Perhaps knowing the exact setting is secondary to the narrator’s commentary on her alienation from her former working class life of scrimping savings, as well as her new role entertaining stuffy, upper-crust company, indulging financial excess and unwittingly relying on hired help herself to mind house. It feels Victorian in its depictions of high-societal obligations, romanticized locales and pigeon-holed, patriarchal expectations yet the protagonist buying whatever she pleases and roaming away from her materially doting but emotionally unsupportive husband is a freedom more likely enjoyed in modern times. The world here isn’t, and maybe even refuses to be, defined by a specific time period or geographical location, and resides in a “Twilight Zone” of ambiguous existence. Amina Cain’s Indelicacy is a slim, spare read that, like its main character, aspires to say a lot but steeps its messages deep into a descriptive vagueness that it expects readers to decipher.
A cleaning woman at a museum is swept into a moneyed marriage that provides the relished luxury to devote herself to writing, only to feel similarly constrained within social norms and a loveless union.
0 kommentar(er)
