Indelicacy

              by Amina Cain

                    My rating 4/5 stars

What does a person do when she has too much of herself.

“I see myself then, a figure in the street, walking to the museum. To look out from my window and see myself like that. Moving in and out of experience.”

A state of trance. Almost. Looking at things, looking within. Seeing oneself looking at those things.

Vitoria watches herself like a figure walking in the street, looking at paintings and dances and faces of friends. What she sees, she captures into words. Writing, even if it is only meant for herself.

The experience of reflecting at art and the subsequent emotions is subjective. Rarely does it have a place for notions of others. And when the art transcends living, its exploration turn still more solitary, the rest obscured from view. Or not deliberately looked at because it’s unnecessary. Quite a hindrance really.

In this uncanny and yet bewitching novel, Cain explores a mind so entranced by the idea of seeing oneself as still in the constantly shifting and moving world that the rest ceases to be significant. Though Vitoria’s carefully plotted act of estranging herself from her husband in such a way that it ensures a comfortable living for her, because of her otherwise meager means, presents a contradiction with this idea of stillness.

The impulse of looking at oneself looking at the world found a home in me, my reveries at times resembling that trance like state and perhaps even striving, like Vitoria, to be able to hold them longer. It may be vain an exercise, still it brings a heightened sense of being alive, of somehow being more conscious of our passage through this life.