At the Bottom of the River

Written by Jamaica Kincaid

Narrated by Robin Miles

Jamaica Kincaid's At the Bottom of the River . . . inspired, lyrical short stories



Reading Jamaica Kincaid is to plunge, gently, into another way of seeing both the physical world and its elusive inhabitants. Her voice is, by turns, naively whimsical and biblical in its assurance, and it speaks of what is partially remembered partly divined. The memories often concern a childhood in the Caribbean—family, manners, and landscape—as distilled and transformed by Kincaid's special style and vision.



Kincaid leads her readers to consider, as if for the first time, the powerful ties between mother and child; the beauty and destructiveness of nature; the gulf between the masculine and the feminine; the significance of familiar things—a house, a cup, a pen. Transfiguring our human form and our surroundings—shedding skin, darkening an afternoon, painting a perfect place—these stories tell us something we didn't know, in a way we hadn't expected.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Highbridge Company
• Release date: Jul 1, 2025
• ISBN: 9781696695039

Jamaica Kincaid

Jamaica Kincaid wurde 1949 als Elaine Potter Richardson auf Antigua geboren. Mit siebzehn ging sie als Au-pair nach New York, wo sie bald zur Schriftstellerin wurde, zu Jamaica Kincaid. Ihre erste Erzählung »Girl«, die aus nur einem einzigen Satz besteht, erschien im New Yorker und machte Kincaid schlagartig berühmt. Viele ihrer Erzählungen und Romane handeln von ihrer besonderen Rolle als Tochter, als Frau, als Angehörige einer ehemaligen Kolonie. Neben ihren gewichtigen Themen ist Kincaid durch ihre eigenwillige Sprache und ihren stark autobiographischen Ansatz bekannt geworden. Sie lehrt African and African American Studies in Harvard und lebt in Vermont.

Reviews for At the Bottom of the River

[beserene · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Kincaid is not someone I read a lot; multiple students in my publication workshop this past spring listed her as a favorite author and it occurred to me then that I had not read anything of hers in a good 20 years. But sometimes I do like to challenge myself, so I thought I'd go back to her classic.

This is the shortest book I've read this week but it has taken me the longest to read; I've dipped in and out of it all day. It's not the kind of book I can feast on all at once, in a single sitting. I have to sit with it and chew on the pieces. The publisher calls them "stories" but they are more like prose-shaped poems, memories of variable cohesiveness. I'm more literal-minded than I should be, for an English professor, and I crave narrative like a comforting narcotic. Kincaid sometimes allows me to find the story in the gaps but just as often forces me to go without.

Even in those moments, though, I appreciate the wash of her language, like the sentences are giving my brain a good and useful scrub. Sometimes I have to stop reading and just see, in my mind's eye, the most vivid images that she spins out of the minutia of everyday existence, like with "the skin of an orange -- removed as if it had been a decorous and much-valued belt" which I thought about for a lot longer than one might expect.

It's not every afternoon that I ponder an orange. But some books make you look at the world in a different way than you've been used to, which is a good thing to do, and this is one of those books.

[edwinbcn · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

At the bottom of the river by Jamaica Kincaid is a colourful and poetic evocation of the Caribbean. The prose has a thoroughly poetic quality. Rhythmic repetition of sentence patterns and words hints at the rhythms of life, short sentences at a relative simplicity. Beauty is enhanced by detail-rich descriptions of people and the surrounding natural world.

With this work Kincaid completely lives up to her reputation. The book gave me exactly the reading pleasure I was hoping to find.