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.
