Books about reading other books are a genre where the act of reading is always, unfailingly, romanticised. Amina Cain’s first foray into nonfiction, A Horse at Night, is no different. Two years ago, she wrote a remarkable novel, Indelicacy, about a cleaner in an art museum wanting to produce art herself. Now she has written a book-length essay where she reads fiction, (and watches cinema, and stares at paintings) not for the value of the stories they tell, but for the landscapes they portray. The essay is a chain of images moving fast, compiled to create a heightened, artful experience for the reader. “It’s not always language I’m drawn to first,” she writes. “I often begin with setting. Before plot, before dialogue, before anything else.” The images shift from settings by the ocean, to night-time, to freezing winters, to the natural world. The narrators and the backstories of these novels, paintings and films are made to disappear. What remains is the reader alone with these visions. The word in the book that describes best what Cain is trying to evoke in the reader is “picture-feeling”. It is taken from a Renee Gladman book of the same name, but Cain cannot remember what it was about.
