![]() ![]() ![]() In an essay published on The Paris Review Daily in 2013, Cain writes that a novel can be like a landscape painting. Yet her direct, transparent language, interspersed with quotations from writers like Jean Rhys, Jean Genet, and Octavia Butler, makes the novel feel contemporary as well. The narrator’s struggle to build a life that is both creative and ethical takes place in the atmosphere of the nineteenth century, among candlelit parlors and carriages in the snow. When she marries a wealthy man, she obtains the leisure to write, but she also finds that her new privileges bring their own dangers and constraints. Like Clarice Lispector and Marguerite Duras, two writers Cain admires, she uses language to go to the heart of things, unafraid to twist it, deform it, or chop it off in search of a way to express experience, most often the experience of women, and especially women who write.Ĭain’s debut novel, Indelicacy (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020), concerns a woman who works as a cleaner at a museum, and wants to transform herself into a writer. Her two collections of short fiction, I Go to Some Hollow (Les Figues, 2009) and Creature (Dorothy, 2013), offer tiny, crystalline worlds where strange relationships unfold in spare, unforgettable prose. Amina Cain is an architect of the sentence. ![]()
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