This was an example of how a bad narrator can ruin a book. The narrator had a flat steady pace. No change in pace. No change in inflection, not even for questions. Everything was the same.

I bought this book the second I saw it because I was excited about a new Kincaid novel. Then I went home and looked at reviews and it sunk to the bottom of my TBR to stagnate. But Kincaid's name kept calling to me, and the African American literature challenge for February came around, so I finally picked it up.

I'll admit, I didn't love this book right away. Kincaid uses a run-on style here. Not exactly run-on sentences, but run-on paragraphs, run-on thoughts, everything bleeds into everything else just like now bleeds into then and then into now. It took me a little bit to fall into the rhythm of it. But then I found myself repeatedly smiling these smiles of pure joy, not because of anything joyous happening in the book (really, there wasn't much of that0, but just because of the WRITING. This is the story of a specific place and a specific family, but she also deliberately unmoors it over and over again with allusions to Greek myth and to archetypes and to geology and immigration stories. But it is also her story, and anyone who has read ANY of Kincaid's other work will recognize connections here. Mr. Sweet is often unbearable in his self-absorbed ways, but Kincaid basically (but never explicitly) turns him into Zeus, and I'm like, OKAY, he's Zeus, and Zeus is a prick, GOT IT. And it somehow make it easier to bear.

Anyway, this book is about the dissolution of a marriage and it is about racism and classism and archetypes and creative geniuses and small Caribbean islands and recovering from the wounds of childhood and the way our nows are rooted in our thens and our thens rooted in our nows.

I loved, loved it. Five stars. ( )

Kincaid's writing is stunning and truly immersive. This book feels off, perhaps because (despite her denials) I suspect this was a cathartic exercise about her own acrimonious divorce following a betrayal by her husband...as mirrored in the novel...and while I'm sure it was xathartic for her, it was hard for me to read it. It felt unexamined as fiction. I cannot recommend her other work highly enough, and perhaps for those who want to sit in these emotions, this novel would work for that time in your life, only. ( )

See now Then. Then is Now. Now is Then. At first, she had to think about the sentences, the rush of thoughts, the constant flow, because Then is Now and Now is Then and the circle of life is not linear, she thought, but the language, the language Then and the language Now is beautiful.

Then that being said, once I got used to the flow of the book and the unusual sentence structure, I was swept up in a sad sad story about a marriage gone painfully, sadly, awfully wrong. The three star rating that I gave this book is primarily due to the depressing subject and the cloud that never, ever lifts.

The back and forth, Then and Now storytelling is unusual and it does tend to try to round out the picture of the story in the sense that a flashback would do. This is the story of Mr. and Mrs. Sweet and how they perceive their worlds Now and how they perceive their worlds Then. It is also the story of their two children, Herakles and the Beautiful Persephone whose names I am certain are symbolic if I would take the time to research that.

I think a bit of joy would have lightened the heaviness of this book. ( )

See Now Then, See Then Now, just to see anything at all, especially in the present, was to always be inside the great world of disaster, catastrophe, and also joy and happiness, but these two latter are not accounted for in history, they were and are relegated to personal memory.

A truly astounding story about... well, a family. In the name of magical realism (and hints of mythological inspirations), Kincaid delivers a story about the hardship of life and relationships. It's beautiful and manages to capture emotions in a way that both makes them living and concrete.
( )