My Brother

by Kincaid, Jamaica

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Description

New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Hardcover. 1st Edition. October 30, 199. Very Good. 1st edition. Very good condition. Jacket in very good condition. Clean and tight. Practically unread condition. Compassion only occasionally lightens the grim tone of Jamaica Kincaid's se aring account of her younger brother Devon's 1996 death from AIDS. As in no vels such as Annie John, Kincaid is ruthlessly honest about her ambivalence toward the impoverished Caribbean nation from which she fled, her restrict ive family, and the culture that imprisoned Devon. That honesty, which incl udes chilling detachment from her brother's suffering, is sometimes alienat ing. But art has its own justifications. The bitter clarity of Kincaid's pr ose and the tangled, undeniably human feelings it lucidly dissects are just ification enough. From Library Journal Reading novelist Kincaid's prose is like learning all over again why one writes: to sift endlessly, reorder, and distill one's raw, cluttered experience so that what emerges is, quite simply, perfect. Kincaid has written most recently about her mother (The Autobiography of My Mother, LJ 1/96), and indeed is still writing about her mother, though obliquely, in this memoir of her youngest brother, who died at age 33 from AIDS. Kincaid did not know until after his death that he was homosexual; she had not seen him for 20 years before his illness. In gently insistent, incantatory prose, she recounts their forced reunion, the complicated feelings his illness evokes, the pity and anger she feels for a life senselessly squandered, and her coming to love him as he lay dying. Being back in her native Antigua, and especially near her mother, stirs powerful and painful memories, an .

Book summary

Jamaica Kincaid writes candidly and with affection about her gifted brother, who died of AIDS at 33 after a troubled life. In the process, she evokes her growing up on the island of Antigua, and the terrifying woman who is her mother.