As I said in my college course, while reading this novel I felt as if I were at a holiday gathering, attempting to leave and an old, senile aunt won't leave me alone. This book was basically try-hard blathering for too many pages. I got the dismantled marriage message, but the rest of the writing...
I really tried to get through this book but I found it first, way too writerly, and second, way too depressing, and third way too predictable. It's a novel about how what we perceive now is not what we perceive then (obviously, it seems). Kincaid does a good job of showing how when we look back o...
What I loved about this book was the layering of time, the way Kincaid uses characters and metaphors to show the complexity of "now" and "then." She demonstrates the way strands of time get tangled, broken, larger sometimes, almost invisible at others. I also liked the interior monologues of Mrs....
The ambivalence of a grown child's love for his parents.I have a nephew, well-mannered and intelligent, now 20 years old. All his life he has lived with his parents in California. Except for the last six years (his only sibling, a sister, was born six years ago), he was an only child. He now wan...
“All manner of feelings are locked up within my human breast and all manner of events summon them out.” (p47) I read about Kincaid in an article on the legacy of Virginia Woolf. When I began reading, however, I felt uncomfortable with the writing style. It feels somehow abstract while being the o...
My first foray into Kincaid's wide body of work, and I certainly wasn't disappointed. Basically analyzes her, let's say, "complicated" relation with her family - her cruel mother, her feuding brothers, and in particular, her wild and horn-dog-y brother who, during the span covered by the memoir,...
I am way to the left on criminal justice issues and am strongly opposed to capital punishment, but if there is one group of offenders forcing me to reconsider my commitment to the values I hold, it is probably that comprised of people who write in library books. I'd like a grant for a study resea...
From "The Talk of the Town," Jamaica Kincaid's first impressions of snobbish, mobbish New York Talk Pieces is a collection of Jamaica Kincaid's original writing for the New Yorker's "Talk of the Town," composed during the time when she first came to the United States from Antigua, from 1978 to 1...
There is something about Nepal, something a little magical, a little mystical, completely absorbing and intriguing. Sometime during my university days, I joined a group of fellow students (from that other university in Singapore) who were going trekking in Nepal, specifically making the trip to t...
Placing a Man Under InvestigationJamaica KincaidMr. PotterFarrar Strauss and Giroux, 2002Mr. Potter tells the life story of the eponymous character as narrated by his daughter, Elaine. Set in a quiet community on the island of Antigua, the story delves into Mr. Potter's formative experiences, and...
I answered immediately that I would like to go hunting in southwestern China for seeds, which would eventually become flower-bearing shrubs and trees and herbaceous perennials in my garden. Two years before, in 1998, I had done this. I had accompanied the most outstanding American plantsman among...
If you come by aeroplane, you will land at the V. C. Bird International Airport. Vere Cornwall (V. C.) Bird is the Prime Minister of Antigua. You may be the sort of tourist who would wonder why a Prime Minister would want an airport named after him—why not a school, why not a hospital, why not so...