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. (From the book blurb) My thoughts: 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. Comments are closed.
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