Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalaya (Directions)
Posted By on November 11, 2011
Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalaya (Directions)
In this delightful hybrid of a book—part memoir and part travel journal—the bestselling author takes us deep into the mountains of Nepal with a trio of botanist friends in search of native Himalayan plants that will grow in her Vermont garden. Alighting from a plane in the dramatic Annapurna Valley, the ominous signs of Nepal’s Maoist guerrillas are all around—an alarming presence that accompanies the travelers throughout their trek. Undaunted, the group sets off into the mountains with Sherpas and bearers, entering an exotic world of spectacular landscapes, vertiginous slopes, isolated villages, herds of yaks, and giant rhododendron, thirty feet tall. The landscape and flora and so much else of what Kincaid finds in the Himalaya—including fruit bats, colorful Buddhist prayer flags, and the hated leeches that plague much of the trip—are new to her, and she approaches it all with an acute sense of wonder and a deft eye for detail. In beautiful, introspective prose, Kincaid intertwines the harrowing Maoist encounters with exciting botanical discoveries, fascinating daily details, and lyrical musings on gardens, nature, home, and family.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
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A Difficult Trek,
As an avid reader, enthusiastic traveler, lover of Nepal, and a wannabe gardener, I eagerly picked up “Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalaya”. Jamaica Kincaid has written of her trek through the mountains of Nepal gathering seeds to plant in her Vermont garden. What promises to be a literary trek through some of the world’s highest peaks ends up feeling more like a slow walk down an endless sidewalk. While there are a few remarkable descriptions of the mountains and rivers she crossed, most of the book is filled with the author’s introspective whining. The pages of a travel memoir should transport the reader into another land and introduce us to it’s places, people and unique culture. Unfortunately, “Among Flowers” fails to do any of those things.
The main thing that struck me about this book is how self-absorbed the author seems to be. By her own admission, she took almost no interest in what was around her unless it was of some use to her, for example, if some particular seeds would grow in her region. While she seems to have a good grasp of Latin plant names, she couldn’t learn the actual names of her Nepali porters. Instead she refers to them merely by what role they played in relation to her- the man who prepared her meals was “Cook” and the one who carried her table was “Table”. She admits that she didn’t bother noting the characteristics of the Nepali people since they couldn’t do the same for her. She makes a gross generalization of the people as either looking like they were from the South (India) or the North (Tibet), apparently not having taken the time to learn about the many indigenous Nepalese tribes. As a black woman who was raised in Antigua and now resides in America, I was very surprised at Kincaid’s lack of cultural sensitivity toward others and apparent disinterest in the people of Nepal. In addition, in two different places she mentions having a hatred for the Germans and even says “Germans seem to be the one group of people left that can not be liked just because you feel like it”.
As a piece of literature, the text is rambling and incohesive. Some sentences seem like they will never end; others left me wondering what she was talking about. She ping-pongs between what she sees and what she feels and then attempts to draw us into her distant memories. Far too much of the book is spent describing what she was thinking and complaining about things. I’m afraid the result is that she seems to be far more engrosed with herself than interested in the amazing places and people she is walking among. This book may better have been described as a personal journal than a travel memoir.
If you are interested in trekking in the Himalaya, read a different book. If gardening and seed-collecting are what you fancy, look somewhere else. However, if you want to get to know Jamaica Kincaid, this just may be the book for you.
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|Another world within a world,
Among Flowers is an account of Kincaid’s trek in the Himalaya with her botanist companions.
Kincaid, living in Vermont but originally from Antigua, is an enthusiastic gardener herself though not a seed collector to the extent of her botanist companions. On occasion, particularly at the beginning, I couldn’t help wondering what Kincaid was doing on the expedition other than gathering material for this quirky introspective book. She makes much of missing her thirteen-year old son Harold and keeps calling him on her satellite phone until Sunam, the Sherpa leader, takes it away from her due to the Maoist activity in the area. Also she is acutely aware that most of the seeds collected are not suitable for growing in Vermont and therefore shows little or no enthusiasm for them.
As regards her companions, she mentions them by name but dispenses with detailed description. It’s as if they were pale ghosts beavering away in a mystical landscape in their quest for seeds.
To say I didn’t care for the book would be wrong, rather, I did enjoy it, but found several sentences repetitive, stumbling, and bordering on the nonsensical. The writing does not flow easily …
… “Dan said we were too low for finding this; Bleddyn said, yes, but soon we would be.” …
… “It resembled something my children would play with in the bathtub, rounded and dullishly smoothed, like an old-fashioned view of the way things will look in the old-fashioned future, not pointed and harshly shiny like the future I am used to living in now.” …
… “When I told Sunam how touched I was by his presence, this little boy, the same age as my son, carrying sixty-pound loads strapped up on his back, he said of course I would be touched because Jhaba was a Sherpa.” …
… “Now the shield itself was behind me, I could no longer see the mountains that had been the shield of my destination.” …
It’s as if this stumbling style mimics Kincaid’s stumbling trek … “That night in the cold dark and snow when I had stumbled into camp, what I had missed seeing growing spectacularly among the boulders hovering above me was the great Rheum nobile, growing solitary, erect, aloof, and stiff like little sentinels.”
Despite her off-beat writing style, or because of it, Kincaid succeeds in capturing the mysterious atmosphere of her surroundings and the frustrations of seed/plant collecting combined with the real danger of confronting Maoist guerrillas. A view on another world within a world.
She manages to give an impression of possessing a contrived naivety through her writing style which is simplistic and complex all at the same time. Nevertheless, I’d prefer to have had her participate more and given a gutsier descriptive account of the seed collecting and the people surrounding her.
That’s style for you, what gets published and what doesn’t. I’d be interested to know how much editing went on. Agents and editors are notorious for cutting and suggesting re-writes for clarity or length. This book is purposely short, by Kincaid’s own admission, probably her stylistic view-point won over her editor in previous publications so that aspect was a non-starter in this one.
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