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A Horse at Night: On Writing
A virtuosic meditation on literature and life in the tradition of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own and William H. Gass’s On Being Blue.
“Without planning it, I wrote a diary of sorts. Lightly. A diary of fiction. Or is that not what this is?”
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. Driven by primary questions of authenticity and freedom in the shadow of ecological and social collapse, A Horse at Night: On Writing moves associatively through a personal canon of authors—including Marguerite Duras, Elena Ferrante, Renee Gladman, and Virginia Woolf—and topics as timely and various as female friendships, zazen meditation, neighborhood coyotes, landscape painting, book titles, and the politics of excess. Amina Cain’s first nonfiction book is an individual reckoning with the contemporary moment and a quietly brilliant contribution to the lineage of Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own or William H. Gass’s On Being Blue, books that are virtuosic arguments for—and beautiful demonstrations of—the essential unity of writing and life.
“Without planning it, I wrote a diary of sorts. Lightly. A diary of fiction. Or is that not what this is?”
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. Driven by primary questions of authenticity and freedom in the shadow of ecological and social collapse, A Horse at Night: On Writing moves associatively through a personal canon of authors—including Marguerite Duras, Elena Ferrante, Renee Gladman, and Virginia Woolf—and topics as timely and various as female friendships, zazen meditation, neighborhood coyotes, landscape painting, book titles, and the politics of excess. Amina Cain’s first nonfiction book is an individual reckoning with the contemporary moment and a quietly brilliant contribution to the lineage of Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own or William H. Gass’s On Being Blue, books that are virtuosic arguments for—and beautiful demonstrations of—the essential unity of writing and life.
136 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2022
103 people are currently reading
9826 people want to read
About the author
Amina Cain
9 books296 followersAmina Memory Cain is the author of the novel Indelicacy, a New York Times Editors’ Choice and staff pick at the Paris Review, published in February 2020 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, and two collections of short fiction, Creature, out with Dorothy, a publishing project, and I Go To Some Hollow, with Les Figues Press. Her writing has appeared in Granta, The Paris Review Daily, n+1, BOMB, Full Stop, the Believer Logger, and other places.
She has also co-curated literary events, such as When Does It or You Begin?, a month long festival of writing, performance, and video at Links Hall in Chicago, Both Sides and The Center, a summer festival of readings and performances enacting various levels of proximity, intimacy, and distance at the MAK Center/Schindler House in West Hollywood, and the Errata Salon, a talk/lecture series at Betalevel in Los Angeles’ Chinatown.
She lives in Los Angeles and is a literature contributing editor at BOMB. You can sometimes find her online on Twitter (@aminamemory) & Instagram (@amina_memory).
She has also co-curated literary events, such as When Does It or You Begin?, a month long festival of writing, performance, and video at Links Hall in Chicago, Both Sides and The Center, a summer festival of readings and performances enacting various levels of proximity, intimacy, and distance at the MAK Center/Schindler House in West Hollywood, and the Errata Salon, a talk/lecture series at Betalevel in Los Angeles’ Chinatown.
She lives in Los Angeles and is a literature contributing editor at BOMB. You can sometimes find her online on Twitter (@aminamemory) & Instagram (@amina_memory).
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June 29, 2024
‘I write to see what is inside my mind,’ author Amina Cain tells us in her non-fiction work A Horse at Night: On Writing’, adding that ‘for me, it is often far better, healthier, than recording what I know is already there.’ This exquisitely gorgeous and insightful little volume is her ‘diary of fiction,’ being both a look at the craft of writing and reading as well as reflections on her own life. A short but powerful little book, I found this to be as illuminating as it was intoxicating to read, enhanced by reading it alongside Cain’s novella Indelicacy which was written around the same time. The interplay of both books was an exciting experience seeing both theory and practice of the ideas expressed here, particularly the ways she examines the question ‘How can a detail be urgent and at the same time concealed?’ or her statement that ‘For me, fiction is a space of plainness and excess.’ Brimming with insights and adding multiple books to my to-read list, A Horse at Night is a sublime investigation into the visual qualities and details of language and simply a beautiful book on writing.
‘A novel can and should hold different registers of feeling and experience at once, and from that something new can emerge.’
Dorothy Project never lets me down and this was another big hit for me. When I first opened this book, inspired by zeynep’s amazing review, my eyes were drawn to this passage: ‘Again and again in novel after novel, plot gets in the way of detail. It destroys the dream.’ As someone who prefers small, quiet novels that really allow the details to shine brightest and amalgamate into something greater than the sum of their parts, I knew this was an authorial mind I needed to investigate and launched into a serene few days reading this as well as Indelicacy (read my review here). Along with Cain’s own insights on her writing, she imbues her examinations with those of other writers as well as critical analysis of their works. Elena Ferrante’s The Lost Daughter or The Ravishing of Lol Stein by Marguerite Duras are examined most at length, but I enjoyed seeing her takes on authors like Annie Ernaux—who she writes ‘does obsession and jealous very well’ and her ‘sentences are a series of hits or punches’, something I strongly agree with. I really appreciated seeing lesser known works I was excited to discover we both have read and enjoyed like the atmospheric The Weak Spot by Lucie Elven or the works of Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi. Basically, this book will make you excited about reading and make you want to read everything she mentions (I’ve already read Self-Portrait in Green based on this book).
‘Perhaps solitude is a practice as much as an instinct, its pleasures very much contextual. Sometimes being alone is terrible.’
Cain’s discussions on solitude really soothed my weary soul, and are key to the narrative in Indelicacy. As someone who has two jobs that involve being interrupted constantly and a busy life outside work where there are always multiple parties vying for my attention, sometimes it is easy to lose sight of yourself in it all. Which is something Cain really speaks on, though she also discusses how we need others in our lives and to be around other ideas, minds, and that connection is a big part of what makes life worth living. I think she says it best here:
On the flip side, she also writes:
Speaking of the novel Indelicacy, I found her ideas on the way she embeds visual images into the sparseness of her sentences to be very interesting to consider when reading her novel. She has excellent passages on how reading is very much a visual experience, which is why open spaces like reading facing a field or a beach is so rewarding because we can project our ideas out onto them. She also discusses authors like Renee Gladman who she says ‘enters the space of [language], taking the reader with her,’ and there are some excellent insights into writers who pull us through ‘to the other side’ where both the work and we, the reader, are transformed by it. Ekphrasis is another element Cain really enjoys, which appears in her novels as well, and I quite liked her section on A.S. Byatt discussing Honoré de Balzac’s use of ekphrasis that ‘he makes the whole thing ghostly by making it live,’ which Cain continues with her look at ‘letting the portrait walk.’ Cain looks at writing very much like putting paint onto a canvas and her execution of these ideas was quite lovely to see.
For Cain, details are the most interesting. ‘I’ve mostly been paying attention to things we could say are “acessories” to [novels], not to what we would say is crucial,’ she says, but demonstrates how ‘an impression can be just as important as meaning.’ How true. When we think of a novel we love, often it is a small scene or tiny detail that really wedges into our hearts and minds and its these tiny impressions we turn back to again and again. Its like when you are drunk and trying to explain why you like something and some seemingly minute and absurd detail suddenly takes on a universe of meaning in your heart. Cain understands this and expresses it so eloquently that her words here have become one of those tiny details that will stick with me.
Cain tells us that she is ‘attached to fiction,’ and as someone else who would admit that about myself, I found this to be such a rewarding little read. I love her thoughts on writing, and animals (which comes up a lot, tying back into a discussion on Sigrid Nunez’s The Friend), and this definitely made me think about why I appreciate quiet, interior novels. Keep a pen close at hand when reading too, I was constantly underlining amazing sentences. Amina Cain can WRITE. This is certainly a book I will be thinking about for a long time because, as Cain writes, ‘when one closes a book it doesn’t mean the feeling of the book closes too.’
5/5
‘A novel can and should hold different registers of feeling and experience at once, and from that something new can emerge.’
Dorothy Project never lets me down and this was another big hit for me. When I first opened this book, inspired by zeynep’s amazing review, my eyes were drawn to this passage: ‘Again and again in novel after novel, plot gets in the way of detail. It destroys the dream.’ As someone who prefers small, quiet novels that really allow the details to shine brightest and amalgamate into something greater than the sum of their parts, I knew this was an authorial mind I needed to investigate and launched into a serene few days reading this as well as Indelicacy (read my review here). Along with Cain’s own insights on her writing, she imbues her examinations with those of other writers as well as critical analysis of their works. Elena Ferrante’s The Lost Daughter or The Ravishing of Lol Stein by Marguerite Duras are examined most at length, but I enjoyed seeing her takes on authors like Annie Ernaux—who she writes ‘does obsession and jealous very well’ and her ‘sentences are a series of hits or punches’, something I strongly agree with. I really appreciated seeing lesser known works I was excited to discover we both have read and enjoyed like the atmospheric The Weak Spot by Lucie Elven or the works of Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi. Basically, this book will make you excited about reading and make you want to read everything she mentions (I’ve already read Self-Portrait in Green based on this book).
‘Perhaps solitude is a practice as much as an instinct, its pleasures very much contextual. Sometimes being alone is terrible.’
Cain’s discussions on solitude really soothed my weary soul, and are key to the narrative in Indelicacy. As someone who has two jobs that involve being interrupted constantly and a busy life outside work where there are always multiple parties vying for my attention, sometimes it is easy to lose sight of yourself in it all. Which is something Cain really speaks on, though she also discusses how we need others in our lives and to be around other ideas, minds, and that connection is a big part of what makes life worth living. I think she says it best here:
‘To be in favor of solitude is not to be against community or friendship or love. It’s not that being alone is better, just that without the experience of it we block ourselves from discovering something enormously beneficial, perhaps even vital, to selfhood. Who are you when you are not a friend, a partner, a lover, a sibling, a parent, a child? When no one is with you, what do you do, and do you do it differently than if someone was there? It’s hard to see someone fully when another person is always attached to them. More importantly, it’s hard for us to see our own selves if we’re not ever alone.’
On the flip side, she also writes:
‘Too much time alone is just as risky as not enough, for it allows us to sink into our cyclical patterns of thought and narrative. We need someone to hold up a mirror so we can see who we are when we are taken outside of our heads. We need to hear others’ thoughts too.’
Speaking of the novel Indelicacy, I found her ideas on the way she embeds visual images into the sparseness of her sentences to be very interesting to consider when reading her novel. She has excellent passages on how reading is very much a visual experience, which is why open spaces like reading facing a field or a beach is so rewarding because we can project our ideas out onto them. She also discusses authors like Renee Gladman who she says ‘enters the space of [language], taking the reader with her,’ and there are some excellent insights into writers who pull us through ‘to the other side’ where both the work and we, the reader, are transformed by it. Ekphrasis is another element Cain really enjoys, which appears in her novels as well, and I quite liked her section on A.S. Byatt discussing Honoré de Balzac’s use of ekphrasis that ‘he makes the whole thing ghostly by making it live,’ which Cain continues with her look at ‘letting the portrait walk.’ Cain looks at writing very much like putting paint onto a canvas and her execution of these ideas was quite lovely to see.
For Cain, details are the most interesting. ‘I’ve mostly been paying attention to things we could say are “acessories” to [novels], not to what we would say is crucial,’ she says, but demonstrates how ‘an impression can be just as important as meaning.’ How true. When we think of a novel we love, often it is a small scene or tiny detail that really wedges into our hearts and minds and its these tiny impressions we turn back to again and again. Its like when you are drunk and trying to explain why you like something and some seemingly minute and absurd detail suddenly takes on a universe of meaning in your heart. Cain understands this and expresses it so eloquently that her words here have become one of those tiny details that will stick with me.
Cain tells us that she is ‘attached to fiction,’ and as someone else who would admit that about myself, I found this to be such a rewarding little read. I love her thoughts on writing, and animals (which comes up a lot, tying back into a discussion on Sigrid Nunez’s The Friend), and this definitely made me think about why I appreciate quiet, interior novels. Keep a pen close at hand when reading too, I was constantly underlining amazing sentences. Amina Cain can WRITE. This is certainly a book I will be thinking about for a long time because, as Cain writes, ‘when one closes a book it doesn’t mean the feeling of the book closes too.’
5/5
November 1, 2022
The danger with books about books is that you are filled with the insatiable urge to read more books. I don’t know if this book would be enjoyable to those who aren’t devouring books constantly, but for those that do, A Horse at Night is candy.
June 28, 2024
This was a deeply disorienting read for me. You have to understand. When Indelicacy came out close to the same time as my novel Chouette and when i read it i felt an instantaneous connection with the language. I felt Amina Cain must write very similarly to the way I write, and must read like I read, and maybe even think how I think. Now I’ve read this book and even though I’ve read almost all the same books mentioned here, and seen exhibits of the same artists as Amina Cain writes about, I mostly felt how wrong I’d been about thinking I had any understanding this person apart from her novel, my connection was very strong with the words on the page but it seemed to me that how those words got there, and what the author thought about while composing them—how she writes— was completely foreign to me. The way she connects with language in other authors’ novels is also so different from me. It’s like we’re doing completely different things when we read. So here we are, we humans, making do with the same symbolic languages, the alphabets and the shapes of sounds we make, thinking there is something of a sameness between what is said/written and what is heard/understood, but maybe that understanding is just the frailest thread the connects us and we nod our heads and say we understand. Or something like that.
July 16, 2022
“I am thinking now of a particular time in my life, in Chicago, when I began to meet the people who would become some of the best friends I had ever known. With a few, we announced how much we liked each other before we had spent much time together. This made me nervous. What if when we did spend time it didn’t go well? What if one of us got bored? But we didn’t get bored, or at least if we ever got bored we didn’t mind it. We went on to become people who knew each other, who liked each other as much as we had from the beginning. Some of these friendships expanded beyond the traditional borders, without altering the original feeling they had held. It was one of the few times I’ve experienced intimacy without grasping.”
January 10, 2023
don’t read this during a book buying ban✍🏻
December 1, 2024
Being a fan of Cain's 2020 novel Indelicacy, I thought I'd give this non-fiction follow-up a try. Accurately marketed as part "diary" and part "meditation" on the craft of fiction-writing, it's a slim volume with no real coherent structure except that the topic is usually books.
The tone is intellectual, but not necessarily snobbish or difficult to follow. It feels more like a high-brow, one-woman podcast at times than a typical book. That's not necessarily a bad thing.
By the end, I had written down a number of referenced titles to add to my TBR list. Cain's reading tastes seem to be as eccentric as mine, so I enjoyed her brief commentary on these a great deal.
While certainly this book will change no one's life or help them in any substantial way with the art of writing, I ultimately enjoyed it for the obscure book recommendations and as a literary palate cleanser.
The tone is intellectual, but not necessarily snobbish or difficult to follow. It feels more like a high-brow, one-woman podcast at times than a typical book. That's not necessarily a bad thing.
By the end, I had written down a number of referenced titles to add to my TBR list. Cain's reading tastes seem to be as eccentric as mine, so I enjoyed her brief commentary on these a great deal.
While certainly this book will change no one's life or help them in any substantial way with the art of writing, I ultimately enjoyed it for the obscure book recommendations and as a literary palate cleanser.
September 10, 2023
‘What if a work of fiction simply ended with pages and pages of descriptions of plants? If it doesn’t already exist, I think I must sit down and write it.’
Makes me wonder what ‘hoya’ (plants) Cain has in her ‘garden’ because (although I don’t do it anymore) I used to have a mad/stupid amount of ‘hoyas’ (because it’s (at least in my opinion/experience) a very ‘crazy plant person’ sort of plant to have; so when you get into it, you start to ‘exchange’ cuttings with other ‘crazy plant people’ (by post/mail too), and it can get really out of control if you’re not good enough at killing plants ‘naturally’?). Before I get carried away with plant ramblings, I will say that I enjoyed Cain’s writing/essays. And because of this, I am quite keen to read her novel, Indelicacy.
‘—but I find myself always returning to Clarice Lispector and Duras, and now Ferrante and Townsend Warner in my thinking, but also when I write, and I’ve realised that it might make sense to focus on them through writing for an extended period of time. It’s said that it only takes a few seconds for the body to tense up, but that to relax completely takes much longer, more like twenty minutes—Regardless, I also like reading these books because of the state of mind in which they put me.’
Cain introduced (other) ‘books’ to the readers so well without ‘carelessly’ spoiling it/them for prospective readers, and I really appreciate that. Enjoyed the book, mostly, but there’s just one thing that I would have preferred to be written differently. It’s so anal of me to feel this way, but I felt a bit annoyed about how she felt compelled to sort of be apologetic and guilty about her ‘love’ for solitude towards the end of the book. As if the two or more ‘loves’ cannot coexist? As if one love has to be suppressed in order to allow the progression/continuity of other ‘loves’ in her life (this is just my view of it, she probably meant well)? I just wanted her to be unbridled and aggressive about loving all that she loves.
‘One reads or writes a novel like one goes out to walk in the heat, or into the rain, to buy persimmons and butter.’
‘The flowers that look like bright yellow balls, with soft little pine tree-like leaves, are standing in their bucket of water, not far from a large bowl of tangerines—How could I not think of Lolly, especially in the blustery seasons? I was glad I left my commonplace desk. I went back to it with those images in my mind. For me, fiction is a space of plainness and of excess.’
But on the other hand I also completely understand why she had to sort of tone it down and ‘explain herself’ — and be like ‘I love solitude but I love the people I love too’ (which felt sort of unnecessarily cringey to me; but a better reader/someone who appreciates these sort of ‘sentimental’ superfluity might appreciate that more). I don’t want to quote or even talk about Benjamín Labatut so often, but (it’s inevitable? I do not want to go back to being the person I was before I read his writing/work — I don’t know how to explain it/this better; read his books if you’re curious) Labatut told a crowd of people at a literary festival once that his first thought when his daughter was ‘born’ (to loosely paraphrase everything except for the swearing as that’s basically lingua franca) — ‘what the fuck, I can never be fully alone now?! (with a completely serious face, with no ‘comic relief’ added afterwards)’ I love that he didn’t have to ‘explain’ that he actually ‘loves’ his daughter anyway or whatever. Explaining ‘love’, or more precisely to feel obligated to explain ‘love’ — is just not ‘it’? Because to me, it is (or should be (in my personal opinion that is)) self-explanatory.
‘I want to write with that kind of expansiveness, into one’s life and the landscape one is in. It is like a needle piercing the sky. Writing of spending time with one’s mother, the conversations they have in a spring that is really a late brutal winter, not understood by her mother at all. Loneliness on the moors, becoming Emily Brontë, ice and interiors, the house and the mind—in Carson’s writing. I admire it, and I feel so much when I read it, but how can I feel cradled in something so difficult? It’s the writing itself that does that, the details, the setting, the cutting through, taking off one’s clothes.’
If a writer mentions Carson or the Brontë I like best in a book, and also write about them well? Use them well? I wouldn’t know how to ‘not care’ or feel ‘indifferent’ about their book. Because I’ve read that particular Carson poem (basically stuck with it, in my head forever), it just makes reading Cain’s essays a little bit more layered and exciting for me, and I really like and appreciate that. Confessedly, I read Cain’s book twice. I postponed my written thoughts/review (for the first read) for too long as I felt like I needed to read it again quickly again (and I think I enjoyed it even more the second time).
‘Even though I’m a writer, it’s not always language I’m drawn to first. When I start writing a new story, I often begin with setting. Before plot, before dialogue, before anything else, I begin to see where a story will take place, and then I hear the narrative voice, which means that character is not far behind. Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about landscape painting and literature, and perhaps as an extension of this I have started to think through the idea of character and landscape as similar things, or at least as intimates, co-dependent.’
Even though I don’t fully share Cain’s views (above, as I’m definitely more drawn to ‘language’?) I think it’s beautiful the way she approaches ‘writing’. I’m definitely more ‘language’ obsessed; and I know this because I realised recently that I don’t watch many films (or at least specifically these recent years) even though I have a long mental list of films I really want to watch at some point (but for some reason never find enough ‘motivation’ to); and at least half of the films I’ve watched most recently were done essentially because of friendly/social reasons. But with books, the pull is just fucking irresistible? It’s far more addictive. Lydia Davis has a book on writing (which focuses a lot more on ‘language’ and ‘translation’) Essays Two: On Proust, Translation, Foreign Languages, and the City of Arles, and I think I can definitely read that a few more times just because I am but a little obsessed with it. I’m not necessarily saying that it’s a ‘better’ book than Cain’s (they’re quite different even though they talk about similar things), but I do strongly think that it would be a complementary reading to Cain’s.
‘To be in favour of solitude is not to be against community or friendship or love. It’s not that being alone is better, just that without the experience of it we block ourselves from discovering something enormously beneficial, perhaps even vital, to selfhood—It’s hard to see someone fully when another person is always attached to them. More importantly, it’s hard for us to see our own selves if we’re not ever alone.’
December 19, 2022
Sadly, a miss from Dorothy Project. A shaggy little book of writerly meditations, A Horse at Night lacks both the charm of a diary and the clarity of an essay collection. Cain treats her readers to self-evident musings on well-worn subjects, and she writes so seriously that it’s hard not to poke fun. On relaxation, Cain says:
Now that I have said so much about it, I’m thinking more about who gets to relax, and when, for it is a luxury. If you are someone who relaxes much of the time, maybe you should give some of it away.
On the Internet: I wonder if the Internet is shifting the borders of the self, or if the self is just filtered through it.
And on age: My loss of authenticity is related to change, to how, as I’ve gotten older, I seem to have become a different person.
I’m not sure whom these epiphanies are meant for. Some strike me as out-of-touch and underbaked (why write one page about selfhood and the Internet, a subject that has been/could be explored in such depth?); some strike me as just plain obvious (my god, relaxation is a luxury! Age changes us!) Cain might have made up for these deficiencies with an interesting style, but she describes her own writing as “plain and spare,” the equivalent of a “Shaker room.” Such descriptions are accurate; her prose feels repressed, bleached, scrubbed clean of the sort of language that might render her meanderings interesting.
It’s not exactly Cain’s fault for being who she is—white, a minimalist, interested in Zazen meditation, a collector of writer-friends, a serious visitor of galleries and viewer of very long art films, humorless, self-indulgent— but it is very true that I can’t stand her. I’m not sure how this one passed through so many hands at Dorothy.
Now that I have said so much about it, I’m thinking more about who gets to relax, and when, for it is a luxury. If you are someone who relaxes much of the time, maybe you should give some of it away.
On the Internet: I wonder if the Internet is shifting the borders of the self, or if the self is just filtered through it.
And on age: My loss of authenticity is related to change, to how, as I’ve gotten older, I seem to have become a different person.
I’m not sure whom these epiphanies are meant for. Some strike me as out-of-touch and underbaked (why write one page about selfhood and the Internet, a subject that has been/could be explored in such depth?); some strike me as just plain obvious (my god, relaxation is a luxury! Age changes us!) Cain might have made up for these deficiencies with an interesting style, but she describes her own writing as “plain and spare,” the equivalent of a “Shaker room.” Such descriptions are accurate; her prose feels repressed, bleached, scrubbed clean of the sort of language that might render her meanderings interesting.
It’s not exactly Cain’s fault for being who she is—white, a minimalist, interested in Zazen meditation, a collector of writer-friends, a serious visitor of galleries and viewer of very long art films, humorless, self-indulgent— but it is very true that I can’t stand her. I’m not sure how this one passed through so many hands at Dorothy.
March 29, 2023
I've been reading this book slowly over the last week or so, dipping in and out of it, contemplating Amina Cain's musings on writing, fiction, and our relationship to text. She has a lot of interesting ideas in this that are worth sitting with. It's written unlike anything I've read before, a sort of diary and essay collection, very fluid in themes and topics. She moves from talking about her own writing at times to pondering her favorite writers or stories. She looks at how we relate to the text through its 'accessories,' as she says, rather than strictly in form and style. I liked this. I would like to revisit it again someday, or read certain sections over again to continue to think about what she is saying. I also think it would be valuable to read some of the books she references in this that I have not read (though she is a Cusk and Ferrante fan so I pretty instantly felt on the same wavelength as her).
Read
January 29, 2025I like reading about someone writing and reading books. Maybe this strange inclination of mine is not a surprise for anyone here as we are a community of readers who literally read each others’ thoughts about books. However, many people find it irritating when the main character of a novel is a writer who does only one thing: sits, thinks and, well, write (or isn’t three things?). I gobble up such books. So this one should be totally up my stream. Designed as a selection of mini-essays and informal diary entries this is the work where the author comments on her life, her reading, her ambitions and desires as a writer.
Alas, it didn’t not quite deliver in my case. It is the one of very rare books I’ve read twice back to back for the only reason that i’ve started to seriously doubt myself in case i’ve missed the hidden layers of meaning so “lightweight” it seemed. It can happen that a book does not open itself to a reader straightaway. I’ve learned that for some books it is almost a requirement to read a few times.
Unfortunately for everyone involved, after the second reading, my opinion about the merits of this book have not changed. Generally I do not mind the spontaneity, a confessional tone or “unpolishness” of writing which would come with the territory of the diaries. In fact i often actively seek for such writing. But the pieces in this collection did not look unpolished. They just looked a bit unsubstantial. Not everything is for posterity in this world. I appreciate it. But many of my friends here on GR write much better essays in a similar gist. In fact i read them here everyday. Inevitably, I’ve been asking myself why this particular collection has been selected for a publication out of millions similar essays easily available on-line and even here on this site? But even if i skip this question, I’ve counted ten endorsements on the cover of this slim book and two more inside the covers including the ones from Claire-Lousie Bennett or Sara Baume. The work of those two i value. I have to admit that this praise has sold this book to me at the first place. How was this praised so highly and excessively by another writers? This I find puzzling. I am happy, however, for these questions to remain rhetorical.
Tastes differ of course as well as people’s motivation to read. So in what follows I’ve intentionally included quite a few quotes, more than i usually do. So there is a space for anyone reading this “report of my struggles” to make up their own mind based upon these quotes or to use it as a springboard to grab a copy of this book to form their own opinion.
Her personal observations are easily relatable. Some of them contain lively descriptions of places and situations. However, many of them lack a certain level of originality. Occasionally they are borderline trivial. I would lie if i said many of them did not trigger my sigh and even an occasional yawn. But they also has made me conscious that i might be an ungrateful reader lacking a sense of tact or ignoring the deeper layers of meaning. Struggling with those conflicting feelings, keeping sighing and having a silent dialogue with her, i’ve plowed through the following (she in “italics”, I - normal font):
“Reading is best but it’s nice to read in bed at the end of a long day, the darkness of the window meeting the soft light inside the room?” - Sigh.
“You take hold of your happiness and enjoy it when it is with you.” - A banality? Sigh.
“When another person is accompanying you they fill the space between you and certain kinds of experiences. It is important that not always happen. To be in favour of solitude is not to be against community or friendship or love.” - Yes. No conflict there. Does someone claim the opposite? Sigh.
“The women are all in repose, sitting or lying down. … They look healthy. When we are relaxed, we are healthy.” Sigh, sigh, sigh!
Among the social issues discussed was a problem of cat’s ownership and “toxic female friendship” as a form “an internalised patriarchy” as represented in Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend.
“It is unfortunate to use the word mine to a cat as a mark of ownership - yet I do.” And what conclusion am I as a reader supposed to make or how am I supposed to use this information? Is it supposed to be a revelatory, soul-searching auto-fictional confession or is it supposed to be a subtle critic of capitalism?
But her analysis of the female friendship in “My brilliant friend” has even stopped me sighing and made me speak loudly which was embarrassing considering I was in a cafe. This is her passage with my comments in [square brackets]:
That concluding sentence sounds like a patronising cliche containing two very loosely defined terms that do not further elaborate on the phenomena of friendship in the novel but make it sound like some commodified object. Personally, I am very much confused what is “toxic friendship”, how it differs from a “detoxic” one and why, on the top of that, only possible root of this “toxicity” is a patriarchy “internalised” or not. It might be possible that the author would be able to convince me if she would elaborate on those terms and their applicability to Lila and Elena’s situation in more extended way. Like that, in one sentence this discourse seems to be an unconvincing “performative” use of a fashionable jargon.
“When the sun goes down I usually read fiction. Nonfiction for the day light hours. For poetry it just depends . … After one gets out of the bath the feeling stays for a while. The same thing happens with reading, of course. When one closes a book it doesn’t mean the feeling of the book closes too.” Sigh. A bath and a book is a good comparison for those who indulge in both. I am not sure though the feeling after closing this book in my case would be comparably satisfying. And after a while, i can hardly hope to enjoy a related Proustian madeleine cake moment.
Her observations on writing are a bit more profound and special to her case. They are a mixture of a manifesto-type proclamations and more understated thoughts. Some of them are intriguing:
“I am not always writing a sentence to tell the story, exactly, but simply to make things appear in it, to see what is possible.”
“For me fiction is a space of plainness and excess.”
“I don’t want to stay on the surface of language, on the surface of sentences.”
The others points are more specific to her which might be of interest to people who either read or plan to read her books:
"When I start writing a new story I always begin with setting. Then I hear a narrative voice."
"As a writer, I feel i am always negotiating that: when to give something explicitly to the reader and when to hold back, or when to give just a little so it can be sensed rather than simply seen."
She is very keen on descriptions. She calls them accessories: “Description of plants are especially nice." At the end of the same essay: "There is something nice to have an access to natural resources world”. Sounds “nice”.
The one of her meta- comments have puzzled me:
I wonder does it imply that if i say for example: “My appetite is huge but not like a horse would have” then “a horse” would “haunt” this sentence? I sincerely try to understand the subtlety here: a dancer by har nature is “haunting” or anything that comes with a negative simile makes a sentence “haunting”?
Another type of fragments about writing is a “manifesto”- type proclamations.
There was one fragment written all in infinitive verb’s form that i found quite poetic and free-willing:
“Write into the winter, and summer, and autumn, and spring. Write into the snow and flowers and the wreaths and the wallpaper. Write into the painting and the flame of the long candle. Write into your own mind, turning and turning it.”
In other cases, however, these appeals seem to be quite generic and a bit over-ambitious:
“I begin to think that I must write a novel of suffering because so many are suffering, and because many more of us certainly will, but I don’t know yet if that is it.” - Sigh.
“One reads or writes a novel like one goes out to walk in the heat, or into the rain, to buy the persimmon and the butter.” - Not sure i understand what it might mean. I am not a writer. So my imagination is probably very limited, but i struggle to see how i read as if i am buying a butter.
“I’ve become fixated on the idea of authenticity. ... I want to be alighted to others and my self. Who doesn’t? I’ve become a different person getting older.” Sigh. Who isn’t? I feel our joint pain with this one.
“I want my writing to be authentic too, for every sentence to reach towards honesty and meaning.” So there is that. But then: “Do we write to create perfect things? I don’t. I never think of it when I am writing.” That, to some extent has become fairly obvious after reading a hundred pages of those essays. But how does it combine with “every sentence” being meaningful? There is no necessary contradiction of course, but one can hardly thrive to fill every sentence with meaning and not thing about a sentence when one writes.
To illustrate what she wants to achieve, she has included a passage from Ferrante:
Note “abrupt losses of meaning” in Ferrante’s text. Cain commented: “this is the exact kind of novel I would like to read, the kind of novel I would also like to write.” However, my perception of the conflict between her aspiring to authenticity, almost rawness of style and the reality of her writing has become even more palatable in contrast with this passage by Ferrante.
Up to the last few pages, nothing in her writing in this book shows that this rawness and the “spillover” of feelings into the page would suit her natural, more pensive and cautious style. If anything she seems to naturally gravitate towards detachment and analytical style of Cusk.
In this book, it seems she genially struggled to let go of the artificial, almost pretentious idea of authenticity and actually start doing what she proclaimed she wanted. The good news that literally in the last few pages she has finally allowed her writing to reflect her creative struggles, doubts and insecurity with raw honesty and her writing has started to get closer to her self-proclaimed ideals:
These passages filled me with the hope that her future books would be written closer to her genuine aspirations and would present more “authentic” (!) experience to her readers. However, going through this particular book has reminded me in a weird way of a grossly overused and overshared but still striking fragment from a Kafka’s letter:
Maybe not all the books should be this axe. But “what are we reading it for?” still would remain a salient question.
Alas, it didn’t not quite deliver in my case. It is the one of very rare books I’ve read twice back to back for the only reason that i’ve started to seriously doubt myself in case i’ve missed the hidden layers of meaning so “lightweight” it seemed. It can happen that a book does not open itself to a reader straightaway. I’ve learned that for some books it is almost a requirement to read a few times.
Unfortunately for everyone involved, after the second reading, my opinion about the merits of this book have not changed. Generally I do not mind the spontaneity, a confessional tone or “unpolishness” of writing which would come with the territory of the diaries. In fact i often actively seek for such writing. But the pieces in this collection did not look unpolished. They just looked a bit unsubstantial. Not everything is for posterity in this world. I appreciate it. But many of my friends here on GR write much better essays in a similar gist. In fact i read them here everyday. Inevitably, I’ve been asking myself why this particular collection has been selected for a publication out of millions similar essays easily available on-line and even here on this site? But even if i skip this question, I’ve counted ten endorsements on the cover of this slim book and two more inside the covers including the ones from Claire-Lousie Bennett or Sara Baume. The work of those two i value. I have to admit that this praise has sold this book to me at the first place. How was this praised so highly and excessively by another writers? This I find puzzling. I am happy, however, for these questions to remain rhetorical.
Tastes differ of course as well as people’s motivation to read. So in what follows I’ve intentionally included quite a few quotes, more than i usually do. So there is a space for anyone reading this “report of my struggles” to make up their own mind based upon these quotes or to use it as a springboard to grab a copy of this book to form their own opinion.
Her personal observations are easily relatable. Some of them contain lively descriptions of places and situations. However, many of them lack a certain level of originality. Occasionally they are borderline trivial. I would lie if i said many of them did not trigger my sigh and even an occasional yawn. But they also has made me conscious that i might be an ungrateful reader lacking a sense of tact or ignoring the deeper layers of meaning. Struggling with those conflicting feelings, keeping sighing and having a silent dialogue with her, i’ve plowed through the following (she in “italics”, I - normal font):
“Reading is best but it’s nice to read in bed at the end of a long day, the darkness of the window meeting the soft light inside the room?” - Sigh.
“You take hold of your happiness and enjoy it when it is with you.” - A banality? Sigh.
“When another person is accompanying you they fill the space between you and certain kinds of experiences. It is important that not always happen. To be in favour of solitude is not to be against community or friendship or love.” - Yes. No conflict there. Does someone claim the opposite? Sigh.
“The women are all in repose, sitting or lying down. … They look healthy. When we are relaxed, we are healthy.” Sigh, sigh, sigh!
Among the social issues discussed was a problem of cat’s ownership and “toxic female friendship” as a form “an internalised patriarchy” as represented in Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend.
“It is unfortunate to use the word mine to a cat as a mark of ownership - yet I do.” And what conclusion am I as a reader supposed to make or how am I supposed to use this information? Is it supposed to be a revelatory, soul-searching auto-fictional confession or is it supposed to be a subtle critic of capitalism?
But her analysis of the female friendship in “My brilliant friend” has even stopped me sighing and made me speak loudly which was embarrassing considering I was in a cafe. This is her passage with my comments in [square brackets]:
“I love these novels too, as well as Elena and Lila, but not for their friendship, necessarily, which never seems to me completely close, though I like that it encompasses their entire lives [still not closed enough?] receding and then becoming stronger again over and over throughout the time. I understand difficulty in a friendship, and falling out, but not the idea of the “frenemy” [there is no idea of "frenemy" in Ferrante’s novel whatever this trendy neologism is supposed to mean]. I am not interested at all in competitiveness between women [but elsewhere in this book: “I used to worry I was not intellectual in the same ways many of my friends were” - what that if not competitiveness? ] in toxic female friendships as a literary topic. .. I think it is something different, an internalised patriarchy.”
That concluding sentence sounds like a patronising cliche containing two very loosely defined terms that do not further elaborate on the phenomena of friendship in the novel but make it sound like some commodified object. Personally, I am very much confused what is “toxic friendship”, how it differs from a “detoxic” one and why, on the top of that, only possible root of this “toxicity” is a patriarchy “internalised” or not. It might be possible that the author would be able to convince me if she would elaborate on those terms and their applicability to Lila and Elena’s situation in more extended way. Like that, in one sentence this discourse seems to be an unconvincing “performative” use of a fashionable jargon.
“When the sun goes down I usually read fiction. Nonfiction for the day light hours. For poetry it just depends . … After one gets out of the bath the feeling stays for a while. The same thing happens with reading, of course. When one closes a book it doesn’t mean the feeling of the book closes too.” Sigh. A bath and a book is a good comparison for those who indulge in both. I am not sure though the feeling after closing this book in my case would be comparably satisfying. And after a while, i can hardly hope to enjoy a related Proustian madeleine cake moment.
Her observations on writing are a bit more profound and special to her case. They are a mixture of a manifesto-type proclamations and more understated thoughts. Some of them are intriguing:
“I am not always writing a sentence to tell the story, exactly, but simply to make things appear in it, to see what is possible.”
“For me fiction is a space of plainness and excess.”
“I don’t want to stay on the surface of language, on the surface of sentences.”
The others points are more specific to her which might be of interest to people who either read or plan to read her books:
"When I start writing a new story I always begin with setting. Then I hear a narrative voice."
"As a writer, I feel i am always negotiating that: when to give something explicitly to the reader and when to hold back, or when to give just a little so it can be sensed rather than simply seen."
She is very keen on descriptions. She calls them accessories: “Description of plants are especially nice." At the end of the same essay: "There is something nice to have an access to natural resources world”. Sounds “nice”.
The one of her meta- comments have puzzled me:
In my own fiction, I sometimes find myself trying to conjure something that isn’t there, so that it both is and isn’t appealing. For instance, my novel “Indelicacy” narrator says: “I pulled my hair into a loose bun, but not like a dancer would do it“. There is no dancer in this sentence, yet I see the dancer. This is one way to haunt my sentence. It is exciting to think I might haunt my sentences.
I wonder does it imply that if i say for example: “My appetite is huge but not like a horse would have” then “a horse” would “haunt” this sentence? I sincerely try to understand the subtlety here: a dancer by har nature is “haunting” or anything that comes with a negative simile makes a sentence “haunting”?
Another type of fragments about writing is a “manifesto”- type proclamations.
There was one fragment written all in infinitive verb’s form that i found quite poetic and free-willing:
“Write into the winter, and summer, and autumn, and spring. Write into the snow and flowers and the wreaths and the wallpaper. Write into the painting and the flame of the long candle. Write into your own mind, turning and turning it.”
In other cases, however, these appeals seem to be quite generic and a bit over-ambitious:
“I begin to think that I must write a novel of suffering because so many are suffering, and because many more of us certainly will, but I don’t know yet if that is it.” - Sigh.
“One reads or writes a novel like one goes out to walk in the heat, or into the rain, to buy the persimmon and the butter.” - Not sure i understand what it might mean. I am not a writer. So my imagination is probably very limited, but i struggle to see how i read as if i am buying a butter.
“I’ve become fixated on the idea of authenticity. ... I want to be alighted to others and my self. Who doesn’t? I’ve become a different person getting older.” Sigh. Who isn’t? I feel our joint pain with this one.
“I want my writing to be authentic too, for every sentence to reach towards honesty and meaning.” So there is that. But then: “Do we write to create perfect things? I don’t. I never think of it when I am writing.” That, to some extent has become fairly obvious after reading a hundred pages of those essays. But how does it combine with “every sentence” being meaningful? There is no necessary contradiction of course, but one can hardly thrive to fill every sentence with meaning and not thing about a sentence when one writes.
To illustrate what she wants to achieve, she has included a passage from Ferrante:
“The whole future- I thought - will be that way, life together with the damp odour of the land of the dead, attention with inattention, passionate leaps of the heart along with abrupt losses of meaning”.
Note “abrupt losses of meaning” in Ferrante’s text. Cain commented: “this is the exact kind of novel I would like to read, the kind of novel I would also like to write.” However, my perception of the conflict between her aspiring to authenticity, almost rawness of style and the reality of her writing has become even more palatable in contrast with this passage by Ferrante.
Up to the last few pages, nothing in her writing in this book shows that this rawness and the “spillover” of feelings into the page would suit her natural, more pensive and cautious style. If anything she seems to naturally gravitate towards detachment and analytical style of Cusk.
In this book, it seems she genially struggled to let go of the artificial, almost pretentious idea of authenticity and actually start doing what she proclaimed she wanted. The good news that literally in the last few pages she has finally allowed her writing to reflect her creative struggles, doubts and insecurity with raw honesty and her writing has started to get closer to her self-proclaimed ideals:
Sometimes sentences I have written in the past make me cringe, even if once I liked them. They might sound ok, but they’re hollow, with nothing behind them. I have already cut many false sentences from this book, but I’m afraid there will be more I am not yet capable of seeing. I already write such short sparse texts. How much more can I get rid off?
I used to worry that I am not intellectual in the sands way as my friends. I could not understand them. I listened quietly in those moments, aware of the means by which I feel my way towards things, even thought. My writing is like that too?
These passages filled me with the hope that her future books would be written closer to her genuine aspirations and would present more “authentic” (!) experience to her readers. However, going through this particular book has reminded me in a weird way of a grossly overused and overshared but still striking fragment from a Kafka’s letter:
“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that bite and stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow on the skull, what are we reading it for? ... A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”
Maybe not all the books should be this axe. But “what are we reading it for?” still would remain a salient question.
July 22, 2024
“If you are not alienated from yourself, you are more likely to go further into the thing on which you are working.”
A House at Night: On Writing is a gorgeous piece of work. Amina Cain writes with sparse eloquence and a simple honesty. It is a pleasure to be in the space of her words. In this slender volume the reader encounters a spacious intimacy, both in mind and craft; an intimacy that abides deeply in the texture of her sentences. The final shape of my impression is of an incisive architecture of language—An architecture that is both instructive, contemplative and resonate. You can feel her masterful gift at stripping the non essential, leaving an uncluttered redolence where meaning and the power of mystery have room to linger.
She quotes beautiful passages from her shelves—books she admires that emblematize her chosen motifs like a chest of gems that become meditative in her own choices while writing. Her attachment to fiction is part craft but also stimulated by encounters experienced in reading. Her voice, through the process of reading, unfolds into further spaces of writing where she has mastered the ability to leave “a chain of images that remain in the reader’s mind.” These experiences ripple with depth and open up to many questions and possibilities. She is candid about how these exchanges further her the deepest preoccupations of her own writing process as a medium of thoughtful response and connection to books she loves.
These spaces open into threads of thought that address questions and themes, sometimes without answers, but leading further into to a probing interiority. There is a patience here where thoughts and ideas have been shown consideration, allowed to germinate into the full fruition of sentences that can be halting. Cain does this with a forthrightness that engages her own sense of vulnerability woven with strength and a beautiful curiosity that is balanced with confidence and wisdom. It’s mesmerizing!
This book is a diary of sorts . She talks about multiple themes: solitude, authenticity, relaxation landscapes, light and dark, projection, domestic pleasures, titles, perfection in writing, animals and plants. And more.
I particularly like what she writes about landscapes. That an interior space of a character can be infused “Outside the body and inside the mind, a novel can be like a landscape painting with a character moving through it…” she says it’s “a mind made into a place.” Quoting Claire Donato’s novel, Burial, we see this idea come to life with poignant elegance: “It is not snowing so heavily now though what is not seen is always meant to break. Human beings are made of ice, crystals that fall through the body, freeze until they melt, discharge, and then detach atop the ice atop of the lake.“ These kind of invitations are bold and scattered throughout this volume leaving its own landscape in “a chain of images that remain in the reader’s mind.”
Her books capture the complexity of minimalism that is informed by embracing solitude as an essential part of growth and personhood “returned to something vital, allowed to live and think at the proper speed, at a slower, looser pace, with fewer distractions, and this transforms…” Part of this transformation is a renewed strength and youthfulness to the creative spirit. She goes on to say solitude is not better than other things but rather “without the experience of it we block ourselves from discovering something enormously beneficial, perhaps even vital, to selfhood.” She punctuates this sentiment with the idea that “to do any kind of work well, I believe we must at least have a solitude of mind, a solitude of seeing…There is life that surrounds each one of us that no one else should enter, unless they drive it off.” It’s like closing a part of yourself down so other parts can be opened up to a more authentic voice that pines to make itself known.
There is a great deal more that can be said here, but I am done with this review. A Horse at night will quickly become a new Gold Standard of books on writing. Aspiring writers of all genre’s will do well to walk through its gates to graze in the fertile pasture Amina Cain has so astonishingly prepared for students and lovers of the written word.
My favorite vignette in this book is long but does justice to the whole. A Horse at Night sent me into my own writing space and I wrote plenty more about this book... And then I decided to leave those things out of this review.
“Write into the winter, and the summer, and autumn, and spring. Write into the snow and flowers and the wreaths and the wallpaper. Write into the painting and the flame of the long candle. Write into your own mind, urning and turning it.…Write into the floor, the wide planks of the mind. Write into the circular gravel driveway that brings your characters to you, that brings them to life. Write into the Buffalo and the hair and the dog. Write into the bulb with a miniature pasture painted onto it that hangs on the tree. The bulb of grass outside the house. The buckwheat that is growing in the evening. Write into your eyes. The lamp that sits on the table in the evening. You can see it in the mirror. A pale shade of pink. Write into falling snow, falling rain, falling leaves. Write into the dark stove. A bird of Paradise. Write into the ceiling and the scalloped edge. Write into the drawing of a necklace. People praying in church. Write into the cane. The needle and the cloth. Into the times you were unhappy. Write into the fuchsia and black dress. The neckline is low. The cats, curled into little balls on the bed. The endless study. Write into your laziness. Write into the dark lines of the room. Write into the movie you watched. Write into the tall ceilings. The other others who were in the room. This tree that is itself and the shape of a ball. In the shapes around it. Write into the holiday. Into the hedges that line the walk.”
If you are a writer…. Just write.
A House at Night: On Writing is a gorgeous piece of work. Amina Cain writes with sparse eloquence and a simple honesty. It is a pleasure to be in the space of her words. In this slender volume the reader encounters a spacious intimacy, both in mind and craft; an intimacy that abides deeply in the texture of her sentences. The final shape of my impression is of an incisive architecture of language—An architecture that is both instructive, contemplative and resonate. You can feel her masterful gift at stripping the non essential, leaving an uncluttered redolence where meaning and the power of mystery have room to linger.
She quotes beautiful passages from her shelves—books she admires that emblematize her chosen motifs like a chest of gems that become meditative in her own choices while writing. Her attachment to fiction is part craft but also stimulated by encounters experienced in reading. Her voice, through the process of reading, unfolds into further spaces of writing where she has mastered the ability to leave “a chain of images that remain in the reader’s mind.” These experiences ripple with depth and open up to many questions and possibilities. She is candid about how these exchanges further her the deepest preoccupations of her own writing process as a medium of thoughtful response and connection to books she loves.
These spaces open into threads of thought that address questions and themes, sometimes without answers, but leading further into to a probing interiority. There is a patience here where thoughts and ideas have been shown consideration, allowed to germinate into the full fruition of sentences that can be halting. Cain does this with a forthrightness that engages her own sense of vulnerability woven with strength and a beautiful curiosity that is balanced with confidence and wisdom. It’s mesmerizing!
This book is a diary of sorts . She talks about multiple themes: solitude, authenticity, relaxation landscapes, light and dark, projection, domestic pleasures, titles, perfection in writing, animals and plants. And more.
I particularly like what she writes about landscapes. That an interior space of a character can be infused “Outside the body and inside the mind, a novel can be like a landscape painting with a character moving through it…” she says it’s “a mind made into a place.” Quoting Claire Donato’s novel, Burial, we see this idea come to life with poignant elegance: “It is not snowing so heavily now though what is not seen is always meant to break. Human beings are made of ice, crystals that fall through the body, freeze until they melt, discharge, and then detach atop the ice atop of the lake.“ These kind of invitations are bold and scattered throughout this volume leaving its own landscape in “a chain of images that remain in the reader’s mind.”
Her books capture the complexity of minimalism that is informed by embracing solitude as an essential part of growth and personhood “returned to something vital, allowed to live and think at the proper speed, at a slower, looser pace, with fewer distractions, and this transforms…” Part of this transformation is a renewed strength and youthfulness to the creative spirit. She goes on to say solitude is not better than other things but rather “without the experience of it we block ourselves from discovering something enormously beneficial, perhaps even vital, to selfhood.” She punctuates this sentiment with the idea that “to do any kind of work well, I believe we must at least have a solitude of mind, a solitude of seeing…There is life that surrounds each one of us that no one else should enter, unless they drive it off.” It’s like closing a part of yourself down so other parts can be opened up to a more authentic voice that pines to make itself known.
There is a great deal more that can be said here, but I am done with this review. A Horse at night will quickly become a new Gold Standard of books on writing. Aspiring writers of all genre’s will do well to walk through its gates to graze in the fertile pasture Amina Cain has so astonishingly prepared for students and lovers of the written word.
My favorite vignette in this book is long but does justice to the whole. A Horse at Night sent me into my own writing space and I wrote plenty more about this book... And then I decided to leave those things out of this review.
“Write into the winter, and the summer, and autumn, and spring. Write into the snow and flowers and the wreaths and the wallpaper. Write into the painting and the flame of the long candle. Write into your own mind, urning and turning it.…Write into the floor, the wide planks of the mind. Write into the circular gravel driveway that brings your characters to you, that brings them to life. Write into the Buffalo and the hair and the dog. Write into the bulb with a miniature pasture painted onto it that hangs on the tree. The bulb of grass outside the house. The buckwheat that is growing in the evening. Write into your eyes. The lamp that sits on the table in the evening. You can see it in the mirror. A pale shade of pink. Write into falling snow, falling rain, falling leaves. Write into the dark stove. A bird of Paradise. Write into the ceiling and the scalloped edge. Write into the drawing of a necklace. People praying in church. Write into the cane. The needle and the cloth. Into the times you were unhappy. Write into the fuchsia and black dress. The neckline is low. The cats, curled into little balls on the bed. The endless study. Write into your laziness. Write into the dark lines of the room. Write into the movie you watched. Write into the tall ceilings. The other others who were in the room. This tree that is itself and the shape of a ball. In the shapes around it. Write into the holiday. Into the hedges that line the walk.”
If you are a writer…. Just write.
July 14, 2024
https://kansasbooks.blogspot.com/2024...
“Maybe I’ve not kept a diary because I imagined lives have been more interesting for me to write down than my own. Yet my life comes into my fiction too, and now I am writing of it here, attached to my reading and my writing. Attached to darkness. Solitude, the ocean. Attached to fiction.”
Leyendo esta pequeña joyita de Amina Cain volví a recordar lo que decía Luis Sagasti en una entrevista cuando revelaba que concebía la literatura como una forma de leer y no de escribir. En este caso, A horse a night es un libro tanto sobre lo que leemos como sobre la escritura, es casí imposible, imagino, escribir sin haber leído antes. Amina Cain reúne aquí una serie de pequeños ensayos que funcionan como entradas de un diario, en los que encadena los libros que más la han marcado y los enlaza con su propia escritura “I wanted to write fiction because I saw something in Dura’s Lol Stein. I didn’t know how to stop thinking about that character…”, sobre el proceso de creación artística. No es tanto la información que da sobre estas lecturas lo que conforma este libro, no hay datos demasiado reveladores, pero sí es muy revelador como lo enlaza con su propio proceso creativo.
“The distance can't be crossed anymore; it is too great. And the memory of the closeness will be comforting, or you will feel grief. Anything is possible. What does It mean to know someone? What does It mean to be close, or to be distant? And is there a part of you that can still be close in the midst of distance?”
Amina Cain está continuamente preguntándose, cuestionándose, interrogándose a sí misma por qué escribe de una determinada manera, buscando la revelación a través de ciertas pinturas, de ciertas películas como imágenes que pueda llevar a su propio terreno literario y para ello usa el paisaje, las plantas, animales, al mismo tiempo que las relaciones humanas, centrándose sobre todo en la amistad como punto de apoyo para reafirmar esta exploración de su propio Yo a través de la escritura. Así que finalmente esta obra acaba resultando una especie de conversación entre ella y el lector, de tan íntimamente como transmite su autoficción. Permite al lector adentrarse en su intimidad a través de estas imágenes, por ejemplo, cuando saca a la luz alguna imagen o escena concreta de una película como "News from home" de Chantal Akerman, como diario personal entre ella y su madre, o por ejemplo cuando hace mención Viaje a Italia de Rossellini, relacionándolo con el aislamiento, la distancia, la amistad y la forma en que van cambiando ciertas relaciones, siempre como obsesión para ella, como un enlace con su propia escritura.
"I want to be like the narrator in Borges "Argumentum Ornithologicum", alone with my visions. I want to know I have seen what is only visible when I am by myself, even if I spend a good part of my life with others. I don't want to be locked out.
I don't want the sharp isolation that comes from proximity to uncaring strangers, or those who have become unhappily like strangers. As Rossellini's (Journey yo Italy) Katherine says to her husband
I don't think you're very happy when we're alone
and Alexander responds,
Are you sure you know when I'm happy?"
La manera en la que enlaza lecturas, citas literarias, autores, conforman un autorretrato en el que ella se va desnudando de la misma forma en que se expone, por ejemplo, Annie Ernaux “Ernaux does obsession and jealousy very well: crude, angry, a little violent. Sometimes it feels as though the novella’s sentences are a series of hits or punches”, convierten esta obra en una pequeña delicia, no solo por la cantidad de lecturas nuevas que se pueden extraer de aquí (al final aparecerá una lista de las obras, autores y películas que menciona) sino por la transparencia con la que se muestra Amina Cain. Sus miedos literarios, sus angustias a enfrentarse al papel, el aislamiento y la soledad como vía para este proceso creativo "To write, to do any kind of work well, I believe we must at least have a solitude of mind, a solitude of seeing", de expresar los temas que la obsesionan, de su ficción que se transforma en autoficción, van surgiendo sobre todo porque usará a otros autores como excusa y modelo para describirse a sí misma. Ernaux, Virginia Woolf, Tanizaki, Rachel Cusk, Heinrich von Kleist, Paul Delvaux…, porque para Amina Cain no hay separación entre sus influencias literarias, su escritura y su experiencia de vida, todo está asociado y enlazado. Y es bonito el título. Su revelación en la última frase de este texto es una puerta que se abre...
“But I see now that I hide things in my sentences too. I thought because I write slim books, I was already working within the smallest unit possible, which is a unit I like, where I write best.
Now I see that sometimes my focus gets even smaller, and that I am not always writing a sentence to tell a story, exactly, but simply to be in the space of a sentence, to make things appear in it, to see what is possible.”
♫♫♫ On the Sea - Beach house ♫♫♫
Viaggio in Italia aka Journey to Italy, 1954, Roberto Rossellini
September 2, 2023
30 Books in 30 Days / Book #3
November 25, 2024
Maybe I’ve not kept a diary because imagined lives have been more interesting for me to write down than my own. (…) Attached to darkness, solitude, the ocean. Attached to fiction.
It is truly wonderful to listen to someone talk about something they love. That is how I felt reading this book. It is palpable the author’s love for literature, and I enjoyed quite a lot to dive deep in her musings. I leave this book with joy and a tbr bigger than I entered.
Maybe I’ll write a more detailed review. Maybe not.
It is truly wonderful to listen to someone talk about something they love. That is how I felt reading this book. It is palpable the author’s love for literature, and I enjoyed quite a lot to dive deep in her musings. I leave this book with joy and a tbr bigger than I entered.
Maybe I’ll write a more detailed review. Maybe not.
November 7, 2023
"Of all the forms language can take, the sentence is the one I’m most drawn to."
This is a fairly typical example of the writing in this book: It sounds somewhat revelatory at first, but the longer I think about it, the less sense it makes. What are the other "forms language can take" which the sentence competed against in order to win Cain's favor? Letters, syllables, and words? Words, half-sentences, ellipses, and paragraphs?
Another example:
"For instance, in my novel Indelicacy, when the narrator Vitória is visiting the desert, she says, ‘I pulled my hair into a loose bun, but not like a dancer would do it.’ There is no dancer in this sentence, yet I see the dancer. This is one way to haunt a sentence. Plainly. It is exciting to me to think I might haunt my own sentences, to believe that they can be haunted. That the reader might be taken over subtly, that there is room in fiction for an experience like this. And that something of this experience might remain."
Isn't that how comparisons work? Presenting it in this tone and with this much gravitas makes me think that Cain feels she just discovered this. That's pretty alarming, and it makes for very tedious reading.
This is a fairly typical example of the writing in this book: It sounds somewhat revelatory at first, but the longer I think about it, the less sense it makes. What are the other "forms language can take" which the sentence competed against in order to win Cain's favor? Letters, syllables, and words? Words, half-sentences, ellipses, and paragraphs?
Another example:
"For instance, in my novel Indelicacy, when the narrator Vitória is visiting the desert, she says, ‘I pulled my hair into a loose bun, but not like a dancer would do it.’ There is no dancer in this sentence, yet I see the dancer. This is one way to haunt a sentence. Plainly. It is exciting to me to think I might haunt my own sentences, to believe that they can be haunted. That the reader might be taken over subtly, that there is room in fiction for an experience like this. And that something of this experience might remain."
Isn't that how comparisons work? Presenting it in this tone and with this much gravitas makes me think that Cain feels she just discovered this. That's pretty alarming, and it makes for very tedious reading.
February 6, 2023
2.5
Very calming and pleasant, but totally underbaked and obvious. Low-impact read about reading and writing.
Very calming and pleasant, but totally underbaked and obvious. Low-impact read about reading and writing.
Read
January 2, 2024I came across this author as she is one of the many quoted in Kerri Ni Dochartaigh's Cacophony of Bone and it fits with that book, in that it is a kind of journal presented as short essays or fragments on writing, of thoughts that occur while reading other writers works.
The chapters have no headings but the book has a contents page that displays from five up to nine words of the first sentence of that fragment/chapter/essay. So the first one begins:
A number of them begin with referencing the work of an author/artist whose sentences or themes or art provoke her reflections, in particular Elena Ferrante, Annie Ernaux, Marguerite Duras, Rachel Cusk, Marie NDiaye. In contemplating Ernaux's The Possession, she wonders what it is she loved exactly, alighting on its urgency, the way the narrator is taken over by something - an aspect that is often present in Ferrante's novels.
One she refers to often The Lost Daughter, the story of a woman whose daughters are absent for the summer, she takes a holiday, not thinking of her daughters,
This leads into Cain's contemplation of the way humans project on to other things (like the sea) and people and how the act of writing encourages this. She asks why we project at all and delves into that occupation of mind with scalpel-like precision.
She reads the diaries of Virgina Woolf, which cause her to recall 30 years of diaries of an Aunt, one entry telling her that she 'began to keep a diary because she saw that life had mystical qualities.'
Writing about authenticity gives rise to reflections on Jean Gent's play, The Maids and Bong Joon-ho's film Parasite and the effect of maintaining roles, when mixed classes live under the same roof.
Much of it was written during the pandemic, a period that encouraged introspection and in which humans didn't always have other humans for company, after reflecting on solitude and the need for human connection and company, other creatures gain notoriety eliciting a chapter that begins:
It makes me wonder what phrase from this book Kerri Ni Dochartaigh made it into her own; I admit I didn't have quite the same response on finishing it "Astounding...I was distraught when I finished.", I found it more of an intriguing insight into the varied way writers analyse and respond to each other's work. I related more to Aysegül Savas's response "Like light from a candle in the evening; intimate, pleasurable, and full of wonder."
Rather than look at plot, character, dialogue or conflict, these reflections she describes as paying attention to the 'accessories', like animals, phrases that create a feeling of relaxation, pondering friendship, or the self. Even plants.
It's something like finding meaning in other works, that intersects with where the reader/writer is on their own journey, whether that is life or a fictional landscape they are trying to create, looking for lessons that might lie between the lines of others who have gone before, whose words have elicited a response in that reader. And we, the reader of this book, are looking through the window of another reader looking through the window...
The chapters have no headings but the book has a contents page that displays from five up to nine words of the first sentence of that fragment/chapter/essay. So the first one begins:
Without planning it, I wrote a diary of sorts...
A number of them begin with referencing the work of an author/artist whose sentences or themes or art provoke her reflections, in particular Elena Ferrante, Annie Ernaux, Marguerite Duras, Rachel Cusk, Marie NDiaye. In contemplating Ernaux's The Possession, she wonders what it is she loved exactly, alighting on its urgency, the way the narrator is taken over by something - an aspect that is often present in Ferrante's novels.
In The Lost Daughter, when Leda goes alone...
One she refers to often The Lost Daughter, the story of a woman whose daughters are absent for the summer, she takes a holiday, not thinking of her daughters,
This leads into Cain's contemplation of the way humans project on to other things (like the sea) and people and how the act of writing encourages this. She asks why we project at all and delves into that occupation of mind with scalpel-like precision.
She reads the diaries of Virgina Woolf, which cause her to recall 30 years of diaries of an Aunt, one entry telling her that she 'began to keep a diary because she saw that life had mystical qualities.'
Writing about authenticity gives rise to reflections on Jean Gent's play, The Maids and Bong Joon-ho's film Parasite and the effect of maintaining roles, when mixed classes live under the same roof.
To have to maintain those class roles always, especially if they are enforced with any kind of degradation, is a violation of the sacredness of one's life, and a violence all of its own.
Much of it was written during the pandemic, a period that encouraged introspection and in which humans didn't always have other humans for company, after reflecting on solitude and the need for human connection and company, other creatures gain notoriety eliciting a chapter that begins:
As I write this my cat Trout whines loudly
It makes me wonder what phrase from this book Kerri Ni Dochartaigh made it into her own; I admit I didn't have quite the same response on finishing it "Astounding...I was distraught when I finished.", I found it more of an intriguing insight into the varied way writers analyse and respond to each other's work. I related more to Aysegül Savas's response "Like light from a candle in the evening; intimate, pleasurable, and full of wonder."
Rather than look at plot, character, dialogue or conflict, these reflections she describes as paying attention to the 'accessories', like animals, phrases that create a feeling of relaxation, pondering friendship, or the self. Even plants.
It's something like finding meaning in other works, that intersects with where the reader/writer is on their own journey, whether that is life or a fictional landscape they are trying to create, looking for lessons that might lie between the lines of others who have gone before, whose words have elicited a response in that reader. And we, the reader of this book, are looking through the window of another reader looking through the window...
January 22, 2023
my problem with amina cain's work is that it seems right up my alley, i expect it to be good but it never delivers and never goes in depth for me. it's all just so superficial
June 29, 2023
this felt like its own esoteric world that i was not allowed to be a part of
Read
February 13, 2023I find it fascinating when authors write about their craft or how other novels/literary works make them feel and this was no exception. This felt like a hybrid between a diary and an essay.
October 14, 2024
this honestly felt like a combination of reading my inner dialogues and a bunch of free book recommendations:) I listened to about 70% of the audiobook only to realise that I wanted to annotate it so I restarted on the first page and now I have a very colourful and underlined copy lol
I really enjoyed this:)
I really enjoyed this:)
June 5, 2024
Prebrala bi še njen nakupovalni listek.
December 12, 2022
INCREDIBLE!!!!
May 26, 2023
The part that stuck with me the most was on authenticity and perfection. Do we give up a part of ourselves when pursing perfection or a shade of someone we admire? A common struggle when writing, it hit home for me:
“Going further into my writing means being vigilant about shedding what is false, even the smallest bit of it. Sometimes sentences I have written in the past make me cringe, even if I once liked them…I have already cut many false sentences from this book, but I’m afraid there will be more I’m not capable of seeing.”
full review here:
https://writtenbymakena.wixsite.com/l...
“Going further into my writing means being vigilant about shedding what is false, even the smallest bit of it. Sometimes sentences I have written in the past make me cringe, even if I once liked them…I have already cut many false sentences from this book, but I’m afraid there will be more I’m not capable of seeing.”
full review here:
https://writtenbymakena.wixsite.com/l...
February 25, 2025
Hmmmmm. He llegit una ressenya per aquí que deia alguna cosa per l'estil de que es quedaria només amb les reflexions més personals de l'autora i no tant amb les reflexions sobre llibres. Hi estic completament d'acord. Hi ha alguna cosa artificial i impostada en com l'autora va filant i introduint les lectures que fa. En canvi, he gaudit quan parla més de l'experiència lectora o sobre l'escriptura. Però crec que no em funciona com a conjunt, i que m'ha desencantat el to, sovint.
May 18, 2023
I loved reading this comforting, beautiful little book about reading and writing. What a delight to just get to sit and reflect in company with Cain on how rewarding and lovely a life of letters can be. Teared up a little bit, highly recommend.
Read
October 15, 2025A book so soothing for the soul. Amina Cain weaved such words together and created something inspiring not only about the art of writing stories or how diaries can provide your mind freedom but also about embracing your authentic self without the influence of others.
Just from the opening sentence, I was already inspired to start a diary of sorts. One where I don't demand of myself to meet a quota of writing one entry per day, but a diary I want to use as a retreat for the mind. A place for self-reflection and my musings whenever I need it, because there's a lot going on up there. Cain shared her reflections on reading diaries and how they feel so intimate and immersive, mentioning the writings of her relative or those penned by Virginia Woolf.
Interiority. I like that word and what it represents in this context. Cain tends to phrase simple experiences beautifully, and I find clarity knowing exactly how a feeling I can't explain be put into words.
***
When the topic of writing is discussed, the author doesn't give the readers any guide on how to write a book in terms of plot, character arcs, setting, or any of the technical stuff. Rather, she merely shares what writing from the heart does for her. Whatever comes naturally is the direction she will follow; the technicality can be a problem for later.
This ties in with the theme of embracing your true self that is present throughout the book. I can't help but feel reassured that it's okay to write for yourself, without worrying about an audience. As long as you write with your heart and passion for the craft, not for the cash, exposure, or validation, then you did a good job.
***
The key points I wrote down—while reading this book—that stood out were about accepting and embracing who you are as a person without the misbelief influenced by your upbringing or dictations and expectations by society.
Once you strip away the persona you put on to get validation from society, who are you really? What do you truly feel? What are you willing to write or create for the sake of the joy of creation? What clothing style do you want to put on, not to please anyone's eye, but to represent who you are? Putting aside the obligations placed upon you, what do you want to do for yourself? Those are the questions that were evoked out of me while I reflect on this book. It gives confidence. Encourages me to write again, whether it be a story or a journal entry or a book review, with not a single care for the structure but nevertheless enjoying the process.
Reading this outside, in the comfort of nature's scenery and gusts of the afternoon breeze, is such a perfect way to savor this little book of essays.
Just from the opening sentence, I was already inspired to start a diary of sorts. One where I don't demand of myself to meet a quota of writing one entry per day, but a diary I want to use as a retreat for the mind. A place for self-reflection and my musings whenever I need it, because there's a lot going on up there. Cain shared her reflections on reading diaries and how they feel so intimate and immersive, mentioning the writings of her relative or those penned by Virginia Woolf.
"Interiority is one of my favorite things to read in fiction — to abide in a narrator's mind if that narrator, that mind, compels me — and when you read a diary you have that, tenfold. A diary is intimate, forthright, immediate."
Interiority. I like that word and what it represents in this context. Cain tends to phrase simple experiences beautifully, and I find clarity knowing exactly how a feeling I can't explain be put into words.
***
When the topic of writing is discussed, the author doesn't give the readers any guide on how to write a book in terms of plot, character arcs, setting, or any of the technical stuff. Rather, she merely shares what writing from the heart does for her. Whatever comes naturally is the direction she will follow; the technicality can be a problem for later.
This ties in with the theme of embracing your true self that is present throughout the book. I can't help but feel reassured that it's okay to write for yourself, without worrying about an audience. As long as you write with your heart and passion for the craft, not for the cash, exposure, or validation, then you did a good job.
***
The key points I wrote down—while reading this book—that stood out were about accepting and embracing who you are as a person without the misbelief influenced by your upbringing or dictations and expectations by society.
Once you strip away the persona you put on to get validation from society, who are you really? What do you truly feel? What are you willing to write or create for the sake of the joy of creation? What clothing style do you want to put on, not to please anyone's eye, but to represent who you are? Putting aside the obligations placed upon you, what do you want to do for yourself? Those are the questions that were evoked out of me while I reflect on this book. It gives confidence. Encourages me to write again, whether it be a story or a journal entry or a book review, with not a single care for the structure but nevertheless enjoying the process.
Reading this outside, in the comfort of nature's scenery and gusts of the afternoon breeze, is such a perfect way to savor this little book of essays.
December 4, 2022
3.5 weird little book, enjoyed it. Had to pause at some of the insights. Other parts are a little fluffy, but it only makes the illuminations more impactful.
Also I tried to sell a well-known Canadian author on this book today and she was rude and unpleasant (jealous?). Anyway. I like Amina Cain's work:)
Also I tried to sell a well-known Canadian author on this book today and she was rude and unpleasant (jealous?). Anyway. I like Amina Cain's work:)
February 2, 2025
Reading, all on its own, is one of the best things, and yet isn't it nice to read in bed at the end of a long day, the darkness of the window meeting the soft light inside the room? Or on the beach, the hot sand and the sound of the waves coming together with the book. Things combine to become other things, other kinds of experiences.
Amina Cain ovde piše o čitanju i doživljaju umetnosti evocirajući pasuse više ili manje poznatih dela i pisaca. Ovo delo je više poetsko, esejističko i krajnje introspektivno, puno njenih ličnih promišljanja. Amina Cain svojim prepoznatljivim tihim stilom istražuje prirodu unutrašnjeg sveta, umetnosti i prolaznih, ali duboko značajnih slika koje oblikuju našu svest.
Nije me u potpunosti okupirala i oduševila, pre svega zbog specifične forme, ali obožavam njen stil i volela bih da ga "ukradem", dok me njen doživljaj sveta i razmišljanja inspirišu da dodatno posmatram i povezujem neke stvari. 3.5☆
Amina Cain ovde piše o čitanju i doživljaju umetnosti evocirajući pasuse više ili manje poznatih dela i pisaca. Ovo delo je više poetsko, esejističko i krajnje introspektivno, puno njenih ličnih promišljanja. Amina Cain svojim prepoznatljivim tihim stilom istražuje prirodu unutrašnjeg sveta, umetnosti i prolaznih, ali duboko značajnih slika koje oblikuju našu svest.
Nije me u potpunosti okupirala i oduševila, pre svega zbog specifične forme, ali obožavam njen stil i volela bih da ga "ukradem", dok me njen doživljaj sveta i razmišljanja inspirišu da dodatno posmatram i povezujem neke stvari. 3.5☆
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