumbling into the traps of isolation, solipsism, or spiraling self-obsession. Instead, Cain writes into the expansiveness of the narrator’s thought processes, not in isolation but in concert with her surrounding environment. While working as a cleaning woman in an art museum, the narrator starts to see herself reflected in the art: “When I was supposed to be cleaning, I would look out the windows of the museum, the paintings behind me reflected in the glass. It meant something to me to see myself with them.” Seeing her reflection blurred with the art elevates the narrator’s sense of self. The memory situates the narrator in her own narrative—while she is looking outside herself (through the window, but also at the painting reflected in the window) she is simultaneously staring back at her reflection, gazing within.
While Indelicacy orbits themes of identity, social class, female friendship, creativity, and desire, it is ultimately a story of a woman claiming her freedom. Vitória, the narrator, lives in an unspecified time and place that could be nineteenth century England (she is expected to marry, clean, cook, entertain, and raise children) if it weren’t for the slippage that occurs in details like the books the narrator reads or the art she describes. Where naming a specific year and setting might help ground readers in a narrative, the purposeful ambiguity of Indelicacy creates an eerie unmoored effect. Vitória, like the art she describes, exists both in and out of time.
Vitória’s arc of self-discovery begins when she stops laboring and starts thinking. Throughout the novel, Vitória spurns social norms—she writes when she is supposed to be working, she questions authority, she experiments with drugs. These small but deliberate transgressions are necessary in her process of understanding her own subjectivity. Close friendships are also significant in Vitória’s development. Though the novel is slow to reveal Vitória’s name, her friends, Antoinette and Dana, are named and described in loving detail. We are never told the name of the rich patron from the art museum whom Vitória marries, but we are told the name of their house maid, Solange.
Cain focuses on what matters to Vitória, what she values—writing, reading, art, female friendship, and a desire to live her own life. Often this takes place in quiet, everyday moments: “Lately, I’ve had a vision of drinking a glass of water while lying in a bath. Or a grouping of vegetables on a counter meant for preparing a vegetable soup. I think about the things we need to live.” Introspective, poetic, and full of longing, this passage is reminiscent of another Künstlerroman, Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. Like Woolf’s Lily Briscoe, who desires “to be on a level with ordinary experience” and yet to also know that “it’s a miracle, it’s an ecstasy,” so too does Cain’s Vitória desire to see and reflect, to be both inside and outside of the moment. The complication of being present yet also a witness to one’s own life is evident in the following passage:
To be alive and sometimes grieving. To eat dinners and sit in restaurants. To sleep with my husband and then tell Solange which rooms need cleaning. To clean my own study and then read in it. To sit in a dark theater with a lit stage in front of me. To walk with Antoinette and then with Dana. Walking along the lake, the snow falling on my boots, my hat.
The effect, for both Lily and Vitória, is living the complicated struggle while at once being removed from it. Here, the dispassionate distancing allows the subject agency over her alienation.
Imagination connects Vitória to the sacredness of the world. She imagines a life where she no longer has to clean the art museum and she, indeed, is able to have that life with her new rich husband, but not without cost. Her husband tolerates her writing but he is hardly supportive. She lives comfortably, but she feels a tremendous amount of guilt with her new class status whenever she engages with Solange. It isn’t until she befriends Dana, a dancer, that Vitória starts to see just how unhappy she is. Then, one day when she visits an art museum, she begins to feel deserving of freedom and devises a plan.
Indelicacy is a hopeful story, told hauntingly. Vitória says at the beginning that she is stalking her own soul, and certainly, in looking back at her life, there is a sense of mystery and awe. If we think about Vitória imagining herself into being, then it makes sense that her attempt to reflect back and write of this emergence may appear hazy, haunted, a carbon copy of what was. While this troubles memory, it is also the condition of women—any freedom imagined cannot be a freedom outside the patriarchal structure that Vitória was born into.
For Vitória, true freedom is found in the space between artist and world—being in connection to something “flowing” toward something else. The theme of connection and flow recurs throughout the book; notably, in the ballet studios, she says, “when I am here, I am like the streamers. I’m connected to something, but also connected to something else. It is always like that. I am flowing toward it.” It is in this liminal space that Vitória feels most attuned to herself but also connected to something that is not self—her purpose of living and existence, her very being in and of the world rises from a type of nonbeing, as sound from silence.
Like the moment when Vitória sees herself blurred with the art, Indelicacy, too, has this effect on the reader. Now, as I write this, I feel unmoored in time—as much a part of the text as it is of me—yet also strung together in some larger constellation. I feel somehow connected to Vitória at her desk, to the tangelos in a wire basket that hangs in my kitchen, to a past-self whispering with my friend, Sarah Rose, in an art history class over twenty years ago, to my fingers, to this computer, to the structures that both allow and condemn this privilege to write, and also to something that is me and not me—a purpose that propels me forward.
Review published in The Rumpus, January 8th, 2020
February 22, 2023
I was entranced by this book. I found it elegant and enigmatic.
September 15, 2020
Dang, this is a hard book to review. It's not like anything else I've ever read. I liked it, but I didn't LOVE it, and I'm not sure I even enjoyed it much, though I was very intrigued throughout. As not only a writer, but a writer who particularly loves to do ekphrastic writing, and attends monthly groups at the Denver Art Museum where we spend 2 hours writing about various art works, I really enjoyed the aspects of the story that did have to do with her writing, specifically.
There are some brilliant lines in here: ".....I would listen to a bird cry, or the cat and the dog scratching around. In those moments I felt like a giant ear." RIGHT? Haven't you felt like this in the quietest moments?
"I look at my books of paintings while sitting at my desk. I look at paintings with snow in them. Here, people are skating across a pond, buying things from a Christmas market. How rosy they look. I don't think I've ever looked that rosy before." This is how I feel during EVERY Christmas season. And whenever I look at snowy holiday scenes full of happy shiny people.
But these tidbits are rare, and the rest of the story just didn't feel very believable to me - a rich husband who comes and rescues her from her cleaning job and gives her everything she wants? Money to buy everything and more she could ever desire? She can write for as long and whenever she wants and is given a lot of freedom within her marriage, and she's not happy with it? All of this stretched my ability to trust a bit, but then again, the entire story was just otherworldly enough that I went with it. There is a sense of surrealism that never quite dives into being truly surrealistic. Fortunately this was a very short and quick read, or I'm not sure I'd have made it through this.
3.5 stars for me. The parts specific to writing were a 4, and the rest a 3.
There are some brilliant lines in here: ".....I would listen to a bird cry, or the cat and the dog scratching around. In those moments I felt like a giant ear." RIGHT? Haven't you felt like this in the quietest moments?
"I look at my books of paintings while sitting at my desk. I look at paintings with snow in them. Here, people are skating across a pond, buying things from a Christmas market. How rosy they look. I don't think I've ever looked that rosy before." This is how I feel during EVERY Christmas season. And whenever I look at snowy holiday scenes full of happy shiny people.
But these tidbits are rare, and the rest of the story just didn't feel very believable to me - a rich husband who comes and rescues her from her cleaning job and gives her everything she wants? Money to buy everything and more she could ever desire? She can write for as long and whenever she wants and is given a lot of freedom within her marriage, and she's not happy with it? All of this stretched my ability to trust a bit, but then again, the entire story was just otherworldly enough that I went with it. There is a sense of surrealism that never quite dives into being truly surrealistic. Fortunately this was a very short and quick read, or I'm not sure I'd have made it through this.
3.5 stars for me. The parts specific to writing were a 4, and the rest a 3.
February 17, 2020
I really enjoyed Cain's other book Creature, a book of short meditative prose pieces. But this book, her first novel, didn't do much for me. There were passages that recalled the subtle brilliance of her unique brand of prose, but they were usually few and far between, lost in a novel that seemed to be set in the near-present, yet the attitudes of the narrator and other characters seem like those of another era.
Spoilers: the narrator talks almost like a kept woman; she starts off as a janitor, but she soon marries someone rich whom she does not love. Then in her bizarre journey to self-discovery figures out that she likes being financially supported without having to work while spending her days writing and going to the ballet. So she self-actualizes a plan to have her husband be unfaithful towards her, that way her husband will leave her and still feel obligated to pay for her lifestyle.
It all seems a bit... backwards. I mean, I'm all for empowerment, but isn't earning your own way towards financial freedom (even if it requires mopping a few floors) a more empowering notion?
Another problem I had with it was that it seemed to want to speak from a voice of a working class woman, completely unenlightened when it comes to certain ideas of agency and feminism (which becomes the journey she has to discover for herself throughout the course of the novel), and yet this is completely unconvincing. She goes to museums and ballets, writes about paintings in a cultured way, and uses words like "abject".
The parts I enjoyed most were her descriptions of the various artworks that moved her in the museums she goes to. I feel like Cain's best work doesn't really fit into a novel, and that is why her other book was so much better. I think ultimately she's more interested in weird thoughts, with examining the consciousness of her narrators as they do their bendy acrobatics. That's possible even within the form of a novel, think Virginia Woolf, but the other elements of the novel have to be just as strong, and I have a feeling that Cain just isn't interested in those other elements enough to make them good.
(Thanks to the publisher for sending me an advanced readers copy)
Spoilers: the narrator talks almost like a kept woman; she starts off as a janitor, but she soon marries someone rich whom she does not love. Then in her bizarre journey to self-discovery figures out that she likes being financially supported without having to work while spending her days writing and going to the ballet. So she self-actualizes a plan to have her husband be unfaithful towards her, that way her husband will leave her and still feel obligated to pay for her lifestyle.
It all seems a bit... backwards. I mean, I'm all for empowerment, but isn't earning your own way towards financial freedom (even if it requires mopping a few floors) a more empowering notion?
Another problem I had with it was that it seemed to want to speak from a voice of a working class woman, completely unenlightened when it comes to certain ideas of agency and feminism (which becomes the journey she has to discover for herself throughout the course of the novel), and yet this is completely unconvincing. She goes to museums and ballets, writes about paintings in a cultured way, and uses words like "abject".
The parts I enjoyed most were her descriptions of the various artworks that moved her in the museums she goes to. I feel like Cain's best work doesn't really fit into a novel, and that is why her other book was so much better. I think ultimately she's more interested in weird thoughts, with examining the consciousness of her narrators as they do their bendy acrobatics. That's possible even within the form of a novel, think Virginia Woolf, but the other elements of the novel have to be just as strong, and I have a feeling that Cain just isn't interested in those other elements enough to make them good.
(Thanks to the publisher for sending me an advanced readers copy)
February 12, 2020
This is a beautifully written story. I read this one slowly, so I could savor the language. My favorite parts of the book were the descriptions of the paintings. Such gorgeous writing!
A super big thank you to the publisher and Netgalley for giving me a free copy in exchange for an honest review! :)
A super big thank you to the publisher and Netgalley for giving me a free copy in exchange for an honest review! :)
March 4, 2020
A boring book about a woman who gets everything she wants and is still miserable. At least it was short.
November 7, 2020
“your face looks like the butt of a wolf and it’s interfering with my concentration?”. isn't that just the sweeter, most inspiring insult? one that makes you wonder what have you been doing all your life, not telling people their faces look like the butt of a wolf.
brilliant insults aside (and the book includes a few), let me say that if the literary gods decided to conjure a novel written exclusively for me, well, indelicacy would be it.
there’s more. the book was so excruciatingly good that once i lost my beloved black matte pencil —the OG of pencils tbh— half-way through, i consciously decided to keep reading and let the pen's ink on the page. this is a big deal for me, i only use pencils to write on books. but the book made me do it: to rid myself of my strange fixation with book preservation.
indelicacy is a galvanising experience into freeing oneself of the silly twitches (possibly by embracing them) and living one’s truth. vitória leads the way. she writes a lot, takes long walks, sits in museums, ties her husband to a chair and dreams of a farm, the countryside, a room of her own where “to write on the afternoon, walk again in the evening, then write again. late at night, read. then write again. sleep”. that is her master plan. however, she’s constantly preoccupied with leisure, the lying down, the luxury and privilege of it. what does her maid think of her. shouldn’t she know better than that, having spent most of her life on the other side of the fence? her meditations on class are spare and poignant, so is her understanding of privilege.
an immovable fog wraps the gloomy landscapes and ghostly characters. the atmosphere feels claustrophobic, but in a controlled, engineered way. the absence of time or spacial references creates the impression of peeking through a snow globe where characters exist in a suspended dimension. at the same time, the observations vitória makes summon the still-life detailing of flemish paintings, stark colours shining a light onto elements you wouldn’t pay attention to otherwise.
as readers we are forgiven incursions into the mind of a stubbornly resolute character who shares her resolve in a casual manner, but often displays fastidiousness at the audience peeking. she seems to say, too much.
vitória’s is a story about becoming. who am i if i’m not writing, she wonders. she is becoming herself, an artist first and foremost, but also a woman in an ever-shrinking universe that slowly makes room for her too. she is incessantly becoming, shifting shapes and appearances, all the while leaving clues to her future self to “be yourself again”. vitória uncompromisingly pursues the radical vision of what her life as an artist should be. she possesses an enviable self-awareness, an intimate knowledge of the inner workings of her soul and mind, that are often juxtaposed with fleeting doubts regarding the legitimacy of her identity as an artist. but, her determination to write returns her to herself and “still in the process of becoming, the soul makes room.” she is free at last.
brilliant insults aside (and the book includes a few), let me say that if the literary gods decided to conjure a novel written exclusively for me, well, indelicacy would be it.
there’s more. the book was so excruciatingly good that once i lost my beloved black matte pencil —the OG of pencils tbh— half-way through, i consciously decided to keep reading and let the pen's ink on the page. this is a big deal for me, i only use pencils to write on books. but the book made me do it: to rid myself of my strange fixation with book preservation.
indelicacy is a galvanising experience into freeing oneself of the silly twitches (possibly by embracing them) and living one’s truth. vitória leads the way. she writes a lot, takes long walks, sits in museums, ties her husband to a chair and dreams of a farm, the countryside, a room of her own where “to write on the afternoon, walk again in the evening, then write again. late at night, read. then write again. sleep”. that is her master plan. however, she’s constantly preoccupied with leisure, the lying down, the luxury and privilege of it. what does her maid think of her. shouldn’t she know better than that, having spent most of her life on the other side of the fence? her meditations on class are spare and poignant, so is her understanding of privilege.
an immovable fog wraps the gloomy landscapes and ghostly characters. the atmosphere feels claustrophobic, but in a controlled, engineered way. the absence of time or spacial references creates the impression of peeking through a snow globe where characters exist in a suspended dimension. at the same time, the observations vitória makes summon the still-life detailing of flemish paintings, stark colours shining a light onto elements you wouldn’t pay attention to otherwise.
as readers we are forgiven incursions into the mind of a stubbornly resolute character who shares her resolve in a casual manner, but often displays fastidiousness at the audience peeking. she seems to say, too much.
vitória’s is a story about becoming. who am i if i’m not writing, she wonders. she is becoming herself, an artist first and foremost, but also a woman in an ever-shrinking universe that slowly makes room for her too. she is incessantly becoming, shifting shapes and appearances, all the while leaving clues to her future self to “be yourself again”. vitória uncompromisingly pursues the radical vision of what her life as an artist should be. she possesses an enviable self-awareness, an intimate knowledge of the inner workings of her soul and mind, that are often juxtaposed with fleeting doubts regarding the legitimacy of her identity as an artist. but, her determination to write returns her to herself and “still in the process of becoming, the soul makes room.” she is free at last.
May 17, 2023
The narrator of Amina Cain's debut novel works as a cleaner at a museum of art. Between the hours of grating labour — of dusting the paintings, scrubbing the toilets, and hurriedly mopping the floors meant for others to leisurely walk along — she stops to look out the windows, considering the paintings behind her reflected in the glass, watching her own reflection in and amongst them. It meant something to see myself with them, she tells us. Rendered invisible because of her class, she is also aware that she is no more understood as a subject than she is an object: I wanted to write about paintings, but I wasn’t seen as someone who could say something interesting about art. I wasn't seen as someone who could say anything at all and then publish it. And yet, write she does: she holds the images in her mind, commits them to her notebook when she can. The very fact that we are reading her account, written in retrospect from a new home in the countryside, tells us that she has done it.
Indelicacy is unique and wondrous: a Künstlerroman, a fairytale, a "ghost story without a ghost, a fable without a moral," a work of feminist existentialism so finely wrought we don't even get to know our writer's name — Vitória — until we have decided to hear her out. Hers is a story of self-discovery, spare but made rich by the sense of urgency with which she is drawn into her own artistic sensibilities — first as daydreams, and then as things exceedingly more ambitious: I began to feel that I could see my writing — not the words or the paintings — somehow in between. That I had made a new thing.
This yearning to make new things emboldens Vitória to make herself anew, and she finds her avenue to do so when she is courted, as in a fairytale, by a wealthy patron outside the museum's cloakroom. She marries him offhandedly, in a span of two sentences, and is transported from her toil to a life of opulence. But though she gains a husband, a house, high society, and a maid, she finds that she has only traded one form of time-consuming labour for another. While she now has financial security and "a room of her own," the new constraints of social and marital expectations mean that this, her study, is seen by others only as her sitting room where she is meant to entertain others, a task she finds no joy in. Urged by her husband to rest, to enjoy herself, she still feels as if she should be cleaning – something that another woman – their maid Solange – is now doing for her. Vitória tries to befriend Solange, to express to her that they do share something after all, but finds that her new status as the lady of the house makes the latter truculent, and stands between them like a wall. Though Vitória learns to enjoy several transgressions in her new life – she ties up her husband in bed, experiments with drugs, finds ways to write despite the constraints levelled on her, and ultimately devices a way out of them without giving up any of her privileges – this strained relationship with Solange is one she cannot push through, except, as we find out in course of her tale, in the crudest of ways.
One of the most striking aspects of Indelicacy , for me, is the manner in which it speaks of gender through a direct inversion of the ways in which women are written in books about male ambition. Here, Vitória’s relationships, with her own subjectivity, as well as with other women, are paramount: her friendships with Antoinette – a dear friend from her cleaning job – and with Dana – a dancer she befriends at the ballet lessons she deigns to take after her marriage – are described with tenderness and love, and even the meaning of her animosity with Solange is considered in depth. These women – each named after a distinctive female character from the works of Jean Rhys, Octavia Butler, and Jean Genet respectively – are shown as fully-formed individuals navigating their desires against their own set of constraints. Meanwhile, the man Vitória marries – the man who comes to the museum to consider paintings by Caravaggio and Goya, whose works are known for being unflinching from darkness and cruelty – is never named in the novel; his work, passions, and desires are never explored. He is no companion to Vitória – theirs is, in fact, a marriage of convenience for her, one where he remains as much a cipher to her as he does to us.
The mechanics of class, too, are made self-evident here: rising up the ranks, Vitória is less willing to concede to the will and whims of others, and begins to value the survival of her own passions over everything else. Decadence becomes a source of joy, so that even though she understands the cruelty she is partaking in – having once been on the receiving end of it – she would rather not be on the outside again. This theme is, again, explored most potently through the way Vitória situates herself vis-a-vis Solange, I can best explain it as a self-conscious meditation on convenient incrementalism (or, what is better known today as 'girlboss' culture).
Aside from the politics subtly coded into it, Indelicacy also appears to be an astonishingly accomplished work in terms of its form, its fable-like quality that derives from the exactness of Cain’s prose being matched by the inexactness of the novel’s setting. Vitória’s story is difficult to pin down to any particular time or place, which allows it a slipperiness, a ghostliness that firmly resists any claims towards historical realism: there are carriages in the streets and candles in the windows, reminiscent of nineteenth century Europe, yet many of the paintings she describes are those found on display today at the Met in New York. Piano concerts and ballet recitals are where women of Vitória’s new standing go to keep up appearances, but their vocabulary is soaked through with modern day colloquialisms: we see Vitória telling male interlopers off by telling them their face looks like the butt of a wolf and is interfering with her concentration; to her readers she confides, equally casually, that life went normally, I guess.
Considered alongside this unstable setting, the plainness and remove with which Cain has her protagonist talk about herself and her often shocking decisions can – and does – put the novel in danger of appearing too simple, perhaps even pointless. There is indeed something odd and impenetrable about Vitória’s nature, a certain sense of dissonance between her introspectiveness and unwillingness to extricate herself from a being that is deeply private and stubbornly alone that can be frustrating (as her husband correctly and incorrectly points out: "You try to make yourself abnormal on purpose, he said. "You think it makes you better than the other people around you.”)
For me, however, the bewilderment didn’t last very long: Indelicacy begins with an epigraph from the ever-so-cryptic writer Clarice Lispector, and seen in light of this influence, Vitória’s numbness and distance in the novel seems rather purposive. Every aspect of her story – form, setting, character – surges forward with a hint of indelicacy, bent on unsettling and decentering our ideas of literary poise and refinement. Even the idea of artistic passion here veers away from the prescribed goals – the narrator wants to write, not to publish or prove a point, but simply because it is what she wants to do more than anything else. Perhaps Cain’s own object in writing such a novel is something similar: to express herself without a need for impressing. Whatever the case, I for one enjoyed how skilfully distilled the writing was, the ease with which it raised several forms of philosophical inquiry with each measured sentence – an unseemly feminist treatise cast in miniature.
3.5 stars, rounded up.
Indelicacy is unique and wondrous: a Künstlerroman, a fairytale, a "ghost story without a ghost, a fable without a moral," a work of feminist existentialism so finely wrought we don't even get to know our writer's name — Vitória — until we have decided to hear her out. Hers is a story of self-discovery, spare but made rich by the sense of urgency with which she is drawn into her own artistic sensibilities — first as daydreams, and then as things exceedingly more ambitious: I began to feel that I could see my writing — not the words or the paintings — somehow in between. That I had made a new thing.
This yearning to make new things emboldens Vitória to make herself anew, and she finds her avenue to do so when she is courted, as in a fairytale, by a wealthy patron outside the museum's cloakroom. She marries him offhandedly, in a span of two sentences, and is transported from her toil to a life of opulence. But though she gains a husband, a house, high society, and a maid, she finds that she has only traded one form of time-consuming labour for another. While she now has financial security and "a room of her own," the new constraints of social and marital expectations mean that this, her study, is seen by others only as her sitting room where she is meant to entertain others, a task she finds no joy in. Urged by her husband to rest, to enjoy herself, she still feels as if she should be cleaning – something that another woman – their maid Solange – is now doing for her. Vitória tries to befriend Solange, to express to her that they do share something after all, but finds that her new status as the lady of the house makes the latter truculent, and stands between them like a wall. Though Vitória learns to enjoy several transgressions in her new life – she ties up her husband in bed, experiments with drugs, finds ways to write despite the constraints levelled on her, and ultimately devices a way out of them without giving up any of her privileges – this strained relationship with Solange is one she cannot push through, except, as we find out in course of her tale, in the crudest of ways.
One of the most striking aspects of Indelicacy , for me, is the manner in which it speaks of gender through a direct inversion of the ways in which women are written in books about male ambition. Here, Vitória’s relationships, with her own subjectivity, as well as with other women, are paramount: her friendships with Antoinette – a dear friend from her cleaning job – and with Dana – a dancer she befriends at the ballet lessons she deigns to take after her marriage – are described with tenderness and love, and even the meaning of her animosity with Solange is considered in depth. These women – each named after a distinctive female character from the works of Jean Rhys, Octavia Butler, and Jean Genet respectively – are shown as fully-formed individuals navigating their desires against their own set of constraints. Meanwhile, the man Vitória marries – the man who comes to the museum to consider paintings by Caravaggio and Goya, whose works are known for being unflinching from darkness and cruelty – is never named in the novel; his work, passions, and desires are never explored. He is no companion to Vitória – theirs is, in fact, a marriage of convenience for her, one where he remains as much a cipher to her as he does to us.
The mechanics of class, too, are made self-evident here: rising up the ranks, Vitória is less willing to concede to the will and whims of others, and begins to value the survival of her own passions over everything else. Decadence becomes a source of joy, so that even though she understands the cruelty she is partaking in – having once been on the receiving end of it – she would rather not be on the outside again. This theme is, again, explored most potently through the way Vitória situates herself vis-a-vis Solange, I can best explain it as a self-conscious meditation on convenient incrementalism (or, what is better known today as 'girlboss' culture).
Aside from the politics subtly coded into it, Indelicacy also appears to be an astonishingly accomplished work in terms of its form, its fable-like quality that derives from the exactness of Cain’s prose being matched by the inexactness of the novel’s setting. Vitória’s story is difficult to pin down to any particular time or place, which allows it a slipperiness, a ghostliness that firmly resists any claims towards historical realism: there are carriages in the streets and candles in the windows, reminiscent of nineteenth century Europe, yet many of the paintings she describes are those found on display today at the Met in New York. Piano concerts and ballet recitals are where women of Vitória’s new standing go to keep up appearances, but their vocabulary is soaked through with modern day colloquialisms: we see Vitória telling male interlopers off by telling them their face looks like the butt of a wolf and is interfering with her concentration; to her readers she confides, equally casually, that life went normally, I guess.
Considered alongside this unstable setting, the plainness and remove with which Cain has her protagonist talk about herself and her often shocking decisions can – and does – put the novel in danger of appearing too simple, perhaps even pointless. There is indeed something odd and impenetrable about Vitória’s nature, a certain sense of dissonance between her introspectiveness and unwillingness to extricate herself from a being that is deeply private and stubbornly alone that can be frustrating (as her husband correctly and incorrectly points out: "You try to make yourself abnormal on purpose, he said. "You think it makes you better than the other people around you.”)
For me, however, the bewilderment didn’t last very long: Indelicacy begins with an epigraph from the ever-so-cryptic writer Clarice Lispector, and seen in light of this influence, Vitória’s numbness and distance in the novel seems rather purposive. Every aspect of her story – form, setting, character – surges forward with a hint of indelicacy, bent on unsettling and decentering our ideas of literary poise and refinement. Even the idea of artistic passion here veers away from the prescribed goals – the narrator wants to write, not to publish or prove a point, but simply because it is what she wants to do more than anything else. Perhaps Cain’s own object in writing such a novel is something similar: to express herself without a need for impressing. Whatever the case, I for one enjoyed how skilfully distilled the writing was, the ease with which it raised several forms of philosophical inquiry with each measured sentence – an unseemly feminist treatise cast in miniature.
3.5 stars, rounded up.
October 19, 2020
What was that
June 14, 2022
Really expected to love this but it fell really flat for me for some reason. I think my main issue was that it felt a little too underdeveloped and overexplain-y. Every time the author brought up an interesting concept or bit of dialogue, I felt like it immediately ended and it didn't allow for the ideas to marinate or have much complexity. The plot and characters were in theory right up my alley but again, I just didn't find it very compelling! :(
Displaying 1 - 30 of 1,104 reviews