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Amina Cain

Indelicacy: A Novel Kindle Edition

by Amina Cain (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

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FINALIST FOR THE CENTER FOR FICTION'S FIRST NOVEL PRIZE

"Cain’s small but mighty novel reads like a ghost story and packs the punch of a feminist classic." —The New York Times Book Review

A haunted 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.

Print length

178 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date

February 11, 2020
File size

2668 KB
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Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Amina Cain is the author of two collections of short fiction, Creature and I Go to Some Hollow. Her essays and short stories have appeared in n+1, the Paris Review Daily, BOMB, Full Stop, Vice, the Believer Logger, and elsewhere. She lives in Los Angeles and is a contributing editor at BOMB.

Lauren Ezzo is a Chicago-based audiobook narrator and commercial voice talent. A Michigan native and Hope College alumna, she has recorded over 100 titles and garnered several AudioFile Earphones Awards for her narrations. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

Review

"In Indelicacy we meet a woman who spends time studying landscape paintings and then walking inside the landscapes where she lives. She looks at a landscape then moves inside another, and as we read it begins to seem that the landscapes in paintings and in fiction are eerily the same. In a deeply pleasing way, reading this novel is a bit like standing in a painting, a masterful study of light and dark, inside and out, freedom and desire. Amina Cain is one of my favorite writers. I loved reading this book." ―Danielle Dutton, author of Margaret the First

"To read Amina Cain's Indelicacy is akin to donning magnifying spectacles that distill a woman's past into modern reality, these lucid and uncanny lenses remaining on the eye far beyond her pages." ―Josephine Foster, musical artist

"With simplicity and wisdom, Amina Cain's Indelicacy strips away the clutter of the modern novel, leaving only her narrator’s concentrated attention and yearning. As a tribute to the history of its own form, Indelicacy manages to expand our ideas of both the classic and the contemporary." ―Tim Kinsella, music-maker and author of Sunshine on an Open Tomb

"Acutely observed, Indelicacy is an exquisite jewel box of a novel with the passion and vitality found only in such rare and necessary works as The Hour of the Star and The Days of Abandonment. Through this timeless examination of solitude, art, and friendship, Amina Cain announces herself as one of the most intriguing writers of our time." ―Patty Yumi Cottrell, author of Sorry to Disrupt the Peace

"Amina Cain's diligence, patience, and clarity of vision are unparalleled. This is a writer profoundly aware of the impact and import of silence. Her sentences echo long after they’ve landed on the page. Keep your eyes peeled for Indelicacy." ―Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, author of Call Me Zebra

"Indelicacy is a novel like the tolling of a great bell. It will move your heart. Amina Cain's writing is the rarest kind: it creates not only new scenes and characters, but new feelings." ―Sofia Samatar, author of Winged Histories

"I was spellbound by Amina Cain’s Indelicacy, partly because it is a lucid novel about human relationships, the soul, art, and change; partly because it is an intelligent yet raw tale about what ruptures are required to grow room for oneself; partly because of its witty juxtaposition of good and bad; but mostly because it is deeply original, like nothing I've ever read before." ― Gunnhild Øyehaug, author of Wait, Blink

--This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

Product details

ASIN : B07RZFD9Z9
Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux (February 11, 2020)
Publication date : February 11, 2020
Language : English
File size : 2668 KB
Text-to-Speech : Enabled
Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
X-Ray : Enabled
Word Wise : Enabled
Print length : 178 pages
Lending : Not Enabled

Best Sellers Rank: #471,244 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #4,162 in Women's Literary Fiction
- #5,474 in Women's New Adult & College Fiction
- #6,923 in Contemporary Literary Fiction

Customer Reviews:
101 ratings

Customer reviews

5 star		36%
4 star		21%
3 star		24%
2 star		6%
1 star		13%

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Top reviews from the United States

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Mindo'ermatter

Hoped I Might Like It More---But?

Reviewed in the United States on February 11, 2020

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This book had so much potential, but I'm still not sure where it went. Strange!

Vitoria, the novel's major character, gives a first-person account of a segment of her life. Written as a personal introspection, she descibes details of her life's progression from an art museum's cleaning woman, discovered by a wealthy professional man who "rescued" her from a life of drudgery and near poverty to become his wife and matron of a large household with servants.

In a true pygmalion style, she describes her sudden joy with wealth and privilege along with her blissful joys of early marriage. A lover of the art where she once worked, she now returns as a lady patron to enjoy them, study them, and begins to write her feelings about them. She wants to become a writer, an author.

The nontraditional, nonchaptered structure of the narrative is a cross between a stream of consciousness and entries in a journal. The plotline is somewhat mysterious and ambiguous, while retaining a personal confessional of sorts, describing her newly found freedoms and individual development as a free thinker and master of her own soul. However, other than her passion for writing--- not shared by her husband---she soon loses her sense of life's wonders and opportunities. Never learning what her husband actually does professionally, she soon tires of his routine affections and his introducing her to many new experiences available to the wealthy. She describes her changing attitudes and perspectives, growing increasingly disillusioned and disappointed with others and herself until she knowingly creates the circumstances that end her marriage. Free at last, she faces an unknown future, but joyfully eager for her new beginning.

I enjoyed the author's skillful descriptions and irregular plotline, as Vitoria grows into becoming someone she detests and eventually rejects. This self-discovery narration generates a loss of self-worth and intrapersonal conflicts, reminiscent of Camus, Sartre, or Kafka, emphasizing dysfunctional and self-destructive behaviors. I wanted Vitoria to thrive, develop, and succeed, but found her increasing self-absorption and pettiness disappointing.

This thought-provoking short read, was both engaging and yet somewhat senseless, while portraying a woman given opportunities but without the training and structure to truly develop herself into something she and others might value and respect.

The author's storytelling deliberately avoids telling the setting of the story or the time period of these experiences, other than being in a large metropolitan area with many cultural opportunities. It seems many of the paintings described are owned by the Met in New York, but never explicitly described.

The Audible narration was effective for this shorter work, while not elaborating more about the author's storyline intensions.

It made me think and reflect deeply, but although generally pleased with the reading experience, I was left not fully satisfied.

26 people found this helpful

Helpful

Redsetter

It's An Existential Allegory

Reviewed in the United States on February 17, 2020

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I see INDELICACY as an Existential allegory specifically directed toward women imprisoned by class, marriage, local custom, art, and life itself. The tale takes place outside of time and place. The narrator takes a middling position between her two girlfriends who could be seen as her past and future, or perhaps, and also, her id and her ego. When the sullen maid, Solange, enters the picture (straight out of Genet's "The Maids") and calls the mistress-of-the-house "Madame," I knew I'd finish in one sitting. Other readers will be enticed by other allusions. I identified with the narrator from the beginning.
One comment in the New York Times derisively subtitles the book "Cinderella Finds her Mojo." I can see that, but there's so much more. You can read it on many levels. It's Pilgrim's Progress without the God, The Handmaid's Tale without the State. The narrator writes simply and claims she dropped out of a philosophy course. I think the story finds its best home in the reader's own mind. You'll get from it what you're willing to bring to it. That can be said about most experiences.

11 people found this helpful

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Katherine Cameron

An Un-Book

Reviewed in the United States on February 24, 2020

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I read a novel in order to get inside a character and a setting and story - through the power of words that "show" rather than "tell". This book lacks every feature of a good novel. The main character and narrator is flat, emotionless, and utterly uninteresting. The setting largely revolves around boring, literal descriptions of paintings in a museum, and clothes the narrator puts on or gives to others for different occasions. The story comes forward in a flat, emotionless way. There is almost no inflection. Even when the narrator occasionally has a strange outburst, she just recites the mean-spirited words without any feeling whatsoever. Autism comes to mind - or some other kind of emotionally detached state. Sex is referenced but never felt or described. Very very weird. I couldn't tell you what this book was about and I don't really care.

6 people found this helpful

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Amazon Customer

Thank God It’s Short!

Reviewed in the United States on February 21, 2020

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I am sure coastal elite intellectuals will enjoy bragging to each other about how much they fell for this weird piece of writing. A reasonably interesting story line, but the one word I will always use to describe it is simply — weird.

7 people found this helpful

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Lisa Moro

Strange book

Reviewed in the United States on March 18, 2020

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It read like poetry in an odd confused incomplete sort of way.

3 people found this helpful

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GAYANE TOROSYAN

Garbage

Reviewed in the United States on April 26, 2020

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I am not sure why The New Yorker praised this author, but the book was total garbage. Reading it felt like a nightmare with no point whatsoever.

2 people found this helpful

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Criticalthinker

A complete miss

Reviewed in the United States on February 15, 2020

Trite, poorly conceived and derivative. This book was a slapped-together pastiche of Chick Lit tropes. I will give the author credit for writing the occasional well-crafted line, but those are rare as hens’ teeth. I finished this short, “lite” book (more novella than novel) even though I was hate reading for most of it. Why? Because I was trying to figure out why it was published, and was even lauded by some reviewers. I assume that the publisher hopes to latch onto (monetize) the Female Angst action stirred up by “The Handmaid’s Tale” tv series, and the #MeToo movement. If that’s the road that brought you to this book, I’d advise you to skip this trifle and read go read Margaret Atwood. Or Virginia Woolf. Or Jean Rhys. Or any of the many woman writers who captured the process of a woman finding her true identity.

This book made me furious, and then I got even more annoyed that I had been angered by something I should have brushed off as trivial. What got to me is how much this talks down to women. Who thinks this drivel is what we want to read? The author never met a metaphor she didn’t like, and that writing crutch soon grates. Example (possibly slightly paraphrased because I don’t have the book in front of me): “My notebook lay beneath the tree, like a fallen leaf. Someone would step on it, probably my husband.” Gag me with a cliche.

18 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

Ralph Blumenau

Too idiosyncretic for my taste

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 29, 2020

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The story is narrated by Vitoria, though we do not learn her name until two-thirds of the way through the book. When it opens, she is a cleaner in art gallery of a museum. She tells us nothing about her early life, or how she came to have such a lowly job, when she had such intellectual interests. She reads a lot, and, more importantly, writes a lot – not for publication, but to record in her notebooks her thoughts, observations, imaginations and descriptions of paintings. The names of the paintings are never given, though one reviewer thinks they are probably at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. What Vitoria writes is often enigmatic and stream-of-consciousness (actually too jerky to deserve the name of stream), and often makes no sense to me. (Nor does the book's title.)

Very early on we learnt that she married a very wealthy husband – who is never named, nor do we know anything about his work. There is one brief mention of their uneventful first meeting, but we learn nothing about any kind of courtship that preceded the marriage. She now lives a life that is very comfortable and, as she herself recognizes, is decadent. She lacks for nothing material; her husband takes her on exotic holidays, and, in the beginning, sex is the best part of their relationship. She has her own room in which to write – though her husband does not believe that she, or, for that matter, any woman, can really write. There is a servant, Solange, with whom Vitoria tries to make human contact – but Solange rebuffs this, and their relationship becomes uneasy and even hostile.

There is actually less about Vitoria’s husband than there is about two of her friends: Antoinette, her fellow-cleaner at the Museum, and Dana, whom she met at a ballet school Vitoria had joined. She had lost touch with Antoinette for two years after Vitoria had left; but when they met again, Antoinette was married, was deeply in love with her husband, and was expectant – whereas Vitoria’s marriage had become arid: she did not want children, and no longer had sex with her husband. In fact, she now wanted her marriage to end, but hoped, for financial reasons, that it would be her husband rather than she who would end it. In a grotesque way, she actually achieved this: her husband asked her to leave, and, yes, he would provide for her.

The novella has its moments; but I did not enjoy it. Vitoria’s account – and especially the writings in her notebooks - frequently skitter around so inconsequentially and sometime so incomprehensibly that I was exasperated by it.

Ashley H

Stunning - a must read

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 6, 2020

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I couldn't recommend this book enough, it's magical. It immediately pulls you into a world that is as mysterious as it is intriguing. have already bought a second copy to lend out in my bid to get more people to read this!

2 people found this helpful

suekitty13

A very thoughtful, unhurried story that felt like it had a lot to say

Reviewed in Canada on February 11, 2020

Vitória works as a cleaner in a museum. She cleans the bathrooms and polishes the benches but during her breaks she gazes at the art pieces and dreams. She writes her impressions of the paintings in a notebook which she never really intends for anyone to read. She writes because it makes her happy and helps her feel fulfilled in some way. There is something beautiful about escaping from everyday life through art, either as an observer or as an artist. She leaves the drudgery and dreariness of her work behind through her writing, and when she marries rich she literally leaves it behind. While I’m not sure I entirely grasped the messaging of this book I do think that the idea of art as transformative was a part of it. That is a concept I completely support. Vitória wasn’t a likable character but she was in some ways an understandable character and this made her feel like a real person. I didn’t personally connect with her but I could relate to her feelings about the paintings. This was a very thoughtful, unhurried story that felt like it had a lot to say, but for me the significance was anything but clear.

Thank you to Farrar, Straus and Giroux for providing an Electronic Advance Reader Copy via NetGalley for review.