Autobiography of My Mother (Paperback)

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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

"My mother died at the moment I was born, and so for my whole life there was nothing standing between myself and eternity," writes Jamaica Kincaid in this disturbing, compelling novel set on the island of Dominica. Born to a doomed Carib woman and a Scottish African policeman of increasing swagger and wealth, narrator Xuela spends a lifetime unanchored by family or love. She disdains the web of small and big lies that link others, allowing only pungent, earthy sensuality--a mix of blood and dirt and sex--to move her. Even answering its siren call, though, Xuela never loses sight of the sharp loss that launched her into the world and the doors through which she will take her leave.

From Publishers Weekly

Kincaid's third novel (after Annie John) is presented as the mesmerizing, harrowing, richly metaphorical autobiography of 70-year-old Xuela Claudette Richardson. Earthy, intractably antisocial, acridly introspective, morbidly obsessed with history and identity, conquest and colonialism, language and silence, Xuela recounts her life on the island of Dominica in the West Indies. In Kincaid's characteristically lucid, singsong prose, Xuela traces her evolution from a young girl to an old woman while interrogating the mysteries of her hybrid cultural origins and her parents, who failed to be parents: her mother died during childbirth; her often absent father, a cruel and petty island official, cultivates a veneer of respectability ("another skin over his real skin"), rendering him unrecognizable to his daughter. At 14, Xuela undertakes an affair with one of her father's friends, becomes pregnant and aborts the child. Experiencing that trauma as a rebirth ("I was a new person then"), she inaugurates a life of deliberate infertility, eventually becoming the assistant to a European doctor, whom she later marries. Xuela's Dominica, two generations after slavery, is a "false paradise" of reckless fathers and barren matrilinear relations, of tropical ferment, fecundity, witchcraft and slums, whose denizens resemble the walking dead. With aphoristic solemnity at times evocative of Ecclesiastes, Kincaid explores the full paradoxes of this extraordinary story, which, Xuela concludes, is at once the testament of the mother she never knew, of the mother she never allowed herself to be and of the children she refused to have. 75,000 first printing; major ad/ promo; author tour; translation, first serial, dramatic rights: Wylie, Aitken & Stone.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: Plume (January 1, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0452274664
• ISBN-13: 978-0452274662
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.3 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (31 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #242,044 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I loved this book, December 21, 1998

By	[e-mail] (Santa Cruz, California) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Autobiography of My Mother (Hardcover)

I have to speak up, because I feel that this book is being unfairly trashed. I stumbled across one of the chapters of this book in a collection, and I was so taken aback that I had to rush out and get the complete novel. I think that that Jamaica Kincaid's writing is so beautiful and poetic that she could be writing about anything and I would read it. But she also tells a very interesting and important story. Xuela is a mixed-race, motherless girl who does not receive love from anyone, and must survive by loving and celebrating her self. Perhaps for those people who have always felt secure in their place in life, and surrounded by love on all sides, Kincaid's book is too harsh and hard to relate to. But for those of us who have had times we when we felt so alone that we literally had to become our own mother and/or our own best friend, Kincaid's novel is a testimony to our experience. A great book.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Controversial, disturbing, not for everyone., January 6, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Autobiography of My Mother (Hardcover)

Having read this title while vacationing in Jamaica, (even though placed in Dominica and the author grew up in Atigua)I was entirely able to understand Xuela. Many children are born out of wedlock, though the fathers still are involved with their children. Xuela is an extreme, but not implausible, case of emotional detachment. Everything in the book, from her father's corruption, to encountering the stevedore during a downpour came to life in my reading experience. Be forewarned, Xuela is not a likeable character, and her physical self-love may be offensive to some readers. But Jamaica Kincaid's blunt and honest portrayal of a hardened woman is undeniably hard to forget.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars pretty writing - imagery not meant to be pretty, May 6, 2000

By	Chuen Ng (Los Angeles) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Autobiography of My Mother (Hardcover)

I think more readers should read this in context of Jamaica Kincaid's own personal life, especially regarding her torn relationship with her mother. It would then become extremely touching, as Kincaid really writes this to save her own living. While other reviewers have found this book to be harsh or dirty in some sense, we should gain the sense that this narrator is really at a loss for love, that there is so little to love, but was able to find love in herself.