The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 15 August 2022
by Amina Cain
This short, spare, almost impressionist novel spans a few years in the life of our protagonist, a woman named Vitória (whose name we don't learn until three quarters of the way through the book). She is enraptured by art, writing and ballet. For the moment, she is also employed as a cleaner of a large art museum in the unnamed city in which she lives. Her work gives her an almost unique opportunity to gaze upon great works of art, alone and quiet. From this experience, she writes detailed descriptions of her experience with the art. She writes and aspires to personal accomplishment with her writing, though, beyond the writing on art, we do not learn just exactly what she is writing (except perhaps this book itself?).
Our protagonist does have one friend, a fellow museum cleaner. And eventually she marries a wealthy man, also unnamed throughout the book. This marriage allows her to leave her job and to spend her time viewing art and ballet performances. It frees her to do her writing, but she must do it without her husband's attention, as he belittles her aspirations, expecting her instead to serve as an ornament to his own success. So, she goes from the restrictions of poverty and loneliness to the restrictions of a constrained married life. All the while she aspires to her writing, to making at least one or two friends, and living a life authentic to her dreams. Inevitably, this leads to just the sort of conflict between freedom and domestic constraint as one would expect once embarked on this story. Cain's story is a fimiliar tale of social constraints, particularly those experienced by women and in opposition to their personal freedom and aspirations. Her writing is spare and episodic but curiously hypnotic as well. Its setting in both time and place is uncertain enough that it could reside almost anywhere in the past century and a half (though for some reason this reader felt it seemed to take place in Canada in the middle of the 20th century). The book has a dreamy, artsy feel and is well worth the attention.