- Paperback: 96 pages
- Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux; Reprint edition (Sep 2000)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0374527342
- ISBN-13: 978-0374527341
- Product Dimensions: 21 x 14.2 x 0.6 cm
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 1,684,236 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Review
These ten short pieces, some of which have appeared in The New Yorker, suffer from being grouped together in book form here: there's a blurry monotony in Kincaid's prose-poem style (lists, litanies, fragments) and a limited range of imagery in her existential monologues. Still, her first collection is flecked with individuality and talent - especially in the more ironic sequences. "Girl" is a three-page list of remembered instructions from a Caribbean childhood. ("Wash the white clothes on Monday and put them on the stone heap; . . . always eat your food in such a way that it won't turn someone else's stomach; on Sundays always try to walk like a lady and not like the slut you are so bent on becoming.") Several sketches deal with the narrator's fragmented, abstracted images of a beloved, overpowering mother, one who can even appear in dreamlike exaggeration ("Sometimes I cannot see from her breasts on up, so lost is she in the atmosphere"); and this passionate, ambivalent relationship is also linked, implicitly, to the narrator's childhood ambitions, her future roles as lover and mother. ("I shall grow up to be a tall, graceful, and altogether beautiful woman, and I shall impose on large numbers of people my will and also, for my own amusement, great pain. . . Now I am a girl, but one day I will marry a woman. . . .") Far less distinctive, however, are Kincaid's adult-voiced meditations on existence, death, identity - with a few passages that read (unintentionally) like Woody Allen parodies of philosophy, and with the most familiar sort of inspirational/poetic grapplings: "In the light of the lamp, I see some books, I see a chair, I see a table, I see a pen; I see a bowl of ripe fruit, a bottle of milk, a flute made of wood, the clothes that I will wear. And as I see these things in the light of the lamp, all perishable and transient, how bound up I know I am to all that is human endeavor, to all that is past and to all that shall be. . . ." When least abstract, when least derivative (Gertrude Stein and Beckett are only two of the heavy shadows here), Kincaid shows vivid promise in this slim (80 pp.) debut; too often, unfortunately, her Caribbean/literary musings seem precious and repetitive. (Kirkus Reviews)
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Product Description
A collection of stories which plunges the reader into an intensely physical world, partly remembered, partly divined: a childhood in the Caribbean, defined by fierce emotion and poverty co-existing uneasily with teatime, churchgoing and British schoolbooks about frostbitten chimney-sweeps.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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9 reviews
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful
Love, sadness, and growing up in the Caribbean
2 May 2004
Format:Paperback
Jamaica Kincaid's AT THE BOTTOM OF THE RIVER is a study of voice and language that first brought the author recognition beyond the pages of literary journals. These ten stories, all but the last extremely short, are set in an intense Caribbean landscape where a girl comes of age in the shadow of her mother; they are hallucinatory, tense, and indirect, leaving much for the reader to interpret. For example, the first story, "Girl", is a monologue spoken by the mother giving advice ("this is how you set a table for dinner") interspersed with comments degrading the daughter. The two italicized, one-sentence responses from the daughter speak volumes about this complicated relationship. "What I Have Been Doing Lately" is a dream-like narrative that lists what the narrator is (probably not) doing and, in the process, illustrates the emotional state of someone so sad that she just wants to lie in bed. "At the Bottom of the River", the final, longest, and most traditional of the stories, implies the past and future of the narrator through visions seen "at the bottom of the river."
Kincaid's style combines the effect of the simple but perfect word with the lilt of Caribbean rhythms. On the surface, these stories are not difficult to read, but they can be challenging to understand for the reader accustomed to more traditional methods of storytelling. The collection is about as short as a book can get, and so the stories can be read in one sitting, back to back, although their absorption can take much longer.
15 of 17 people found the following review helpful
brilliant!
20 Nov 1999
Format:Paperback
Just as a diamond's facets make it shine, At the Bottom of the River is composed of disparate glimpses of brilliance. Short short stories in a unifying vein of carribean color, these pieces are mystical, sensual and poetic. The cadence of Kincaid's language takes hold of you-- you don't read this book so much as you surf it. . . you breathe it. . . you feel it resonate within you long after it's over.
14 of 19 people found the following review helpful
Strange
8 Dec 1999
Format:Paperback
A book that drifts from page to page, from consciousness to consciousness.
Reading the book is liking trying to look at things at the bottom of the river, which continuously get distorted by the movement of the water, the interplay of light reflected on the surface and shadows at the bed, and things that sometimes drift into view and out - with and for no apparent reason.
Quite an interesting experience.
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