Thursday, August 29, 2013

Good Reads Review

Reviewer Matt Lived in the Shirley Jackson house as found in the Jamaica Kincaid's,  See Now Then

"So I read "See Then Now" yesterday afternoon. I read it because I enjoy Jamaica's voice. I also read it because it the vast majority of the book takes place in the house I grew up in, the Shirley Jackson house. Jamaica's house was across the street.

I can see how the appearance of folks from the neighborhood might cause some anxiety to those referenced, but there was nothing that struck me as particularly fanciful. Jamaica is a self-centered person and always has been. I think she's aware of this fact and I've always thought this facet of her personality made her more interesting. Jamaica is a storyteller and I appreciate storytellers far more than reporters. This book is obviously her take on things rather than an attempt to depict things as they actually are/were, but I can see things as they were through her eyes. We all see the past modified by time. Recent studies have shown that each time we remember a past event we are in fact remembering the last remembrance of that event rather than the event itself. Our self image as a product of our memory is nothing more than an ongoing game of telephone we play with ourselves. This is the reason that the courts no longer give weight to eye-witness accounts during criminal proceedings. This is why it's irrelevant whether or not this book is a novel or a memoir.

The book was probably not fair to her ex-husband (and children). I guess I think that's okay. We should all probably be nicer to others, particularly our own families. In my future memoir of my hometown I'll probably be kinder to everyone. If Jamaica had done so it would seem false, particularly given the temporal proximity to her divorce and the abandonment/maturing by her babies. I do think it was fair to the village, a place where the volunteer fire department does spend more time washing their trucks than fighting fires and people are occasionally buried in their hunting clothes. Not that that's all there is to the place, but it is part of it."

Tuesday, June 18, 2013

Interview with Jamaica Kincaid




Does Truth Have a Tone?

Lauren K. Alleyne interviews Jamaica Kincaid
June 17, 2013

"For this interview, Kincaid spoke with me early one morning via Skype (once she’d awakened her son to help her figure out “how it worked”). We only used the audio feature, as she assured me I was missing nothing but the rumpled sight of her drinking coffee in bed. When she learned I was from Trinidad, she confessed to having made up, as a child, a cousin from Trinidad named Jillian—a way to keep up with her friends, who all seemed to have tons of relatives. I offered her use of my cousin of the same name, and so we began our conversation about fiction, non-fiction, history, and what it means to tell the truth."

– Lauren K. Alleyne for Guernica

Follow the link to read the interview:

http://www.guernicamag.com/interviews/does-truth-have-a-tone/

Tuesday, May 14, 2013

KINCAID IS OFFENDED

Jamaica Kincaid, 2010. (Elisabetta A. Villa/Getty Images)
KINCAID IS OFFENDED BY THOSE WHO READ HER NEW NOVEL AS AUTOBIOGRAPHY! 

Book Review 
 


I'M IMAGINING THE DAISY FLOWER: SHE LOVES ME? SHE LOVES ME NOT?

AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL: 

"See Now Then is about the failing marriage between a writer and a composer living in a small New England village. The writer, Mrs. Sweet, is black and from the Caribbean, and her husband, Mr. Sweet, is white and comes from a princely faction of New York “entitled to doormen, no matter what.” The book’s premise appears to be borrowed from Kincaid’s own life: In 2002, her 20-year marriage to the composer Allen Shawn ended in divorce. Kincaid continues to live in the Bennington home they shared."

NOT AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL: 

"Kincaid, however, is offended by the notion that her fiction is autobiographical. “It’s belittling to think that what I’ve done hinges so much on my own life. It’s as if the reality of what I’ve written is hard to take in so that people must ask about my life rather than what I’ve written,” Kincaid said. “The purpose of the novel wasn’t to talk about the intimate details of my life. The biggest character in the book is the thing we call time: What connects you to tomorrow."

Tuesday, March 19, 2013

Don't Read (only) as Autobiography: A Cautionary Review

Review gives Kincaid's book a B-

  " shouldn’t be read as purely autobiographical"

 by Kevin McFarland March 18, 2013 

A.V. CLUB

"See Now Then, Jamaica Kincaid’s first novel since 2002’s Mr. Potter, shouldn’t be read as purely autobiographical. The facts do line up well: Kincaid’s former husband, Allen Shawn (Wallace Shawn’s brother) is a composer; they had two children together, a boy and a girl; they lived in Bennington, Vermont. The novel depicts a crumbling marriage between Mr. and Mrs. Sweet, a composer and a writer, respectively, who live with their son and a daughter in a small New England town. But it isn’t a book about another American divorce. See Now Then elevates marriage difficulty to the level of myth and archetype, to represent a fundamental part of the American story. Unfortunately, Kincaid focuses so much on the style of the lyric novel that it hinders the potential emotional impact."

Here we are allowed to read it autobiographically but not as "pure" autobiography!

Friday, March 8, 2013

Jamaica Kincaid Answers 10 Questions on YouTube

Jamaica Kincaid: 'I hope the reader won't look for clues to my life in the book...it's about something deeper.'

Time Interview (Time Video)

January 28, 2013.
Belinda Luscombe



Monday, February 25, 2013

Reviewer of Jamaica Kincaid's "See Now Then" Notes External Details Match Up



Time flies, cleverly, in 'See Now Then'

February 24, 2013



Philly.com

Reviewed by Susan Balée (follow link)




"See here, readers: See Now Then, the new novel by Jamaica Kincaid, traces the interior history of a (ticked off) black woman whose heart has been broken by her (once beloved) husband. And although she says otherwise in interviews, it sure looks like Kincaid is the woman and her erstwhile ex-, Allen Shawn (son of famous editor William, brother of actor Wallace), is the heartbreaker.
 All the external details match up: Shawn and Kincaid's life in Bennington, Vt., where he taught musical composition and she composed prose in their house, possibly the house where the horror writer Shirley Jackson once lived, but certainly a haunted place; their daughter and son; his neuroses (Shawn has written a book about anxiety) and short stature, her middle-aged largesse and love of gardening; his ultimately leaving her for a younger woman. Although the main characters in this book are called Mr. and Mrs. Sweet, the Mrs. quotes from her writings and they are recognizably works by Jamaica Kincaid."


Friday, February 22, 2013

It's Not About Me! Interview with JAMAICA KINCAID

 Printers Row Journal Interview Kevin Nance


Interview

(click to read the complete version of the Printers Row Journal interview with Jamaica Kincaid published in the Chicago Tribune)

Author Jamaica Kincaid poses for a portrait in the backyard of her home in Claremont, Calif. on Friday, February 1, 2013. (Patrick T. Fallon, Chicago Tribune)

Q: And so the story of the family, including the decaying marriage at the center of it, is really subordinate to your thoughts about time.

A: Yes. You might be the first interviewer who hasn't started out by saying, "You were married to a composer, you have two children, you live in Vermont, so this must be about you." It's not about me. If I were going to write a book about me, believe me, I would say so.

Reviewer Asserts Sweets are Fictional Stand"-ins

Chicago Tribune Lifestyles Review:

'See Now Then': Jamaica Kincaid's new symphony

In 'See Now Then,' a once-lyrical marriage disintegrates, leaving nothing but cacophony

February 01, 2013|By Alan Cheuse

"The Sweets, fictional stand-ins for Kincaid and her former husband, live in the (real-life) village of North Bennington, Vt., in a house formerly owned by (real-life) eccentric novelist Shirley Jackson and her (real-life) husband, the brilliant literary critic Stanley Edgar Hyman. Mr. Sweet is a modernist composer, and Mrs. Sweet, born in the Caribbean, is a housewife, mother and lay philosopher when it comes to the large questions of time and language."

Review Again See Now Then

"Writers make uncomfortable kin." Jamaica Kincaid

 No doubt! Jamaica Kincaid draws attention to that issue in her new novel SEE NOW THEN. Check out the following review where the author's life is directly referred to when reviewing her fictional novel.


JAMAICA KINCAID
Photo by Ann Summa for The New York Times


February 22, 2013

Home Truths

"Yet Kincaid, it seems, can never breathe easy. “See Now Then,” her first novel in 10 years, examines the hidden fault lines of a happy family that might be seen as an allegorical version of her own. Composed in incantatory prose, a “Mrs. Dalloway”-like loop of multiple viewpoints, including passages quoted or imagined from Kincaid’s other books, the novel examines — in strains hurtling from satire to fairy-tale innocence to raw pain — the faulty nature of perception."

Friday, February 15, 2013

Interactive Autobiography (TM) and Jamaica Kincaid: STUDIO 360 INTERVIEW

STUDIO 360 INTERVIEW

Studio 360

Interview

by Kurt Andersen

Jamaica Kincaid on The New Yorker and Lil’ Kim


"Kincaid’s work (Annie John, Lucy, Autobiography of My Mother) has often dealt with her Caribbean upbringing, but her new novel, See Now Then, is set in North Bennington, Vermont, the town where Kincaid has lived for many years. It’s the story of Mrs. Sweet, a mother with two grown children in a marriage that’s gone very sour.
Many particulars of the book — the town, the gardening, the Caribbean upbringing, the unsuccessful composer, the dissolving marriage — resemble Kincaid’s real life, but she insists See Now Then is not autobiographical. “I wasn’t thinking of myself, I was thinking of all sorts of larger things,” she tells Kurt Andersen. Kurt was struck by how the book’s prose is both “poetic, fragrant, and a little other-worldly but also ruthlessly and shockingly unsentimental at times.” Kincaid explains that “it’s possible it’s influenced by where I spent my forming years which is incredibly beautiful, but in which some rather brutal things happened in the world after 1492.”

AUDIO INTERVIEW


Thursday, February 14, 2013

SEE NOW THEN More Reviews

More Reviews IN THE

MIX

 


USA TODAY

By Elysa Gardner, USA TODAY
Published: February 13, 2013

Jamaica Kincaid’s ‘See Now Then’ is one quirky read

"Like Kincaid's ex-husband, Allen Shawn, Mr. Sweet is a composer. They live in a small New England town, as Shawn and Kincaid did, and have a son and daughter, as the former couple do. But Kincaid's first book in nearly a decade is not a barely fictionalized memoir, or so the author has insisted. As she recently told a reporter, her real children are not, like the Sweet kids, named Heracles and Persephone, and 'my daughter doesn't disappear underground every six months and emerge in the spring.'

Such coyness is pervasive in See Now Then — though so is bawdy humor and unabashed rage and sorrow. There are passages that are almost unbearably self-pitying, with Kincaid — um, that is, Mrs. Sweet — lamenting her husband's disdain for her Caribbean heritage and no-longer-youthful figure. We learn, too, of the 'turbulence and upheaval' she has endured from childhood on: 'I seemed unable to do anything that pleased anyone and that included me,' she writes toward the end."


LOS ANGELES TIMES




THE NEW YORK TIMES 

The Marriage Has Ended; Revenge Begins

"When Dorothy Parker drank too much, Gore Vidal once reported, she sometimes suffered from what she ruefully called “the frankies”: the inclination to tell people, as if for their own good, what she really thought of them.

There’s something about the men of the Shawn family — William, the longtime editor of The New Yorker, who died in 1992, and now his son, Allen, a composer — that seems to give women the frankies while sober. 

In 1998 Lillian Ross published “Here but Not Here,” a memoir of her 40-year affair with the married William Shawn. She outed this famously private man, while his wife was still living, as an enthusiast for pornography who “longed for the earthiest and wildest kinds of sexual adventures,” among many other things."

SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

Polly Rosenwaike
 
One can't help thinking that Kincaid's easily Googleable ex-husband will not be pleased by the arrival of "See Now Then." How should the rest of us feel? Exhilarated, grateful - and relieved, perhaps, that Kincaid can't see inside our own heads."

Wednesday, February 13, 2013

See Now Then

Recent Review

 

 

 How does Jamaica Kincaid's veiled self-reference influence the reading of her new book, "See Now Then"?

All of this is relevant because Kincaid, the author of more than a dozen books, is a public literary figure. And seen through the lens of some basic but widely known facts of her life, reading "See Now Then" becomes quite a different experience.        
                                                                                     

"by the time I reached that last passage, the domestic complications of See Now Then began to lose their entirely magical and allegorical qualities and feel more like the nastiness of a real marriage." His sense of the similarity between the author's life and the artistic work, causes him to conduct some research about her personal life. In his reading, knowing that the family composition and marital disagreement are close or shared with the author interrupts his ability to read the work as art (literary prose) alone. 

In fact he recommends readers who do not know about her life to avoid the details and warns them to stop reading his review because, "you would enjoy it more." The parallels that he points out between the character Mrs. Sweet and the author Kincaid are that she gardens, lives in small town New England, and the family composition are the same, which taken alone are not so significant. For him, the most impacting similarity is that as the husband and wife trade insults, the physical attributes commented upon are similar to those of the author and her ex-husband's physical appearance. He said the resemblances were disconcerting and he began to feel "voyeuristic." Later, the indications about the father's aggressive feelings toward the son and his possessiveness towards the daughter seem to "express a very personal, private hurt." Tobar concludes that the book deserves to be read as fiction, and yet he clearly cannot avoid making connections. He reads it as a veiled  memoir. Certainly, this is a favorable review and yet he concludes:"There are two ways to read Jamaica Kincaid's mesmerizing new novel, See Now Then.The first is the way any work of art should be read: by simply absorbing what's on the page. This is how I read the first two-thirds of See Now Then."

What is important about this review is that even though the reviewer did not know much about Jamaica Kincaid's personal life before reading her novel, he was still influenced by the presence of the autobiographical within her writing.When I heard audio recorded readings of sections of this work, I noted that the audiences laughed at what seemed to be insider jokes; for example, comments that could be about her daughter and son's behavior (but presented in this fiction) has a familiar feeling. For readers who are familiar with the author's previous works, the influence of her autobiography will likely be more forceful.


Monday, February 4, 2013

Jamaica Kincaid's "See Now Then" is Published

Anticipating Reactions to the Autobiographical in Jamaica Kincaid's See Now Then

( Elisabetta A. Villa, Getty Images / February 1, 2013 )
Jamaica Kincaid at Festival Delle Letterature Di Roma 2010



"There are two ways to read Jamaica Kincaid's mesmerizing new novel, See Now Then. The first is the way any work of art should be read: by simply absorbing what's on the page. This is how I read the first two-thirds of See Now Then."




See Now Then
A Novel
Jamaica Kincaid
Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 192 pp., $24

It becomes impossible to avoid the personal life story of Kincaid during his well-intended reading: READ AS ART. 
Tobar who has little knowledge about Kincaid's personal life but he becomes too tempted to verify details and consequently, does some research and reports on the findings. His research changes the reading from simply ART to Art -Influenced-Autobiography and it completely changes the meaning of her work. He writes that "All of this is relevant because Kincaid, the author of more than a dozen books, is a public literary figure. And seen through the lens of some basic but widely known facts of her life, reading "See Now Then" becomes quite a different experience." Similarities about the physical appearance of Mrs. Sweet to Kincaid and Mr. Sweet to her former husband, Allen Shawn begin to create another layer of meaning in the work- it begins to feel "uncomfortably voyeuristic"  as he reads.  I await the arrival of my copy and my own sneak peek  into Jamaica Kincaid's life.

Sunday, January 27, 2013

Jamaica Kincaid Girl Audio Recording


I imagine that Jamaica Kincaid lived in a house such as the above when she was a child.

Jamaica Kincaid takes her children to the school bus in Vermont.

Jamaica Kincaid reading (photo credit and link to Girl text)

 Listen...to Jamaica Kincaid's voice...

Kincaid reads her short story "Girl"