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Among Flowers : A Walk in the Himalaya

by Jamaica Kincaid

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1455187,110 (3.05)11
Biography & Autobiography. Travel. Nonfiction. HTML:

In this delightful hybrid of a book--part memoir and part travel journal--the bestselling author takes us deep into the mountains of Nepal with a trio of botanist friends in search of native Himalayan plants that will grow in her Vermont garden. Alighting from a plane in the dramatic Annapurna Valley, the ominous signs of Nepal's Maoist guerrillas are all around--an alarming presence that accompanies the travelers throughout their trek. Undaunted, the group sets off into the mountains with Sherpas and bearers, entering an exotic world of spectacular landscapes, vertiginous slopes, isolated villages, herds of yaks, and giant rhododendron, thirty feet tall. The landscape and flora and so much else of what Kincaid finds in the Himalaya--including fruit bats, colorful Buddhist prayer flags, and the hated leeches that plague much of the trip--are new to her, and she approaches it all with an acute sense of wonder and a deft eye for detail. In beautiful, introspective prose, Kincaid intertwines the harrowing Maoist encounters with exciting botanical discoveries, fascinating daily details, and lyrical musings on gardens, nature, home, and family.

From the Trade Paperback edition.

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Showing 5 of 5
[[Jamaica Kincaid]] was asked to do something, anything she would like, anywhere in the world. That's the kind of fairy godmother wish most people can only dream about. However, this fairy godmother came in the guise of National Geographic, so Kincaid knew her wish would come true. Her side of the transaction would be to write a book about it. [Among Flowers] is the result.

Kincaid's first thought was to return to China with her friend the botanist and plantsman Dan Hinkley. She had been there with him in the late 1990s collecting seeds. Hinkley's suggestion was that they go to Nepal instead, seeking the seeds of every plant lover's Holy Grail, the Himalayan blue poppy. In October 2002, the two of them met up with the Welsh plant hunters Sue and Bleddyn Wynn-Jones in Kathmandu. Then it was a short flight to Tumlingtar and the beginning of their three week trek.

Kincaid's view of life is seen in terms of how the world relates to her, not in terms of her relation to the world. This can make her seem like a difficult travelling companion at times when conditions aren't up to her standards, or when she doesn't feel like doing some of the more tedious work.
On October 13, our day off, I lay in my tent reading. Sue, sick with a cold, dutifully got up and cleaned the seeds that Bleddyn and Dan had collected. I wasn't very interested in this since none would survive in my garden.
On the other hand, this focus does allow her to see and describe things others just might pass by.

It takes a brave person to portray herself as a whining, dawdling, neophyte, and I wonder why this is the persona Kincaid chooses to adopt here and elsewhere. After all, no one walks north eastern Nepal's mountains with their drastic elevation, weather and terrain changes without being more than everyday fit. Photographs of her on the trip bear this out. Kincaid is also knowledgeable about plants, even if she's not particularly interested in those that won't thrive in North Bennington, Vermont.

All this aside, she has written an engaging account of this trip. She realizes the irony of a fiercely anti colonialist black woman employing porters and cooks to take down and set up camp each day, to deliver hot water and tea to her in her tent each morning before she gets up. There are difficulties along the way. Leeches swarm campsites requiring regular body inspections. Maoists who sound more like Naxalite thugs control passes, and later access to a local airport. There are also moments of joy, seeing plants that could never be encountered outside a trip like this.

I would have liked to know more about what seeds the botanists did take back to their respective homes, but although that may have been the point of the trip, it isn't the point of the book. Most of all Kincaid is able to articulate that disconnect travellers often experience between the immersion in the daily routine of their trip, and the daily routine going on back home without them. She speaks of the idea that's what foreign to you is everyday to the people who will keep the daily routines which seem so novel to you, even when you are home resuming yours. She laments the effect of the idea that a journey starts to end as soon as you arrive.

This is the second book of hers I have read, both nonfiction. While I struggle with Kincaid the person, and sometimes Kincaid the author, making it difficult to write about her work, I do like what I have read by her so far.
  SassyLassy | Feb 3, 2022 |
I am sorry I didn't like this book more. As I mentioned above, I found the prose choppy and as it moved along, also too inward focused. I wanted more travel and flowers and less Kincaid. Finding that balance in this kind of book (and recipe blog posts on the Internet) is a challenge, I think. The opening chapter, as she prepares for this journey, includes observations about leaving Vermont and how she knew that world would never be the same. She drew me in with these moments of clarity.

But the journey ends before she comes home and only in the last paragraph or so do we get any larger lessons. Ultimately, while her view of Vermont may have changed, she didn't seem to record any real change in herself. She admitted to whining and swings from appreciation of the sherpas to annoyance when they don't seem to be meeting her every need. (At some point, I think she does recognize that they are basically keeping her group alive on this adventure.) There is honesty in the account: she could have left out her annoyance and whining, I suppose.

I am toying with a rating scale as I have benchmarks for five-star books having read at least two so far this year. I think, for me, this was a 3.5. As a gardener, the idea of seed gathering in the Himalaya was of interest and her observations about making gardens resonated with me but the author herself got in the way. ( )
  witchyrichy | Jan 8, 2020 |
There is something about Nepal, something a little magical, a little mystical, completely absorbing and intriguing. Sometime during my university days, I joined a group of fellow students (from that other university in Singapore) who were going trekking in Nepal, specifically making the trip to the Annapurna base camp. It was an 18- day trip and as I had been a member of the Outdoor Activities Club in my junior college (that’s kinda like the last two years of high school) where we did plenty of hiking and camping, I thought it sounded great and hoped it wouldn’t be all that difficult.

Alas, it was. All that climbing and steps and steps and steps. Steps into the village and out of the village and in again. But it was also just amazing. The porters and their ability to carry most of our stuff around in gigantic towering packs were just astonishing and the food they managed to whip up in the middle of nowhere – they even made an apple pie and roast chicken once! And every morning, you were greeted by a friendly voice outside your tent and a steaming mug of tea. And at the end of the day as we headed into the day’s campsite (usually almost all set up by the time we arrived – I was usually at the tail end of the group) a refreshing drink of pineapple juice.

Food and steps aside, among my favourite memories of the trip is one as we were leaving one of these mountain-side villages, down a step, and another, and another… And as we treaded our careful way down (these steps, I should add, tend to be larger than your typical stairs – usually requiring both feet to be on the one step, unless I suppose you have really long legs or are just used to these kinda of steps), these two kids in greyish, worn school uniforms, a boy and an older girl, fly past us. They dash down these very steps and head off into the distance, off to school which seemed to be a mountain away. I could follow their journey a little way as they raced down and out of their village and across to the next set of mountains until they were such tiny figures I could hardly see them anymore.

“And it was brought home to me again, that while every moment I was experiencing had an exquisite uniqueness and made me feel that everything was unforgettable, I was also in the middle of someone else’s daily routine, someone captured by the ordinariness of his everyday life.”

Luckily Kincaid has managed to put those similar feelings into far more eloquent prose as she travels Nepal with botanists collecting seeds.

And there are many moments like these in her travelogue, Among Flowers, some pretty little gems that made me reminisce of that time not so long ago when I took was in Nepal. A time when I was younger and more carefree and more willing to put up with nights in a tent and bathing from a pail of water.

However, Kincaid’s voice is at times a bit whiny and the book reads quite like a diary, very personal, pretty honest, and has some mundane details – so it might put some readers off. But I could understand – even that 20-year-old me, so used to outdoorsy stuff, was just completely overwhelmed by Nepal, its beauty, its people, and its lack of plumbing.

Among Flowers is a short enjoyable read and it left me wanting to learn more about the Maoists and the tumultuous history of Nepal (which reminds me – a few days after we returned from Nepal, the royal massacre took place). The book is part of the National Geographic Directions series, which includes books by writers like Oliver Sacks and Francine Prose, definitely worth checking out!
  RealLifeReading | Jan 19, 2016 |
I had kept this book for a good moment to savour reading it, and was then sourly disappointed. Among flowers. A walk in the Himalaya by Jamaica Kincaid was a very disappointing read. Fifty pages into the book, I leafed back to the Contents page to check whether I was still somehow reading an introduction, but discovered that there was no introduction. The loosely structured, plebeian style was what confused me. I was quite ready for a travelogue, expecting beautiful descriptions of landscapes in northern Nepal, and a lot about botany. Kincaid is known for her love of gardening, and the book is a report of a seed collecting expedition in Nepal. I was appalled by Kincaid’s constant complaining about the trip, focusing almost completely on herself and her (physical) discomforts as in I couldn’t fall asleep and so I went of our tent, just outside the entrance, and took a long piss. This was a violation of some kind: you cannot take a long piss just outside your tent; you are not to make your traveling companions aware of the actual workings of your body. (p.91) Instead of observations of the local populations, as one might expect in the tradition of National Geographic, the publisher who commissioned the book, Kincaid is stuck is the most incredibly amateurish and immature babble, secretly giving one of the porters, a Sherpa boy who looks like the people from Tibet, maybe only as old as her son, a one-thousand-rupee note (p.108). The photos included in the book are of the same low quality, mainly depicting the author or showing the most ordinary, sentimental pictures. ( )
1 vote edwinbcn | Feb 2, 2012 |
If you love gardening, read this book. This talks about selecting flowers for your garden, from the source itself. Great read during post gardening season. ( )
  seki | May 2, 2007 |
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Biography & Autobiography. Travel. Nonfiction. HTML:

In this delightful hybrid of a book--part memoir and part travel journal--the bestselling author takes us deep into the mountains of Nepal with a trio of botanist friends in search of native Himalayan plants that will grow in her Vermont garden. Alighting from a plane in the dramatic Annapurna Valley, the ominous signs of Nepal's Maoist guerrillas are all around--an alarming presence that accompanies the travelers throughout their trek. Undaunted, the group sets off into the mountains with Sherpas and bearers, entering an exotic world of spectacular landscapes, vertiginous slopes, isolated villages, herds of yaks, and giant rhododendron, thirty feet tall. The landscape and flora and so much else of what Kincaid finds in the Himalaya--including fruit bats, colorful Buddhist prayer flags, and the hated leeches that plague much of the trip--are new to her, and she approaches it all with an acute sense of wonder and a deft eye for detail. In beautiful, introspective prose, Kincaid intertwines the harrowing Maoist encounters with exciting botanical discoveries, fascinating daily details, and lyrical musings on gardens, nature, home, and family.

From the Trade Paperback edition.

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