Memoir. By a well-known Antiguan-American novelist. Focused on her gardening. Perhaps an odd choice for me, given that I have never read any of Kincaid’s novels (though I do remember carrying stacks of them when I briefly worked at a campus bookstore many years ago) and that I am not a gardener (though I dabbled a bit when I was younger). But a few times before, I have read books that are quiet, meditative, thoughtful, closely focused on perhaps gardening as an activity or maybe gardens as places or even some broader consideration of the life pastoral, and I have really taken to them. Not sure why – I grew up in a little town, but have no desire to live anywhere other than the urban downtown that I currently call home, and as I said I made a decision at some point along the way not to turn yard work into a hobby. But I am a fan of the quiet and the thoughtful, as well as of writing that enacts fine-grained attention, and that might explain the appeal. I’m not sure how I heard about this book, but whatever it was gave the impression that it would evoke that same sort of feeling. Which it did. Kincaid is a wonderful writer with long, winding sentences, packed full of details, asides, and rhythmic repetition. She has an eye for the absurd in herself and other people, and has an unabashed willingness to put her in-progress, still-learning, green-thumbed passion on display. And where some writers might have produced an account of self and plants and not much more, Kincaid is quite clear that “the world cannot be left out of the garden” (82). As someone who thinks the world cannot be left out of anything, this made me enjoy it all the more. In a way that remains organically connected to the detailed considerations of plants, her close observations of her own garden and those of others, her feelings about and in different seasons, her readings of nursery catalogues and how-to books, her encounters with botanists, and all the rest, she also asks “What is the relationship between gardening and conquest?” (116) and various other things that you might describe as postcolonial. Anyway, I’m sure I would have gotten more out of this book if I was, in fact, a gardener, and if my brain had visuals to attach to words like *Scabiosa ochroleuca* and foxglove and campanula. But, still, I got what I wanted from it.
Originally posted by Scott on Goodreads.