But I was really drawn to Vitória ’s peace and solitude! Her access to museums and art and dance and music. Sometimes it feels like fantasy, and other times like you’re satirizing that fantasy a little bit. Naomi Skwarna: Indelicacy reads a bit like a meditation on what it takes to live as-or-like, an artist. Re-reading Indelicacy, I find myself wandering around the house as if in a museum, picking things up and putting them down, reorganizing bookshelves, and-in deference to the various women who populate the novel-cleaning.Įarlier this year, Cain and I met in person to discuss Indelicacy, and the vast world that underpins its aberrantly delicate sentences. There is a precision to Cain’s first-person voice that invites possession, which in this new period of isolation and distance provides a momentary sense of escape (to those of us with that privilege). The conflict is as discreet as the novel’s tone: left alone with her writing, Cain suggests an instability beneath Vitória’s fantasy, a 21st century künstlerroman in miniature that questions the artist’s way while pushing forward on it. Vitória, as she transitions from impoverished cleaner to mistress of a grand house, pursues art, and her art, with a solitary but insistent ambition. Her first novel, Indelicacy (Strange Light), is a study of a woman, Vitória, who seems at times to be drawn through the world by her senses and the satisfaction they demand. You know it’s there, but you can’t quite find it.

What she sees, reads, hears, and touches gently permeates her writing, implying its presence with the subtlety of a loved one’s perfume on the neckband of an old sweater. Amina Cain is an artist alive in her senses.

Indelicacy amina cain review