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Annie John A Novel Jamaica Kincaid 9780374525101 Books

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Annie John A Novel Jamaica Kincaid 9780374525101 Books

I resisted reading this when it first came out -- didn't seem like my kind of thing -- but recently I had to read it in order to teach it. I was impressed. It's very cunningly put together, in eight sections each of which focuses on a different stage of Annie John's growing up (I see the book as covering six or seven years), and what one learns in each section makes you reconsider the previous ones so that by the end, the reader has developed a rich sense of psychological and cultural complications. And yet the basic structure is perfectly clear -- a girl reaches a point where she has to separate herself from her mother and she is both empowered by and anxious about that separation. Think of "Paradise Lost," with Adam and Eve separated from paradise and free to work out their own destinies, yet also casting some longing looks back to a time when they didn't have to think of themselves as selves. (In case we don't get the parallel, Annie refers to her situation as "paradise" early in the book, and as a punishment for bad behavior at school, she is made to copy out Books 1 and 2 of Milton's epic.)

Annie's ambivalence shows up in all sorts of ways: in her different ways of responding to her mother; in her friendships with the "good" Gwen and the "bad" Red Girl; in her sometimes outrageous behavior and her stellar academic performance. And the world remains even as she grows up something of a mystery to her -- her mother seems to get angriest with her for behavior that is far from her most outrageous, and it is her mother who seems to spark the separation at the time she starts calling Annie a "young lady," although it might well be that Annie is ready at that point to make an issue of something that will establish some distance. She often says that she doesn't understand why she does what she does, and at such times, I think, Kincaid has nailed something about adolescence truthfully and unsentimentally.

I like the way too that the book develops a cultural-political subtext that puts Annie's growing freedom in the context of the colonial heritage of Antigua. When Annie sees a picture in her history book of Columbus in Chains, she defaces it by writing under it "The Great Man can no longer get up and go." Columbus, of course, is the godfather of European colonialism, and Annie is being educated in a school run on English lines (Queen Victoria's birthday is celebrated). So her defacing can be seen to represent the impotence of these old structures -- as can the girls lying on the tombstones of the old colonial masters as they discuss their changing bodies in adolescence.

I haven't even mentioned the picture that we get throughout of Annie's parents' marriage (apparently close and sexual, despite a 35-year age gap), as well as the tension between the old ways that are associated with the Caribbean ("obeah" magic and healing) and relatively modern medicine. The whole effect is to enrich a familiar story line ("growing up") in a way that makes the narrative voice distinctive and, in its concreteness, plausible and that embeds it in a very specific culture at a particular historical moment. Very much worth reading -- and very readable.


Tags : Annie John: A Novel [Jamaica Kincaid] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Annie John </i>is a haunting and provocative story of a young girl growing up on the island of Antigua. A classic coming-of-age story in the tradition of The Catcher in the Rye </i>and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,Jamaica Kincaid,Annie John: A Novel,Farrar, Straus and Giroux,0374525102,Antigua and Barbuda,Bildungsromans,Domestic fiction,Mothers and daughters,Teenage girls,FICTION Coming of Age,FICTION General,Fiction,Fiction - General,Fiction Literary,General,Kincaid, Jamaica - Prose & Criticism,Literary

Annie John A Novel Jamaica Kincaid 9780374525101 Books Reviews

Annie John is a young girl in Antigua who, over the course of this series of stories, asserts her independence in a manner practiced since the beginning of time by battling it out with her mother.

It's surely not incidental or accidental that the closings of four early chapters end with the phrase "When I got home, . . ." The stories describe Annie's adventures away from family, and the consequences of each return trace the weakening of the bond with her mother. In the first chapter, an attempt to lie about a small act of forgetfulness is punished with an appropriately light sentence, but by bedtime all is forgiven. In the second chapter, Annie has learned which of her activities to reveal and which to hide upon her arrival home. By the third chapter, Annie looks at her mother and "could not understand how she could be so beautiful even though I no longer loved her." And by the middle of the book, Annie "gets home" and the tables turn, as her mother tries (and fails) to play a trivial trick on her "because it's very good for you." From then on, it's a psychological war of wills; home, rather than a refuge, becomes a prison from which Annie needs to escape. "It was as if my mother turned into a crocodile."

As their relationship deteriorates, we follow Annie as her exploits become less innocent and more audacious. Her experiences are often humorous and sometimes misguided but always filled with adolescent angst and curiosity. Her two girlfriends, the pretty schoolgirl Gwen and the transgressive Red Girl, teach her about love; a horrible illness teaches her to appreciate life. Her mother, however, disapproves of her after-school absences, her friends, her public flirtations with boys--even playing marbles sets the woman off. Annie mistakes discipline and worry for tyranny and scorn; Mrs. John, for her part, becomes unduly suspicious and overprotective. The intensity of the quarrels increase until a line is crossed with a reckless, instantly regretted salvo, causing Mrs. John to exclaim, "Until this moment, in my whole life I knew without a doubt that, without any exception, I loved you best." As any older teenager (or parent) knows, once this summit is reached it is a difficult journey back down the mountain.

Kincaid's coming-of-age story certainly isn't the first novel to feature a mother-daughter rivalry, but what distinguishes hers from most others is its calm prose and unsentimental stance. Annie's reminiscences are tempered by the mature reflection of adulthood--by a mixture of love, regret, melancholy, and nostalgia. The subdued tone might deceive some readers (especially, judging from some of the reviews, younger students) into thinking that not much "happens." But what is really going on is a war of attrition between two people who love each other dearly and continually fail to let the other know.
I had to read this novel for a class. The author. has a beautiful style of describing in minut detail of everything that happens Jamaica Kincaids descriptions of each character is wonderfully expressed. At the end of the last chapter I thought there would be. A lot more. What is exemplary is the fact that though yhe authorcis describing a child growing up in Antigua the trials and tribulations she faces is not differentc from any child elsewhere! Bravo!
I resisted reading this when it first came out -- didn't seem like my kind of thing -- but recently I had to read it in order to teach it. I was impressed. It's very cunningly put together, in eight sections each of which focuses on a different stage of Annie John's growing up (I see the book as covering six or seven years), and what one learns in each section makes you reconsider the previous ones so that by the end, the reader has developed a rich sense of psychological and cultural complications. And yet the basic structure is perfectly clear -- a girl reaches a point where she has to separate herself from her mother and she is both empowered by and anxious about that separation. Think of "Paradise Lost," with Adam and Eve separated from paradise and free to work out their own destinies, yet also casting some longing looks back to a time when they didn't have to think of themselves as selves. (In case we don't get the parallel, Annie refers to her situation as "paradise" early in the book, and as a punishment for bad behavior at school, she is made to copy out Books 1 and 2 of Milton's epic.)

Annie's ambivalence shows up in all sorts of ways in her different ways of responding to her mother; in her friendships with the "good" Gwen and the "bad" Red Girl; in her sometimes outrageous behavior and her stellar academic performance. And the world remains even as she grows up something of a mystery to her -- her mother seems to get angriest with her for behavior that is far from her most outrageous, and it is her mother who seems to spark the separation at the time she starts calling Annie a "young lady," although it might well be that Annie is ready at that point to make an issue of something that will establish some distance. She often says that she doesn't understand why she does what she does, and at such times, I think, Kincaid has nailed something about adolescence truthfully and unsentimentally.

I like the way too that the book develops a cultural-political subtext that puts Annie's growing freedom in the context of the colonial heritage of Antigua. When Annie sees a picture in her history book of Columbus in Chains, she defaces it by writing under it "The Great Man can no longer get up and go." Columbus, of course, is the godfather of European colonialism, and Annie is being educated in a school run on English lines (Queen Victoria's birthday is celebrated). So her defacing can be seen to represent the impotence of these old structures -- as can the girls lying on the tombstones of the old colonial masters as they discuss their changing bodies in adolescence.

I haven't even mentioned the picture that we get throughout of Annie's parents' marriage (apparently close and sexual, despite a 35-year age gap), as well as the tension between the old ways that are associated with the Caribbean ("obeah" magic and healing) and relatively modern medicine. The whole effect is to enrich a familiar story line ("growing up") in a way that makes the narrative voice distinctive and, in its concreteness, plausible and that embeds it in a very specific culture at a particular historical moment. Very much worth reading -- and very readable.