August 5, 2023

Just finished A Horse at Night by Amina Cain, which Shruti gave me for my birthday. So excellent.

“Still, I’m interested in flaws in works of fiction, in why it is possible to love a book one finds flawed, maybe even more than a book that might be considered ‘perfect.’ The truth is that I like The Days of Abandonment even more than Thus Bad Begins, which, as much as I do like it, is a little distant, cold, sure of itself. The Days of Abandonment feels hot, wet, vulgar, and alive, a novel that writhes. But maybe for Ferrante, the writhing wasn’t all. Toward the end of the novel, she writes, ‘The whole future – I thought – will be that way, life lives together with the damp odor of the land of the dead, attention with inattention, passionate leaps of the heart along with abrupt losses of meaning.’ This is the exact kind of novel I would like to read, the kind of novel I would also like to write” (98).