In Amina Cain's first nonfiction book, a series of essayistic inquiries come together to form a sustained meditation on writers and their works, on the spaces of reading and writing fiction, and how these spaces take shape inside a life.
Fragments of moving image, performance art, paintings, etchings, and prints materialize and dissipate, and a dialogue between these impressions opens up like a portal of ambiences, coming into focus yet remaining out of grasp ... In some ways this book functions as a gallery of interiority, deep and fluctuating with nebular dispositions and impulses. It is an effort towards articulating the intangible ... a transmutation of fiction and nonfiction, a form of unfurling, soft and grainy at the edges. Moving through this text feels like resting your eyes on shifting shapes on a walk in the dusk ... She moves with an illuminating ease between personal observation, art criticism, and fragments of memoir ... Cain introduces the reader to the landscapes of her own mind; 'I have always carried warmth into the cold.' She writes into the tension between hostile environments and soothing anchors, moments that hover between jeopardy and safety ... a meditative tuning into the sensual experience of being, possibly in multiple places at once; a porous present that has a synesthetic fluidity ... Her prose evokes the textures of visual art in the way it sustains tension and ambiguity ... Occasionally, Cain’s sentences peter out with an idiosyncratic wittering, what seems like a red herring in her own prose, an aside. Cain’s writing is so precise I wonder if this is one of the places she hides things ... ignites a yearning to move in the darkness towards the unknown, to write into the particularities and into the ether.
A chain of images moving fast, compiled to create a heightened, artful experience for the reader ... The book is, at best, a journal where Cain is trying to figure out how to write her next novel.
Overwhelmingly, this book gave me an impression of obfuscation ... The constant referencing of other art (a frustrating and prevalent issue with women’s intellectual non-fiction writing at the moment), hypothetical questions... and unrelenting distance of self... left me unsatisfied and adrift ... There are little glimpses of Cain, but mostly they’re too safe to actually tell us anything.
