Category: book review

Indelicacy

Olga KatsovskiyLeave a comment

I recently finished reading Indelicacy, Amina Cain’s first novel, on a flight. This concise 158-page story set a soothing atmosphere as I watched the sunlight glide across the opened book on my tray table. I would read and glance at the snow covered mountaintops peeking out from between fluffy white clouds outside the window. Reading slowly, I experienced the narrator’s daydreams alongside her. My eyelids would grow heavy and I would fall asleep. A sudden jolt or the bright light on my temple would wake me, and I would take a sip of cranberry juice and drift where I left off. 

***

Set in ambiguous time, Victorian, post war, or an eerie relatable today, this novel holds great substance and depth. The narrator, Vitória, is a young woman who works as a cleaner in a museum and feels compelled to write about unreachable dreams she sees in various paintings. She commiserates with her coworker and only friend, Antoinette, both scraping by and fantasizing about the grandeur of material wealth. The narrator is swept away, seemingly overnight, into a life of luxury as she is approached by a rich man browsing the art galleries who marries her for reasons unknown. 

The beautiful silk dresses she admired through shop windows, extravagant meals at fancy restaurants, the ballet, an ocean once seen only in paintings, transformed from a dream out of reach to a reality for the taking. The narrator’s new acquired wealth opened physical doors she never thought possible, but in turn closed doors on her authentic self. Being rich made her selfish and all consuming. There is a scene on page 90, where her husband suggests she try smoking hashish after discovering her joyfully drunk for the first time. Her immediate reaction is to ask when, “how indelicate” she observes. In all her waking dreams come true, she becomes self absorbed and lonely.

***

The passenger beside me watched a film on his tablet, a couple and two sons sat at a patio table outside of a mountaintop resort. The mother, a small brunette who I recognized as the actress who played Elaine in Seinfeld, puts her arms around her boys and screams as an avalanche comes tumbling down a cliff and buries the resort under an icy white wave. The father, played by Will Ferrell, instinctively runs inside the building to save himself. The wife and kids, spitting out snow in the proceeding scene, are shaken and can never forgive him for choosing self preservation over his family. 

***

An avalanche comes crashing down, revealing a man’s true motivation. Likewise, money gives the narrator of Indelicacy the opportunity to materialize her dreams at a cost. She loses herself and longs for her former life, where she was poor but full of dreams to inspire her writing. She becomes envious of her friend, Antoinette, who thrives in a simple life in love. She loses interest in her loveless marriage. She stops devouring meat “like a pig” and abandons lemonade and blueberry pie, craving mint tea and biscuits. This story is a remarkable study of class and power. What struck me the most is how the narrator grows to feel entitled to her wealth, which ultimately tears her further away from herself. 

Getting to the Bones

Olga KatsovskiyLeave a comment

“When I was young, my language wore coats and shirts and trousers, neckties, bespoke shoes. In my lifetime as a writer I have cast off layer after layer of clothing in pursuit of nudity. […] As I write toward my nineties I shed my skin.” (Donald Hall, “In Praise of Paragraphs,” A Carnival of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety, 2018, p. 11)

Donald Hall died in the summer of 2018, three months away from his 90th birthday. His essay collection, A Carnival of Losses, was published soon after. I savored this book and highly recommend. There are four sections:

1. Notes Nearing Ninety

The essays in the opening half are reflections on aging, memories of growing up in the Great Depression as an only child, his fellowships at Oxford college, teaching English literacy at the University of Michigan, his divorce, meeting Jane Kenyon (she was his student in Ann Arbor), falling in love with Jane’s poetry and ultimately falling in love with Jane, their relationship, resigning from his professorship in 1975 to embark on a life with Jane in his New Hampshire family farm house, how cool it was to see anthologies for sale in pharmacies back then. He writes about misplacing his dentures all the time, forgetting the names of friends and acquaintances, forgetting to open the garage door – “Open the Damned Door” is among my favorites.

2. The Selected Poets of Donald Hall

Eighteen essays recounting Mr. Hall’s encounters with various writers and poets. I love how humble he was no matter whose legacy is in question. He did not initially like Robert Creeley’s work, for example, and openly criticized his poetry in a review. Creeley was offended and the two avoided each other until Mr. Hall liked Creeley’s new style twenty years later. “We met, we talked, we made up” (p. 85) and no more to it. Louis MacNeice was invited to read his poems in Oxford, when Mr. Hall was an impressionable young man in his twenties. While the meeting was “extraordinary,” he writes, “I cannot remember a word he said” (p. 88). There is a very brief and hilarious essay on Allen Tate, of which Mr. Hall has nothing to note except that “Allen Tate always looked grumpy” (p. 100). What is most remarkable about these essays is the fact that Hall documents the human interactions he had with his peer writers and poets.

3. Necropoetics

This is a single analytical essay on the nature of death and elegy. Donald Hall recollects his memories of life with Jane and the beauty and influence of her work. He writes about Jane’s early life, her development as a writer, the ordeal they lived through with her illness, the pain of having to live to old age without her. She had been gone for more than two decades, but was still very much a part of him all those years. I remember being introduced to both poets when I was in college, the only poem I still remember is Jane Kenyon’s “Otherwise”.

4. A Carnival of Losses

Mr. Hall recalls early memories of his grandfather and life on the farm. He muses about writing children’s books, his children and grandchildren, “some guy” by the name of Steve Benson who peed beside him in a urinal and went on to write a poem about it, shopping for something gross at a butchery for his mother, his rugged cousin, post-war experiences at Harvard, baseball, his first romances, the history of Eagle Pond Farm, the importance of keeping his beard long, his hospitalization, getting back to life and writing letters, the glimmer of hope.

Allison, Donald Hall’s granddaughter, once took him aside at a family gathering and told him she would move into his house at Eagle Pond after him. He felt happy imaging the Hall generations that would go on to live there. It appears Allison did not keep her promise. In 2019 there was an estate sale and Eagle Pond Farm became Eagle Pond, Inc., and while no Hall family inhabits the farm, the estate is still around and has potential for writers residencies. I am not sure what Donald Hall would make of this, he would probably sit back in his recliner and laugh. He was not the kind of man to strain holding back a good laugh.