ds her work they are simply transformed from today's generation into her world. Here are some of the different perspectives of her writing.
             Anne Tyler (Anne Tyler," Mothers and Mysteries," in The New RepublicVol.189, No.27, December31, 1983 pp.32-3)
             "Wash the white clothes on Monday and put them on the stone heap; wash the colored clothes on Tuesday and put them on the clothesline to dry...' These are the words that begin this unusual little book [At the Bottom of the River]-a collection of ten stories, none of them longer than a few pages, most set in some unnamed spot in the Caribbean.
             They're also the words that will give you the clearest idea of the book's general tone; for Jamaica Kincaid inspects various particles of our world so closely and so solemnly that they begin to take the nearly magical importance.
             Two themes dominate At the Bottom of the River. The first is the wonderful, terrible strength of a loving mother. "My mother can change everything," a narrator says, and she fantasizes about spending the rest of her days with a woman who "every night over and over, will tell me something that begins, 'Before you were born.'"
             The second theme is the mysteriousness of ordinary life. We skate across the mysteriousness everyday, blindly. To make us see it, the author describes the most ordinary events as if they were dreams. Her voice is the reflexive, dazed murmur of a person just awaked from sleep. "Someone is making a basket, someone is making a girl a dress or a boy a shirt" lies cheek to jaw with the surrealistically matter-of-fact "Now I am a girl, but one day I will marry a woman..."
             "Either it was drizzling or there was a lot of dust in the air and the dust was
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