![]() ![]() Her narratives often stop abruptly, as if reaching the edge of a canvas beyond them a wider world-of romances upended, friendships under strain, a cousin slapped across the face-is evoked but not always explained. The strange, arresting stories in her books Creature (2013) and I Go to Some Hollow (2009) are compressed the way a painting is compressed, framed the way a painting is framed. ![]() Read enough of Cain and her question, oblique at first, begins to resonate. ![]() What about a painting is the story meant to be compared to? Its elements of color, space, line, or texture? Its qualities of flatness or iconicity, fixity or plasticity? Is the painting abstract or figurative? Even though I’m a writer, it’s not always language I’m drawn to.” In an interview with fellow writer Renee Gladman, Cain presents her fixation as a question: “Can a story be like a painting?” The question, phrased as it is, can be interpreted variously. Or maybe it’s that my mind has gone more and more toward these fictional visions. “Whenever I read a novel,” she begins, “narrative has been impressing itself more and more visually in my mind. In her essay “Something Has Brought Me Here,” Amina Cain, the author of two story collections and now the novel Indelicacy, speaks of her preoccupation with the affinities between landscape painting and literature. ![]()
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