Turns out that the very elements in fiction that Cain may be avoiding – detail, personality, conflict – are the things that make such iconic scenes from novels (and films) last in our minds for ever. But that ultimately makes A Horse at Night light reading, so light that it puts you to sleep. The endgame here is to create an otherworldly, romantic feeling about reading: a positive experience that is devoid of too many plot details, personality, or conflict. She has lost friends over reading Ferrante she is worried that the internet is turning novelists into corporations.

And we read along with her as she reads in solitude or to relax reads to project or reads yearning for a second place to inhabit. The opening scene of Rachel Cusk’s Arlington Park in which it rains in a London suburb for five pages… The sea in southern Spain in Deborah Levy’s Hot Milk in which the narrator, Sofia, is stung by jellyfish… The intimate darkness of Borges’s short story A Dialogue About a Dialogue, in which two characters sit chatting in a room, forgetting to switch on the lamp… Cain asks us not to merely read fiction, but to watch it unfurl on the page.īy publicly thinking through a chain-link of scenes written by the likes of Cusk, as well as Marguerite Duras, Elena Ferrante and Jean Genet, Cain explores the many lives she has led privately as a reader. The endgame here is to create an otherworldly, romantic feeling about reading

It is taken from a Renee Gladman book of the same name, but Cain cannot remember what it was about. The word in the book that describes best what Cain is trying to evoke in the reader is “picture-feeling”. What remains is the reader alone with these visions. The narrators and the backstories of these novels, paintings and films are made to disappear. Before plot, before dialogue, before anything else.” The images shift from settings by the ocean, to night-time, to freezing winters, to the natural world. “It’s not always language I’m drawn to first,” she writes. The essay is a chain of images moving fast, compiled to create a heightened, artful experience for the reader. Now she has written a book-length essay where she reads fiction, (and watches cinema, and stares at paintings) not for the value of the stories they tell, but for the landscapes they portray. Two years ago, she wrote a remarkable novel, Indelicacy, about a cleaner in an art museum wanting to produce art herself.

Amina Cain’s first foray into nonfiction, A Horse at Night, is no different. B ooks about reading other books are a genre where the act of reading is always, unfailingly, romanticised.

Amina cain