My Brother

Every week I flip through the book section of Entertainment Weekly mostly to see what's new. Those reviews are vicious they rarely have a good thing to say. In the past they have given terrible marks to some of my favorite books. So I was amazed to see they had rated this book an A-. I immediately put down the magazine and picked up a copy of MY BROTHER. I was not disappointed.

Kincaid is a brilliant writer. Her prose is tight, short, succinct, clear and to the point. In less than 200 pages she says what other writers might have taken twice that much space to convey. Her writing is enjoyable to read even when she is writing about unpleasant subject matter. She has a keen insight into the events in her life and her relationships with other people.

To dismiss this as merely an "aids memoir" is to overlook the main theme in the book which primarily deals with the relationship of the author and her biological family and the life she's left behind in another country along with them.

Along the way Kincaid asks many intriguing questions, (although she does not always answer them). Why do parents do and say such cruel things to their children? Why do parents sometimes see these acts and statements as loving acts for the child's benefit? Why does one child from the same household grow up to be "good" and the other "bad"? Why do the parents sometimes love the "bad" child more than the "good" child? Why do we as adults continue to have contact with our parents and siblings even though we despise some of their past acts and continuing "bad" behaviors?

If you have relatives that you love and hate at the same time (and perhaps think you're unique in this aspect) you owe it to yourself to read this book. The aids aspect is only a backdrop for a mesmerizing look at family relationships and what makes people tick and act the way they do in those relationships.

Once I picked it up, I could not put it down. She sucks you in with her unique structure of "run-on" sentences that truly illustrate her track of thought. Her writing is raw, with all the private details of her family exposed for all to see; She does not censor, anything. Her honesty is stunning, to the point you feel like you should censor some of the parts for her and her family as well as for your sake.

I read this book a few years ago and I still think about it daily. With My Brother, Ms. Kincaid has taken a very personal matter, the death of her brother, and sliced it down to it's essentials.
Lean, just like Hemingway.

I'd only ever read a short short story of Jamaica Kincaid's (that I wasn't too impressed by) before picking up this memoir. I enjoyed her memoir thoroughly. Wonderfully crafted and skillfully written, this rendition of her memories surrounding the life and death of her brother in Antigua, Jamaica, are emotionally moving, to say the least. I'm not giving much away by revealing that her brother dies of AIDS, something that is revealed in the first few pages, so I'm okay to say that this story of a sister and family's grappling with the immiment death manages to handle the AIDS story with beauty, poise, and compelling writing.

She highlights the stigma that surrounded anyone who contracted the disease. Were they a drug user? A philanderer? A homosexual? What kind of lifestyle does that person live that allowed them to contract such a deadly disease? Those are the questions people in Jamaica, and elsewhere, thought and asked themselves at the time, and even today. The sick were labelled, ostricized, deemed outcast, and refused help. A sad plight, indeed.

Simply put, Kincaid has a simple way with language that turns up on the page as alluring, seductive, and entertaining.

-- Reviewed by Jonathan Stephens

I have read Annie John, and The Autobiography of My Mother. This is deffinetly Kincaids best novel yet. She offers herself in her book. This is what makes her writting so wonderful. Her hatered for her mother is caputered in all her writing and is especialy in this true to life accont of her brothers trajic death.