Book Comment: Among Flowers - A Walk in the Himalya

Among Flowers - A Walk in the Himalaya
by Jamaica Kincaid
National Geographic Directions, 208 pages

This book was exotic, interesting, and odd.

But then, how can a book about a fervent gardener going to Nepal not  be interesting?   When so much of a modern person's life is focused on enhancing their level  of coziness it's surely a delight to see someone like the author endure deprivations and take on extraordinary physical challenges  towards a lovely goal.  Really, who among us wouldn't prefer reading about tent-camping in a soggy field filled with leeches or facing down grumpy Maoists than experiencing it?

The goal is to acquire seeds for  plants that will survive and thrive  in a Vermont garden.  The book is at its best when she encounters a  beautiful specimen she had only seen in another context or a  variation.  The reader feels the author's delight in seeing a flower that's  humdrum at home come to full, enormous, technicolor life in a tiny,  remote Nepalese village.  Even a person whose interest in gardens plummets after sniffs of basil and sightings of tomatoes can  understand the author's tremendous joy.

Which leaves us with the odd, starting with the stilted syntax.  It's part  eighteenth century, part Hemingway, part Book of Genesis rewritten  into the first person singular.  Maybe this is her signature style?  The reader doesn't actually  hear the author say "And I found it all good. Good, I found it," but  it wouldn't be a shock.
She sems to take contrarian pride in being rather a pill on the  trip--continually asking the others in the group, "What is this?",  losing interest completely if the answer involves a plant that wouldn't cope in Vermont, and--why not?--a fair amount of whining.  If the author regrets taxing her companions so on an already arduous journey she  stoically keeps that sorrow to herself.

Then there are the perplexing Where Was the Editor? bits. Once  you establish that you're using Fahrenheit there's really no need to  add it to every temperature forever and ever, amen.   The author will express a feeling somewhat poetically only to use that same phrasing for  the same experience a few paragraphs later. She'll describe what was for dinner and quickly tell she didn't eat.  Did every night's trip to the bathroom need to be recorded?  And she makes so many  references to "My son, X" a fed-up reader might conclude that she  doesn't have a son at all, let alone one named, X.

Lastly, it isn't a moral stain that the author refers to the Nepalese  man who cooks for the group as Cook, or the man who lugs the table and chairs as  Table, but man, it sure would have been nice if she could have  remembered their names. Even the phonetic rendering of what it sounded like would have been a step up.  Is it cultural denseness or again this contrariness, this sense of my way, right or wrong?   And as the author doesn't hear the porters' names is she really, truly seeing the Nepalese girls, each one of which she declares beautiful? 

None of the apparent cross-cultural hiccups would mind if the trip in and of itself didn't scream of  First World class privilege.  Despite the loveliness of the idea, aspects of the book come across as just another example of the West's determination to Get What it Wants--be it South American bananas, Iraqi oil, or perhaps the seeds is a lovely flower in the Himalaya.