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#15. A Small Place, by Jamaica Kincaid
Jun. 15th, 2009 12:31 am![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
whereweather.livejournal.comA Small Place, Jamaica Kincaid
1988. Farrar, Straus and Giroux
I am a fan of Jamaica Kincaid. In the last year or so I have read her books At the Bottom of the River, Annie John, and Lucy, and got a lot out of each of them. I was looking forward to reading A Small Place because I was looking forward to learning more about Antigua, the Caribbean island she comes from. (Both Annie John and At the Bottom of the River are set on Antigua, but since they are pretty much in the mind of a first-person narrator, who is usually a child, there is not the kind of distance that you'd need to be _told about_ Antigua -- the kind of political, historical, or sociological things about it that might be interesting to a grown-up North American reader.)
I am disappointed in A Small Place, partly because... I'm not sure what the book wants to be. I've seen it described as a "travelogue," and also as a "jeremiad." The first section, or chapter (like many of Kincaid's books, it is very short: 80 pages of large, clear print), starts off in second-person: it is telling "you," the traveller, what to expect when you arrive in Antigua. The next two sections are in first person, with many recollections of Kincaid's early life in Antigua, which move out and away to analysis of what the problems of the island are (the second section considers mostly colonialism and slavery, the third the island's desperate political corruption.) There is also a very short fourth section, which feels sort of tacked on for closure.
I guess I feel as if the book is not very tight or well-held together, in spite of its size -- and a small book needs that even more, doesn't it? Although her fiction is also full of digressions, I feel as if they work and shape to a larger whole. A Small Place is strangely imbalanced, though: analysis, personal recollection, anger carrying the writer away.. Part of the issue, maybe, is that she seems to sort of be writing around or even trying to get at certain ideas and concepts which have, I think, been formulated more concisely and forcefully by various other post-colonialist theorists and writers. But Kincaid does not want to seem to avail herself of any of that language or intellectual discourse, and so it feels as if she is lurching at things and coming up short. (It feels odd and audacious to level this criticism at Jamaica Kincaid, whose intellect is profound and formidable and whose writing sometimes borders on genius. But nonetheless, that is how the book made me feel.)
( Despite that, there were entire passages I want to copy out to think about and remember. )
1988. Farrar, Straus and Giroux
I am a fan of Jamaica Kincaid. In the last year or so I have read her books At the Bottom of the River, Annie John, and Lucy, and got a lot out of each of them. I was looking forward to reading A Small Place because I was looking forward to learning more about Antigua, the Caribbean island she comes from. (Both Annie John and At the Bottom of the River are set on Antigua, but since they are pretty much in the mind of a first-person narrator, who is usually a child, there is not the kind of distance that you'd need to be _told about_ Antigua -- the kind of political, historical, or sociological things about it that might be interesting to a grown-up North American reader.)
I am disappointed in A Small Place, partly because... I'm not sure what the book wants to be. I've seen it described as a "travelogue," and also as a "jeremiad." The first section, or chapter (like many of Kincaid's books, it is very short: 80 pages of large, clear print), starts off in second-person: it is telling "you," the traveller, what to expect when you arrive in Antigua. The next two sections are in first person, with many recollections of Kincaid's early life in Antigua, which move out and away to analysis of what the problems of the island are (the second section considers mostly colonialism and slavery, the third the island's desperate political corruption.) There is also a very short fourth section, which feels sort of tacked on for closure.
I guess I feel as if the book is not very tight or well-held together, in spite of its size -- and a small book needs that even more, doesn't it? Although her fiction is also full of digressions, I feel as if they work and shape to a larger whole. A Small Place is strangely imbalanced, though: analysis, personal recollection, anger carrying the writer away.. Part of the issue, maybe, is that she seems to sort of be writing around or even trying to get at certain ideas and concepts which have, I think, been formulated more concisely and forcefully by various other post-colonialist theorists and writers. But Kincaid does not want to seem to avail herself of any of that language or intellectual discourse, and so it feels as if she is lurching at things and coming up short. (It feels odd and audacious to level this criticism at Jamaica Kincaid, whose intellect is profound and formidable and whose writing sometimes borders on genius. But nonetheless, that is how the book made me feel.)
( Despite that, there were entire passages I want to copy out to think about and remember. )
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