This was my introduction to Barbara Kingsolver, and what an intro it was. Though I'll not re-read the book, I thought it was an absolute masterpiece, the best book I'd read in years!

Told in different voices, of various members of a missionary family in the Congo, it tells of the fanaticism of the Baptist missionary father, and the trials, tribulations, and reachings for life-affirmation of his daughters. (I know that's a pretty awkward sentence - what can I say - like s.penk I'm past-one beer here.) It also was an introduction to the the events surrounding the independence of the Congo, which even though told in a novel, had a real ring of truth.

And I certainly may reread it some time. I'm finding that rereading books I enjoyed long ago, at a much different age, can be very rewarding. That doesn't really apply to this book (read only sixteen years ago as of now) - but even that is quite a while in terms of the way I read nowadays, meaning I read with much more attention and introspection. So ...

This is one of those books I wasn't in love with, but completely understood why others would be. I dislike religious people, am appalled by the existence of missionaries, and as each awful event occurred found myself wishing that far, far worse would happen to these awful spiritual colonialists.

Now (2019) Amy Adams is making a limited series based on the book, and even started her own production company to make it. Author Kingsolver will write the screenplay with a seasoned screenwriter.

TW// mention of terminal cancer, death (including children, siblings, mention of parents, mention of fathers, mention of babies), racism, ableism, misogyny, mentions of slavery, mention of cheating, pedophilia (including mention of child prostitution), mentions of war, child abuse, domestic abuse, animal death (including brief mention of dogs), brief mentions of infertility struggles, r-slur

The Poisonwood Bible was recommended to me by a friend and I have heard only positive things about it, so I decided to give it a try but I found it incredibly challenging to get through. It did do some good things like teach a lot about the history of the Congo and the Congolese culture. However, this book had a lot of flaws.

The book felt like it lacked a strong focus for a lot of the story. It meandered through the girl’s time in Africa for the first three quarters of the book then rushed through their adult life in the last quarter. If this book had decided on one or two key themes then shaved off some uncessary parts that didn’t serve those themes, the book would’ve been a lot better. The story was also way too long, so the shaving off of some of the daily lives of the girls would’ve really helped the story.

The pacing of the story was incredibly slow. It was a struggle to stay awake while reading. Kingsolver’s dense writing style didn’t help with the pacing either and I’m not planning on reading more of her works because her writing style is not for me.

I wasn’t fond of any of the characters in this story and I desperately craved a likeable character to help me get through this book. Anatole was the most likeable character, but he married a minor when he was twenty four, so he isn’t redeemable in my eyes.

If you’re looking for a deep dive into the Congo and Congolese culture, this book can do that but I’d strongly recommend reading a book written by someone from the Congo with firsthand experience of the Congolese culture instead. I will be seeking out books written by Congolese people to get more than just the perspective of a white woman when it comes to the history of the Congo, but I do appreciate that this book got me started in learning about the Congo.

I can’t personally say I can recommend this book because there was a lot about it that didn’t work for me. I do understand why it is considered a modern classic by some standards, but I am not a fan of this book at all.

5,0 ✨✨✨

( Audiobook)

A stunning book.
I'm in love with this writer. Such gorgeous writing about harrowing and relevant subjects. Great social and political commentary, amazing narration.
Felt it to the bone.

This is the saga of an American missionary traveling to the Belgian Congo to teach his word if God in 1959. He brings his wife and four young daughters with him, leaving the comforts of Bethlehem, Georgia.
The story is told by the four daughters, Rachael, the oldest, the twins Leah and Adan and the youngest Ruth Mary, and his wife Orleanna.

Five different narrations of life in the Congo. We follow the family of Nathan Price as they endure life with a different culture than they are accustomed to.

The writing was atmospheric with well developed characters. I loved Rachael’s story the best. She made me laugh to some of her experiences.

Excellent book.

There is rally something to say for re-reading. I don't usually do that but this was a great experience to re-read and a buddy read. The Poisonwood Bible is a story told from different points of view. A preacher and his wife and four daughters head for life in the Congo, where their father a zealous preacher hopes to convert a village of Congolese. The story will take the reader through much emotion while learning loads of information about the Congo, the culture there but most of all the political upheaval. This is a very memorable book and the the writing is incredible. It's definitely memorable and a great book to discuss in a book club.

Listen. Listen and you may hear a story that took thirty years to incubate. Listen. Listen and you may hear a true modern-day epic, spanning continents and lifetimes. Listen. Listen and you may hear a faint but distinct African lament, one of an uncountable number, but one that should be heard. Listen. Listen and you may meet five women whose time with you may be fleeting but whose memory may keep you company for the rest of your life, if only you will listen to them now.

That single-word injunction, "listen," is repeated not excessively but often enough to make you sit up and take notice throughout THE POISONWOOD BIBLE, and you would do well to heed its call. I did, and I discovered the best book I had read in many years, a book that muscled its way effortlessly into my top five favorite reads of all time. I listened, and I heard the story of Barbara Kingsolver's Africa, of her childhood experiences there and of her insight into the vast web of African politics, so tragic and so hopeful. I listened, and I heard a tale so poetically told that virtually every page held a searingly quotable insight into the human condition, the human conundrum. But most of all, I listened, and I heard the voices of Orleanna, Rachel, Adah, Leah, and Ruth May Price, and they became very dear to me.

Put in simple terms, THE POISONWOOD BIBLE is the story of fire-and-brimstone Baptist preacher Nathan Price dragging his unwilling family away from the safety of Bethlehem, Georgia, USA, to be missionaries in the dry, dirty, and dangerous Belgian Congo in 1959. But THE POISONWOOD BIBLE does not take kindly to being viewed in simple terms. It is an epic in the true sense of the word. It is also a political treatise handled with a palatably light touch. It covers themes including impermeable religious zeal; the motherly urge to protect the children; the transition from childhood to adulthood via rebellion against the father; the almost innumerable divisions between black and white; disability; sexism; and the significance of the torrid metamorphosis that constitutes a life - any life, every life. But THE POISONWOOD BIBLE begins and ends with the five Price women, and in my opinion, it is they who give this novel its beating heart and its immortal soul. It is the story of what they did to the Congo, and of what the Congo did to them.

THE POISONWOOD BIBLE is broken into "books" in the style of the King James Bible, and it is Orleanna's voice we hear introducing each book - Orleanna, fierce but never quite fierce enough, resilient but never quite resilient enough. "The hardest work of every day was deciding, once again, to stay with my family," she says, and she does, indeed, find motherhood to be an almost impossibly overwhelming task. Her failings, both real and imagined, dog her footsteps all the days of her life.

Then there is Rachel, the eldest daughter at sixteen years of age, the character who seems usually to be either disliked or disregarded by readers as well as by the rest of the Price family. Leah says Rachel is "the one stubbornly mediocre mentality in our family" and has "the emotional complexities of a salt shaker." She certainly provides plenty of levity, yet I have as big a place in my heart for Rachel as I do for the others. Throughout the book, I felt that there was a deceptively stoic and moral character hidden by the characteristic toss of her platinum hair and "Charmed, I'm sure." Adah, at least, would agree that there is more to Rachel than meets the eye: "Rachel seems incapable of remorse, but she is not. She wears those pale, wide eyes around her neck so she can look in every direction and ward off the attack."

Adah, Leah's twin and only a year or two younger than Rachel, became my own personal kindred spirit and guide through the winding pathways of THE POISONWOOD BIBLE. The world through "Adah eyes" is a stunning, discombobulating, iridescent mixture of history, color, literature, rhyme - a kaleidoscope that sees more clearly than the others' individually biased microscopes. Adah is an observer, even referring to her father as "the Reverend Price." Adah is disabled, with one side of her body damaged and dragged along by the other, yet she says that "in darkness, when all cats are equally black, I move as gracefully as anyone." Adah is also mute, although Leah describes her as "someone who just on general principles refuses to talk," and she is obsessed with language - I think of her as the silently discursive, quietly subversive language-mangle mage, Adah.

Leah arrives in the Congo a young girl starving for the approval and affection of both of her fathers - that is to say, Nathan Price and God. But her character goes through perhaps the greatest of all the book's metamorphoses, and she has to lose herself for a while in order to find herself. One part of Leah will never change, though: "I would be myself, Leah Price, eager to learn all there is to know."

And last, but never, ever, in this story, least, there is a five-year-old breath of fresh air named Ruth May. According to Leah, "Ruth May's foremost personality trait was sticktoitiveness," and "she tears through her life like she plans on living out the whole thing before she's twenty." In a voice reminiscent of a certain Jean-Louise Finch, Ruth May's simple, exuberant, straightforward, and worldly soul marks the pages of THE POISONWOOD BIBLE like nothing else, for better, for worse, till death do us part.

The beginning of THE POISONWOOD BIBLE is dominated by Nathan Price's heavy-handed, self-righteous, unyielding approach to his "mission" in the Congo, which he sees simply as baptizing the heathens in the river. "Hell hath no fury like a Baptist preacher," we are told, and while this theme emerges initially in a fairly lighthearted, tongue-in-cheek way, it soon enough becomes truly malevolent. Even the guilt he carries from the war pales into insignificance as the reader watches with mounting horror the evil perpetrated by this man on his own family and the people he is meant to be saving. The turning point comes when, after six fruitless months, the Reverend receives what seems to be a very obvious lesson in working with the Congolese villagers instead of against them. His choice to ignore this lesson and become even more immovable in his purpose and practice points the Price family straight down the path to tragedy and marks the point at which this character becomes irredeemable. Orleanna sums up this point of no return when she says, "I held him in my arms at night and saw parts of his soul turned to ash; then I saw him reborn with a stone in place of his heart."

Now, more than ever, it falls to Orleanna to protect her children from this raving lunatic of a father, yet she is mostly ineffective. She constantly berates herself for this and perceives that her girls hardly seem to love her half the time: "I couldn't step in front of my husband to shelter them from his scorching light. They were expected to look straight at him and go blind." Adah describes her mother as "the woman who could not fight fire with fire even to save her children," and Orleanna would surely agree with this assessment. So the children have to save themselves, slowly turning their backs on the man who has ruled their lives with an iron fist and on his God, because in some way, they perceive that they have been betrayed not just by their father but by the Father. The transformation is most laborious and painful for pious Leah, and we witness her anguish with the reverence due to her unquenchable spirit. For her, of course, the beginning is the hardest part: "Sin, sin, I felt drenched and sick of it. 'I used to pray to God to make me just like Him - smart and righteous and adequate to His will,' I confessed. 'Now I don't even know what to wish for. I wish I were more like everybody else.'" But after a while, we are able to both empathize and rejoice as we watch her break free from her father's domination of her life: "If I had a prayer left in me, it was that this red-faced man, shaking with rage, would never lay a hand on me again."

The divide between black and white, the crimes and atrocities perpetrated by white on black, and the question of whether the divide can ever be dissolved and whether atonement can ever be achieved form the constant background to the Price girls' lives and often make their way to the foreground, too, in an entire spectrum ranging from comical to gut-wrenching. Unsurprisingly, Adah is the first to mutely understand that her family is unwittingly making a myriad of social gaffes with the Congolese people: "We have offended all the oldest divinities in every thinkable way ... I wonder what new, disgusting sins we commit each day, holding our heads high in sacred ignorance while our neighbors gasp, hand to mouth." As Leah's eyes open more and more, the gravity of the situation sinks in more for the reader, too: "If God is really taking a hand in things ... He is bitterly mocking the hope of brotherly love. He is making sure that color will matter forever." THE POISONWOOD BIBLE offers significant insight into the Congo's stormy transition to independence and the United States' behind-the-scenes attempts to secure its own interests in this process. As Leah says, "I grew up with my teeth clamped on a faith in the big white man in power - God, the President, I don't care who he is, he'd serve justice - whereas no one here has ever had the faintest cause for such delusions."

The Congo teaches the Price girls many lessons about the true meaning of "civilization," none more richly than in relation to disability in general and Adah's disability in particular. Made to feel like a freak in her home country, Adah finds much greater acceptance in the Congo. As five-year-old Ruth May so humorously points out: "Used to be Adah was the only one of us in our family with something wrong with her, but here nobody stares at Adah except just a little because she's white. Nobody cares that she's bad on one whole side, because they've all got their own handicapped children or a mama with no feet or their eye put out. When you take a look out of the door, why, there goes somebody with something missing off of 'em and not even embarrassed of it." Adah expresses it with her usual grace: "In that other long-ago place, America, I was a failed combination of too-weak body and over-strong will, but in Congo, I am those things perfectly united."

THE POISONWOOD BIBLE is a very feminist novel, but never obnoxiously so. We often hear, in the beginning, of Nathan's teeth-grindingly chauvinistic attitude toward his wife and daughters. Leah says that Nathan "views himself as the captain of a sinking mess of female minds." We hear that he is always trying to show the women up as "dull-witted, bovine females," and even Rachel remarks that: "It's just lucky for Father he never had any sons, he might have been forced to respect them." Orleanna eventually develops a fellow feeling for the African women, and realizes that the lives of women the world over are essentially the same: the men enact momentous political and martial acts, leaving women behind to pick up the pieces: "Don't dare presume there's shame in the lot of a woman who carries on ... Was she a fool, then, or the backbone of a history?"

THE POISONWOOD BIBLE has many tales to tell, but in the end, all tales are one. Perhaps this is the point - every life is a painful journey, every life touches history, and every life is a story worth telling. Even Rachel has to concede: "You can't just sashay into the jungle aiming to change it all over to the Christian style, without expecting the jungle to change you right back." With her usual grace-born-of-suffering, Orleanna understands that: "To live is to be marked. To live is to change, to acquire the words of a story, and that is the only celebration we mortals really know." But I think my kindred spirit, Adah, says it best, and so, to her I leave the last word: "We all are ... trying to invent our own version of the story. All human odes are essentially one: my life, what I stole from history, and how I live with it."

I am now bringing my review to Goodreads.

This is the story of the Price family who leave Georgia with their four children and become missionaries in the Congo circa late 1950's-early 1960's. We have an opportunity to see the family grow and learn, but then...

The Congo rebellion starts. And that is when the book begins a slow slide off the rails. In my opinion.

The book had the opportunity to tell a good story, featuring an interesting plot and characters, but it lost its strength. It seemed to fall into caricature and message pushing that hurt the story as a whole. I felt the need to skim, which I hate doing... just so I could get through it. I wanted more. 2.5 stars

Thus she had lain
sugarcane sweet
deserts her hair
golden her feet
mountains her breasts
two Niles her tears.
Thus she has lain
Black through the years.

Over the white seas
rime white and cold
brigands ungentled
icicle bold
took her young daughters
sold her strong sons
churched her with Jesus
bled her with guns.
Thus she has lain.

Now she is rising
remember her pain
remember the losses
her screams loud and vain
remember her riches
her history slain
now she is striding
although she had lain.

-tMaya Angelou, ‘Africa’

When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said 'Let us pray.' We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land.

-tBishop Demond Tutu

There are certain books which hit you with the force of a sledgehammer, rearranging your worldview in such a way that once you put down the book, you are a changed person. They need not necessarily be edifying or uplifting: in fact, they can be dispiriting and downright distressing – yet they won’t let you go. The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver is a book like that.

On the surface, this is the tragic story of the frightening disintegration of the family of Nathaniel Price, Baptist minister on an evangelical mission in the Belgian Congo at the beginning of the 1960’s. Congo is on the verge of independence: Belgium, after having bled the country dry, is about to run away as colonialism has become a loss-making proposition. In a turbulent country filled with poisonous flora and fauna, and a suspicious and hostile people, Reverend Price has his work cut out. In an out-and-out battle with the pagan forces which control the land, expecting Jesus to win out is foolish; this is clear to all except the preacher. So as he tries to save souls, his wife Orleanna is on a mission to save her sanity and her four daughters – the self-centred and vain Rachel, the twins Leah (earnest and religious) and Adah (handicapped and secretive), and the baby of the lot, Ruth May, a free spirit most in tune with the wild countryside.

As Belgium goes away, Congo becomes independent under President Patrice Lumumba – then the inevitable happens. America, panicky about a possible “socialist” takeover, sets about overthrowing the nascent democracy and installing a puppet dictator, Mbotu, in place of Lumumba who is imprisoned and cruelly murdered. While all this was happening, Nathan Price’s authority is also challenged by the village headman, Tata Ndu, as Jesus is “voted out” in preference for the local tribal deities during morning mass: and on January 17, 1961, unspeakable tragedy visits the Price family in the form of death of one of the children. Feeling that enough is enough, Orleanna moves out with her remaining daughters, leaving Nathan to preach in the wilderness. The remaining part of the novel traces their life journey through two continents and four countries.

***

All good writing uses metaphor to a great extent – this is what separates the excellent from the pedestrian. However, to carry it off for the whole length of 600+ page novel without losing your readers is a great achievement. That is what the author has done effortlessly here.

”Tata Jesus is Bängala!” Shouts Nathan Price from the pulpit – little knowing that Bängala in the local tongue, meaning “precious and dear” when pronounced in a certain way, means poisonwood – the local tree which attacks the skin with itches – the way he pronounces it. And therein begins the disconnect. A desert religion under a fierce God who is not beyond murdering his children for disobedience (for it is the Old Testament God which Nathan prays to, not the God of Love of Jesus, even though he pretends it is) in confrontation with a pagan one, in which everything is connected, everything is alive, death being only a matter of perception. A language in which there is a meaning enforced on each word, in confrontation with a language without a script, where the way sounds are made can make profound changes to meaning. A culture which extols exploitation of nature in the name of religion, in confrontation with a culture which adapts itself to it.

And Christianity itself is not without contradictions. Anyone who has read the Bible can see that the Ogre God of the Old Testament has no relation to Jesus’s God of Love. As Orleanna says:

n  I can understand a wrathful God who’d just as soon dangle us all from a hook. And I can understand a tender, unprejudiced Jesus. But I could never quite feature the two of them living in the same house.n

There is no doubt who Nathan’s God is. In fact, his house is a microcosm of the world as imagined by the Old Testament – he is Our Father, who disburses harsh punishments even for the smallest transgressions, and his wife and four children are his subjects and apostles. And his story becomes the Poisonwood Bible.

In true Biblical fashion, the tale is narrated by the apostles – each one’s gospel narrating the same events with differing points of view. Here the author has outdone herself, as we see the same events through different lenses – allowing us to ponder more on the hidden meanings that lie beneath the still surface. Orleanna, talking from the future with hindsight, gives the overview of each section – which is then narrated by the four daughters in turn. Rachel, totally self-centred, can give only a superficial account (and many a time, subject to horrible malapropisms); Leah is forthright, honest and scrupulously fair (she is also the most obedient and religious); Adah, her crippled twin (who doesn’t speak) has the most disturbing inner vision – a sort of sacred madness; and Mary Ruth, the youngest, who has the most Afro-centric vision.

The novel is structured in sections roughly corresponding to their Biblical counterparts – only, their order is jumbled. Thus, we have Revelation directly after Genesis and Exodus towards the end. The overall effect is satisfactorily scriptural. There are many scenes of mythical intensity: the plague of the killer ants, the forest fire and the ritual hunt, and rain which follows the practically sacrificial death of a child. The slow move towards doom is effectively foreshadowed, and the tragedy at the end has all the trappings of ritual. Especially, Nathan walking around baptising children attending the funeral of his daughter in the pouring rain, is loaded with tragic irony.

In parallel to this tale, the distressing tale of Congo (and Africa in general), unfolds. But unlike the Prices, some of whom at least find peace in their life, the continent is still far away from that ideal.

Adah says:

n  Misunderstanding is my cornerstone. It’s everyone’s, come to think of it. Illusions mistaken for truth are the pavement under our feet. They are what we call civilization. n

Wandering through the Congo along with the Prices, where all that is being (living, dead, inanimate and incorporeal) are the same (ntu), given life by nommo, the word, it is easy to believe that.

Finally read this!
What a time it was spending 10 days in the Congo!
A Baptist minister accepts a post there without taking his wife and four daughter’s opinion about this mission.
Oh my goodness… what these women had to endure…
Anyway… so much hardship and loss… that would stay with them forever.
Glad I finally got to this… Kingsolver is a fantastic author.. I have much more of her to read.

This book was one of those stories that stays with you... first you race through the wonderfully written, beautifully imagined story and then you continue to remember scenes... days, months, and even years later.

Yes, years later.

„В тази история има невежи, но не и невинни.“

Като протяжна песен за Африка, начената преди стотици години и свършила в края на 90-те със смъртта на конгоанския диктатор Мобуту, „Евангелие на отровното дърво“ е рядко епично-лирично отклонение в моя еднообразен читателски живот.

Докато в Щатите едва започва хедонистичната епоха на шейсетте, един баптистки проповедник, квадратен фанатик и насилник, заминава със съпругата си и четирите им дъщери за белгийско Конго, което скоро няма да бъде белгийско, но няма да бъде и на конгоанците. Постколониалният свят се събужда, само за да се превърне отново в арена на противопоставяне между двата полюса на Студената война.

Насред комарите, калта, паразитите, отровните змии и насекоми, свещеникът веднага пристъпва към целта, за която е дошъл, с цялата ентусиазирана добронамереност на работливия маниак – да покръсти децата на местните, които така и така не доживяват до дълбока старост, но поне ще додрапат до християнския рай. Пристъпва грубо, недодялано, отвисоко, от позицията на привилегирован представител на цивилизацията, който ще покаже на „диваците“ как се живее. Уви, ще мине известно време и доста беди ще сполетят семейството, докато везните природа-човек се уравновесят в главите на белите и те започнат истински да осъзнават къде са дошли и по какви закони работи света, в който са попаднали. Проумяването едва започва, а връхлита нова драма – първият демократично избран президент на страната Патрис Лумумба е свален с преврат, режисиран от ЦРУ, а на негово място е инсталиран един военен с ненаситно гърло за злато и власт. Това далечно събитие (в Конго и съседното село е далече) преобръща по трагичен начин живота на всички от семейството, отломките от което се запиляват с години.

Самодоволството е първото чувство, което се изпарява при досега с неблагоприятни условия в непознати страни. Дали мястото му ще заемат (расистки) предразсъдъци, културен шок или пробуждане, зависи от духовната рамка и тежестта на опита, с който всеки герой стъпва на конгоанска земя. Най-малките и необременените със знание са и най-податливи да харесат новото, но и най-уязвими…

Това е книга колкото за Африка, толкова и за непознатото, което приема различни форми за всеки от нас. Как да се отнесем към него, как да заживеем по правилата, които чуждият свят е изработил, без да включва точно нас в сметките. А има ли всъщност „нас“ и „тях“? Тази полусемейна история е рядко съчетание от смирение, мъдрост, тъга и тежка драма. Видяна през очите на всяка една от жените в семейството поотделно, звучи красиво и полифонично, като всеки глас дърпа майсторски действието напред, но и слага пауза, където трябва, за да размишлява над станалото, да постигне разбиране. Интересното е, че всяка една от героините достига до свое собствено разбиране за Африка, което, макар и много различно от това на другите, е еднакво валидно в личен и универсален смисъл. Както се казва, всички са прави, но читателят ще избере коя е по-права спрямо собствените си нагласи и опит.

P.S. Преводът е прекрасен, не се запънах в нито един израз или дума, нищо не дрънкаше на фалшиво или стъкмено.

„Винаги сме мислели, че знаем повече за тях, отколкото те за нас, а истината се оказа друга.“
„Не мога да опиша колко е тежък животът в една страна, чиито управници са единица мярка за корумпираност.“
„Бедната Африка. Никой друг континент не е видял такова неописуемо странно съчетание от чуждо грабителство и чуждо доброжелателство.“