Memories are so vivid in the works of Kincaid that they might as well be the present tense. Her writing is non-linear, her plots share more with poems than with engines, and yet she is compulsively readable. She starts there with the okra trees and the tamarind grove, the cherry grove and the bright blue of the sky and the sea. Kincaid’s fiction is mostly set on the small Caribbean island of Antigua. It is true, so true, and yet it happens to us every year, if we are lucky enough to live somewhere that has still retained seasons: the surprise of winter, the shock of spring. This is her writing about wisteria in My Garden Book (2001):īut what am I to do with this droopy, weepy sadness in the middle of summer, with the color and shape reminding me of mourning, as it does in spring remind me of mourning but mourning the death of something that happened long ago (winter is dead in spring, and not only that, there is no hint that it will ever come again). She once said in an interview that when she was gardening, she was thinking about writing, and when she was writing, she was thinking about gardening. You might return to her work years later and find it still blooming like the gardens she writes about so vividly. She is fearless, her work feeds off mythical realities, rich rivalries, her work is deadly alive, brazenly breaking customs and conventions. She is afraid of nothing as a writer, and never seeks her reader’s approval you’ll love her or not, she doesn’t mind.

(She is, she is six feet tall.) It is big because her themes are huge her principal character is time itself. Re-reading Annie John for the umpteenth time in 2022, I was surprised to find that it is a wee book.

Annie John by Jamaica Kincaid