Genet spawned The Maids out of a true and violent story-it’s intriguing to consider what Cain might make from sturdier material. It couldn’t have been written in the past it’s set in, yet it also doesn’t draw much from the time in which it appears. Indelicacy, by Amina Cain 'Though Indelicacy does not announce itself as autofiction, it shares with autofiction what I find to be the most fundamental aspects of the genre: the act of writing becomes inextricable from the story being told.' Natalie Bakopoulos reviews Amina Cain's debut novel. Indelicacy moves beyond the ideas of A Room of One’s Own, as Cain reveals that Vitria’s intellectual freedom is found not in the writing room she is afforded, but by escaping the upwardly mobile class trajectory and opting out of cultured society altogether. Indelicacy makes a tacit claim as a feminist fable, in which Vitória attempts to carve out room for herself without either submitting to or being complicit in exploitation-but the book’s very ease makes it slight against its much darker lineage. Indelicacy by Amina Cain (ebook) 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 cla. Meanwhile the social constraints that serve here as Cain’s artistic ones also feel too filmy and indistinct to sustain the requisite tension. Vitória lacks the stark self-pity of Jean Rhys’s heroines or the swooning, spiritual intensity of Clarice Lispector’s, and Cain doesn’t manage the magic trick accomplished by those predecessors, in which a mind becomes the world and all outside it vanishes. Cain’s sentences are elegant and often suspenseful, but the narrative can’t fulfill the promise of their strangeness. Indelicacy Amina Cain Buy Now Indiebound Publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux Date FebruFiction Literary A woman aspiring to a contemplative life faces innumerable obstaclescultural, financial, sexual, and metaphysicalthat stand between her and the freedom to live as she desires.

These references, though they impart the odd frisson, invite unflattering comparisons.

Indelicacy cain