Accepting a book recommendation offered up by my fellow Equinox Book Challenge participant, I chose to explore another novel related to the struggles of a maturing African continent. Making their way to the Belgian Congo in 1959, Nathan Price, his wife, and four daughter are ready to commence their missionary work. Arriving with everything they feel they might need, the Prices begin their journey, armed with Jesus, as they are surrounded with the locals in a jungle community. However, early on during their time, the Price women tell of all the changes they could not have predicted while still in the comforts of their Bethlehem, Georgia home. While Nathan seeks to convert the Congolese population—still stuck on their own spirits and medicine men— with his evangelical Baptist ways, the others begin to see that nothing is as it seems. American staples are of no use to anyone in the Belgian Congo and the learning curve is as sharp as can be. With Belgium ready to hand over control of the country to the Congolese, a political vacuum develops, where foreigners are painted with a single brush. Both sides in the Cold War seek to create a new ally, elbowing their way in, hoping to develop 20th century quasi-colonial territory in Africa, more along ideological lines than those of traditional tribe or cultural brethren. One cannot miss that Congo is rife with natural resources that both the Americans and Soviets might like, though this remains a whispered or ne’er spoken fact. While the Price family soon learns that it will take more than the presence of the Holy Spirit to protect them in this foreign land, each has a struggle to better understand their surroundings and themselves, all in the hopes of completing their mission. Personal growth and grief arrive in equal measure, leaving everyone to reassess their role in the Congo, as political and social stability disintegrates with each passing day. As the novel progresses, the Price girls mature into women, using their Congolese experiences to shape their adult lives, forever altered by what they have experienced. An interesting novel that pushes some of the limits of understanding from a missionary perspective, Kingsolver pulls no punches and lays out her agenda throughout. I’d surely recommend this novel to those who seek to explore an interesting journey through the jungles of Africa, prepared to digest and synthesise symbolism of the highest order and non-Western sets of beliefs.

While I have heard of this novel over the years, I never felt drawn to read it. Admittedly, I knew nothing of it and perhaps judged the book by its title—the lesser of the two evil things avid book readers with literary blinders tend to do—and chose to mentally shelve it. After reading two novels about the horrors of South Africa under the system of apartheid, I was ready for something new, but still on the continent. Learning that Kingsolver set this book in Africa, I wondered if it might complement some of the topics about which I had recently read, while also offering me something with a little less political frustration. Kingsolver presents an all-consuming novel that pushes the limits through the eyes of an American family, at times offering the presumptive ignorance of missionaries while also exploring massive clashes in cultural differences between the Western world and African villages. Kingsolver creates a wonderful core of characters, primarily the Price family, allowing her to paint dichotomous pictures of the proper way to live. Using various narratives led by all five women in the family, the reader is able to see the Belgian Congo/Congo/Zaire through different eyes. Backstories are plentiful, as are the character flaws that each possess, but all five are also keen to interpret their familial head—Pastor Nathan Price—with their own biases. This surely enriches the larger story as well as permitting the reader to feel a closer connection to all those who play a central role in the story’s progress. Kingsolver weighs in, both bluntly and in a wonderfully subtle manner, about the role of imperialism in African countries, which later led to a political game of Cold War chess and bloodshed to tweak the choices the Congolese made as they shed the shackles of their oppressors. Personal growth remains one of the key themes in the book, as all the girls become women and, by the latter portion of the book, their lives as adults and parts of families of their own. Kingsolver keeps the reader hooked throughout as she spins this wonderful tale that forces the reader to digest so much in short order. I am happy to have been able to read this piece and take away much from it, without the need to feel as frustrated as I might have been during my apartheid experience. Still, there is much to be said about the ‘backwards’ interpretation Europeans and missionaries had when spying the African jungle communities.

Kudos, Madam Kingsolver, for such a wonderful novel. I took much from all you had to say and will likely return to find more of your writings, hoping they are just as exciting.

This book fulfills Topic # 1: Recommendation from Another, in the Equinox #3 Book Challenge. A special thank you to Farrah (https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/5...) for the suggestion!

Love/hate the review? An ever-growing collection of others appears at:
http://pecheyponderings.wordpress.com/

A Book for All Seasons, a different sort of Book Challenge: https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/...

This novel is breathtakingly beautiful. It's a pity that I see copies of this book in Booksale being sold for P20 (less than 2 US cents) and people are not buying.

I have two copies. One is a mass paperback that I bought almost a couple of years back for P90 (US$2) but I decided to postpone reading it when I realized that this book is an Oprah book. Then when my good friend here in Goodreads marked this as "currently-reading" in early December (last month), I thought that we could be reading buddies. It so happened that I saw a paperback edition being sold for P45 (US$1) so I decided to buy it since the prints was darker and letters were bigger so I bought it to do a favor for my already myopic eyes.

But my friend is a fast reader. He finished this in 1 week when it took me almost 1 month to finish this epic magnum opus of Barbara Kingsolver (born 1955) who is being hailed, for this book, as America's Doris Lessing or Nadine Goldimer. Having read and liked Lessing's The Golden Notebook and Goldimer's July's People both of which I read last year, I agree with the comparison and I know that Kingsolver should be happy to be compared to these two Nobel laureates from another continents. Lessing is British while Goldimer is a South African.

There are many novels that came into my mind while reading this book: Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness because the setting is also in Congo although of the later years of Belgian occupation or to be more specific towards the granting of its independence in 1960; Nadine Goldimer's July's People because the Price family is white family living in an all-black community of Kingala in the heart of Congo which is similar to the Small's family living in South Africa; Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook for the political undertone or its ferocious and fearless political indictment (in this book, Kingsolver reminded her readers US President Eisenhower had a "role" in the assassination of President Patrice Lumumba just to install its puppet President Joseph Mubutu in 1960); Louisa May Alcott's Little Women because the the four Price sisters - Rachel, Leah, Adah and Ruth May also have varied contrasting characters much like the March sisters - Jo, Beth, Amy and Meg and lastly William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury for the lengthy but definitely interesting narratives of each of the children giving their own perspectives to the story.

Having compared this book with those 5 great novels is I guess the best way to describe the structure, message and beauty of this novel. Reading it is like seeing and holding a beautiful piece of art inspired by equally beautifully crafted previous pieces. Going through the narratives of the mother, Orleanna and the sisters are like marveling in awe at this beautiful piece of art in 5 different pairs of eyes. It is simply one of my memorable literary experiences that I will remember for a long time. I was mesmerized by Kingsolver's attention to details particularly on having totally different personalities and distinct voices to each of the sisters: the self-centered Rachel, the innocent Ruth May, the obedient Leah and the passive observant Adah. Their transformations from the time that they landed in Congo to Ruth May's death to their old age are really well-captured and believable. It is like reading Charles Dickens David Copperfield told 5 times without spending 1,000 pages for each.

Oh well, before I quote another favorite book of mine, I hope you get my message: this book is a beautiful book and one of those that I will remember for many, many years. And I do not mind having more copies if a hardcover first edition comes my way at say less than P50. I will give it to my other friend who collect all those first edition hardcover books. Note to the fast reader: he recently told me that what he liked only is the death of Ruth May from snake bite. Those pages actually broke my heart and again made my breathing hard and difficult while visualizing how Orleanna was mummifying Ruth May with mosquito nets.

5th book read in 2011: 195 books to go!

What is amazing about The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver is the author’s voice.

Kingsolver casts a spell with the language she uses to describe three decades in the collective lives of the Price family, beginning with their time as missionaries in the Belgian Congo.

The structure is also a strength. The story is narrated by the mother and daughters of the Price family, each illustrating her perspective of the family chronicle as they experience what would become and what really began as an ill-fated mission. The ending family is a mirror image of the beginning, Leah Price and her four sons serving as the anti-missionary to Nathan Price’s strict and misguided zealotry.

Kingsolver’s imagery is reminiscent of Faulkner’s families, and it may be a silent nod to the Nobel Prize winner to have Orleana Price come from Mississippi. The reader cannot help but be reminded of William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and especially As I Lay Dying, redolent by the altering perspectives of the characters narrative. Kingsolver also masterfully explores many Faulkneresque themes such as family, legacy, racism, guilt, and connections to land.

The author also depicts and expounds upon themes of motherhood, parent child relationships, feminism, colonial arrogance and forgiveness. Running in a current throughout the novel is religion and how Christianity blends and conflicts with animist theology. The Poisonwood Bible also records the history of colonial Congo as it transitions briefly to independence and then to a subjugation of another kind, while also spending some time with the economics of the Rumble in the Jungle between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman.

What I cannot like about the book, and what becomes a fundamental, and distractingly unnecessary flaw is the lack of objective balance. Kingsolver is clearly critical of the Christian mission and Western capitalism, and her argument is persuasive. There is no doubt that Western influences, from colonial Belgium to CIA interference to capitalistic excesses have caused devastating problems in the region. What is maddening about the narrative is Kingsolver’s use of straw man arguments, when she does not need to! She has made her point and well, so refusing to even acknowledge a counter argument weakens her otherwise powerful reasoning.

The characters Nathan and Rachel Price are unnecessarily one-dimensional. She provides an intriguing back-story to explain some of Nathan’s neurosis but uses him simply as a foil to Leah’s development and as an inverse example of her pragmatic spirituality. Rachel’s character is really a caricature, almost a comic relief, and this glaring juxtaposition to Ada’s allegorical maturity further diminishes Kingsolver’s otherwise impressive artistic achievement.

Still, these flaws are far from fatal and Barbara Kingsolver has created a memorable work.

** 2018 addendum - it is a testament to great literature that a reader recalls the work years later and this is a book about which I frequently think. Excellent.

Mi kell az öt csillaghoz? Nos, először is: karakterek, akik valódi érzelmeket váltanak ki belőlünk. Például egy olyan antagonista, akit legszívesebben pucérra vetkeztetve kergetnél végig a Nagykörúton, annyira rühelled. Aki miatt kedved lenne hinni a Pokolban, amit pedig elvből ellenzel, mint a kereszténység szellemével összeegyeztethetetlen utólagos konstrukciót. De vannak, akik miatt ha nem volna, hát ki kéne találni. És Nathaniel Price tiszteletes nagyjából ilyen figura.

Ez a könyv amúgy öt nő elbeszélése (és mint ilyen, önmagában egy írástechnikai bravúr), de a motor Price, az apa alakja, ami bilincsként béklyózza a többieket. A tiszteletes a kereszténység azon típusát képviseli, ami a szeretetet csak a szigoron keresztül képes gyakorolni - üt, és a tetejébe el is várja, hogy tiszteld, amiért üt. Úgy véli, az érdemesek sorsa (más megfogalmazásban: terhe) az, hogy kérlelhetetlen paternalizmussal irányítsák azokat, akik kevesebbet érnek náluk - és mivel szerinte a világ azon része, ami nem ő, kevesebbet ér nála, ezért az egész világot akarja a maga képére igazítani. Mindez persze értelmezhető metaforaként is: Price tiszteletes hozzáállása éppúgy szimbolizálja a hímközpontú társadalmak gondolkodását (feminista olvasat), mint a fehér államok rejtett vagy nyílt gyarmatosító törekvéseit a fekete Afrikában (antikolonialista olvasat). De működik közvetlenül is, egy olyan szörny-apa ábrázolásaként, aki arra kényszeríti feleségét és lányait, hogy vegyenek részt saját lélekmentő expedíciójában, és magával hurcolja őket a belgák által kizsigerelt Kongóba, ahol a malária, az éhhalál és a mérgeskígyók állandó vendégek, de most ráadásul még egy polgárháború is befigyelni látszik. Magyarán: a saját üdvözülése érdekében kész feláldozni másokat. Az ilyen embernél pedig aligha van rosszabb.

A másik, ami az öt csillagot teszi, az a katarzis. Hogy benne akad az emberben (bennem) a levegő. És itt ez is megvan. No most ugye a katarzis nem egyenlő a meglepetéssel vagy a csavarral, hanem néha egyenesen ellentétes vele. A katarzis ugyanis azt jelenti, hogy az író mondatról mondatra épít egy végső drámai robbanást, aminek a fenyegető közelségével az olvasó tisztában van, tudja, hogy be fog következni valamilyen formában - mégsem képes kivonni magát a hatása alól. Ezt Kingsolver példásan felépíti, ám sajátos módon nem a végére, hanem úgy a regény háromnegyedére. Ami utána jön, az egyfajta hosszú lecsengésnek tűnik: a szereplők (már aki megmaradt) kikerülnek az apa súlyos árnyéka alól, és tőle távol lesznek valakik, miközben megpróbálják így vagy úgy kipurgálni magukból a múlt mérgeit. Sok tekintetben kockázatos vállalás ez a szerzőtől, mert nem lehetett biztos benne, hogy a tiszteletes gonosz energiái nélkül is kitart a szöveg lendülete. De kitart. Az eltávolodással teret nyer a szöveg, újabb perspektívákat kap, amikor a szereplők elütő megküzdési stratégiáit is megismerjük. Mondhatni, ennek köszönhetően válnak a lányok azzá, ami az elejétől fogva kijárt nekik: főszereplővé. Arról nem is beszélve, hogy Kingsolvernek sikerül egy másodlagos katarzist is felépítenie, ami ugyan nem olyan drámai, mint az első, de cserébe nagyon szép. Egy igazán elegáns búcsú, mondjuk így.

Remekmű, ami a klasszikus angolszász nagyepika hagyományait követi, de fel is dúsítja azt egy igazán gazdag, érzékeny nyelvvel. Ez a nyelv pedig nemcsak arra alkalmas, hogy kibontsa nekünk a karaktereket, hanem arra is, hogy megteremtse a fejünkben Kongó rémisztő és gyönyörű freskóját. A vörös földet, az illatos gyümölcsöket, a surranó csúszómászókat, a mindent elmosó esőket, és az embereket, akiknek hitét egyesek babonának nevezik - pedig nevezhetnék egyszerűen hitnek is.

I'll wait until after I've finished this review before I read other Goodread reviews of The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver, but I did take a quick look at the numeric ratings other reviewers have given the book. A couple of reviewers have given this book a four rating, but most of the reviewers have given this book either a rating of three or five. That makes perfect sense because this book deserves both a three and five rating. It deserves a three rating because it can be a long and slow read, and there isn't much plot progression. It deserves a five rating because it gives readers Shakespearen quality characters and the sensation of having shared life-altering experiences.

This novel is a tale about the Price family. There are two adults and four kids in the Price family. The children are all girls. The middle two are twins. The father, Nathan, is a tad crazy. The mother, Orleanna, has problems asserting her own identity.

I grew up in a similar family during a time that was almost identical, so it was easy for me to identify with the Price family.

Nathan Price uprooted his family and moved them to the Belgium Congo shortly before the Belgium Congo obtained its independence in 1960. At this point, I'm going to cut away from the Price family and talk about life in 1959.

In 1959, Eisenhower was still President. JFK was running for President. There was Jim Crow in the South, and Redlining in the North. Edward R. Murrow attempted to provide the USA with a moral compass. Douglas Edwards was the news anchor at CBS. John Foster Dulles, the Clarence Thomas of white diplomats, was Secretary of State. The Cold War was warming up, and people were debating if they should build fallout shelters in their backyards.

In 1959 Doo Wop music was the rage. Like everything else, music was segregated. Sam Cooke eventually integrated the music scene, but he was killed for his efforts. White radio stations played white groups like Dion and the Belmonts. Black radio stations played black groups like Clyde McPhatter and The Drifters. White groups like The Weavers were blacklisted.

In 1959, I was eleven years old. My best friend had turned me onto the Hardy Boys and The Kingston Trio. I owned two LPs. One record album was by The Kingston Trio, and the other was by The Drifters. To this day, they're still my favorite two records. Back then, I watched Douglas Edwards anchor the evening news. Walter Cronkite wasn't yet on the scene. When I wasn't watching the news or reading a Hardy Boys Mystery, I played one or the other of my LP records on the stereo system my brother had built. The Kingston Trio sang The Merry Minuet, so I knew, "They're rioting in Africa." That bit of information was later confirmed by Douglas Edwards when he told me what was happening in the Belgium Congo.

Not to change the subject, but before I got to high school, I was educated mainly by spinsters. Spinsters who all had female housemates who lived with them for purposes of sharing expenses. In 1959 it was okay for a woman to live with another woman just as long as they both had low paying jobs, they were "just sharing expenses", and they didn't talk much about their home life. When I got to 7th grade, my science and math teacher was one of those spinsters. Her reputation as a disciplinarian pretty much gave me a conniption, but on those few occasions when I was forced to talk to her one-to-one, she was a regular lady.

I'm mentioning my 7th grade math-science teacher because she was the only actual person I've ever actually met who had actually been to the Congo. Not only that, but she was there at about the same time as when the Price family first arrived. (Is that a coincidence, or what?) I mean she was really in the Congo; that is, if you can believe driving through the Congo South-to-North in a caravan of Land Rovers counts as actually being there. I don't know if she actually met any Congolese people, but she saw lots of animals and took lots of photos. (I mean, she shot lots of animals, but not a one was hurt by it.)

Back to the Price family. I'm grateful for two things. First, I'm grateful I was able to experience what they experienced without actually experiencing it. Second, I'm grateful I was born and raised in Kalamazoo, not Kilanga.

Brilliant!!

A review in quotes from the book:

I know how people are, with their habits of mind. Most will sail through from cradle to grave with a conscience clean as snow...I know people. Most have no earthly notion of the price of a snow-white conscience.

When the spirit passed through him he groaned, throwing body and soul into his weekly purge. The "Amen enema", as I call it. My palindrome for the Reverend.

He warned Mother not to flout God's Will by expecting too much of us."Sending a girl to college is like pouring water in your shoes,' he still loves to say, as often as possible. 'It's hard to say which is worse, seeing it run out and waste the water, or seeing it hold in and wreck the shoes.

I could never work out whether we were to view religion as a life-insurance policy or a life sentence. 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. You wind up walking on eggshells, never knowing which... is at home at the moment.

Tata Jesus is bangala!

Don't blame God for what ants have to do. We all get hungry. Congolese people are not so different from Congolese ants."

"They have to swarm over a village and eat other people alive?"

"When they are pushed down long enough they will rise up. If they bite you, they are trying to fix things in the only way they know.”

Live was I ere I saw evil

...trust in Creation which is made fresh daily and doesn’t suffer in translation. This God does not work in especially mysterious ways. The sun here rises and sets at six exactly. A caterpillar becomes a butterfly. A bird raises its brood in the forest and a greenheart tree will only grow from a greenheart seed. He brings drought sometimes followed by torrential rains and if these things aren’t always what I had in mind, they aren’t my punishment either. They’re rewards, let’s say for the patience of a seed.

On the day of the hunt I came to know in the slick center of my bones this one thing; all animals kill to survive, and we are animals. The lion kills the baboon, the baboon kills fat grasshoppers. The elephant tears up living trees, dragging their precious roots from the dirt they love....And we, even if we had no meat or even grass to gnaw, still boil our water to kill the invisible creatures that would like to kill us first. And swallow quinine pills. The death of something living is the price of our own survival, and we pay it again and again. We have no choice. It is the one solemn promise every life on earth is born and bound to keep.

It's frightening when things you love appear suddenly changed from what you have always known.

No other continent has endured such an unspeakably bizarre combination of foreign thievery and foreign goodwill.

But his kind will always lose in the end. I know this, and now I know why. Whether it's wife or nation they occupy, their mistake is the same: they stand still, and their stake moves underneath them.... Chains rattle, rivers roll, animals startle and bolt, forests inspire and expand, babies stretch open-mouthed from the womb, new seedlings arch their necks and creep forward into the light. Even a language won't stand still. A territory is only possessed for a moment in time. They stake everything on that moment, posing for photographs while planting the flag, casting themselves in bronze.... Even before the flagpole begins to peel and splinter, the ground underneath arches and slides forward into its own new destiny. It may bear the marks of boots on its back, but those marks become the possessions of the land.

History didn't cross my mind. Now it does. Now I know, whatever your burdens, to hold yourself apart from the lot of more powerful men is an illusion. On that awful day in January 1961, Lumumba paid with a life and so did I. On the wings of an owl the fallen Congo came to haunt even our little family, we messengers of goodwill adrift on a sea of mistaken intentions.

Poor Congo, barefoot bride of men who took her jewels and promised the Kingdom.

Don’t try to make life a mathematics problem with yourself in the center and everything coming out equal. When you’re good, bad things can still happen. And if you’re bad, you can still be lucky.

Sugar, it's no parade but you'll get down the street one way or another, so you'd just as well throw your shoulders back and pick up the pace.

Everything you're sure is right can be wrong in another place.

We used to be baffled by Kikongo words with so many different meanings: bangala, for most precious and most insufferable and also poisonwood. That one word brought down Father’s sermons every time, as he ended them all with the shout “Tata Jesus is bangala!”

Illusions mistaken for truth are the pavement under our feet. They are what we call civilization.

Shoes would interfere with her conversation, for she constantly addresses the ground under her feet. Asking forgiveness. Owning, disowning, recanting, recharting a hateful course of events to make sense of her complicity. We all are, I suppose. Trying to invent our version of the story. All human odes are essentially one. "My life: what I stole from history, and how I live with it.

Listen. 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. In perfect stillness, frankly, I've only found sorrow.

A choir of seedlings arching their necks out of rotted tree stumps, sucking life out of death. I am the forest's conscience, but remember, the forest eats itself and lives forever.

The power is in the balance: we are our injuries, as much as we are our successes.

Listened to the Audible version. This book is new among my all time favorites! Read it now!!!

5 impossibly brilliant stars

When this came out twenty-two years ago, I was fortunate enough to see Kingsolver read at the Tattered Cover bookstore. She talked about how she wrote from the five different first person perspectives of the mom and four daughters and she worked to make each voice unique so that you could open the book to any page and know who was speaking without looking at the beginning of the chapter to tell you whose point of view it was. Since this was nominated for a Pulitzer, it’s fair to assume she did a good job.

One of the things I remember clearly from reading this the first time reading this was my anger toward the father, who is a sexist jackass who was so certain in his mission to convert the Congolese people and baptize their children, he did not have a firm grip on how to actually help the Congolese people with other things like survival—he couldn’t even help his own family because he was so focused on the afterlife, he wasn’t seeing how ill from malaria and malnutrition his own family was languishing. He also didn’t believe educating girls was worth while, even though his twin daughters were prodigies.

It vividly feels like you’re with the Price family through downpours and droughts and ants attacking everything, eating babies left alone or chickens if they could get to them.

One of the siblings is little five-year-old Ruth May. Her point of view is adorable and funny. At first I felt sorry for the oldest daughter Rachel, who isn’t booksmart like the twins Leah and Adah, but she is pretty. She’s desperately missing her high school years of going to dances and parties. Towards the end of the novel, she makes me cringe, although her attitude to indigenous Africans is, unfortunately, an attitude still held today by far too many white Americans toward indigenous Americans and black folks.

Leah and Adah also change over the course of the novel because of the things they saw and survived. Coming to the United States they are dazzled by grocery stores with dozens of kinds of toothpastes and items that are definitely not actually needed, although advertising and marketing convinces the American consumer that they are. It’s a powerful novel indeed that many years later, I can go to the grocery store and remember the scene from this novel when I can’t figure out which toothpaste to buy because I have a zillion choices.

This is one of those booksthat stands the test of time and is worth rereading.

n  "Silence has many advantages. When you do not speak, other people presume you to be deaf or feeble-minded and promptly make a show of their own limitations."n

I can't believe it took me nearly 20 years to read this book (and I can't believe it was published 20 years ago this year!) I've read a few of Kingsolver's other books, and naturally enjoyed her style, her research, and the strong characters. This book is (likely) her magnum opus and worth every accolade poured on over the decades.

Highlights and observations (slightly spoilerish...):
- My favorite passsages were the conversations between Anatole and Leah. From page 309-310:
"Don't try to make life a mathematics problem with yourself at the center and everything coming out equal. When you are good, bad things can still happen. And if you are bad, you can still be lucky."
- Orleanna's memories at the opening of each "book" really pulled the text together for me.
- Adah was a wonder and I loved her chapters. The quote above (re: silence) was one of the few I just had to copy for my quote notebook.
- Rachel was god-awful, and I am sure that was always the intention. I tried to find something uplifting or redeeming about her character, but... no. Nothing.
- It did make me sad that the sisters were not closer. Even though we are all very different, I have a special bond with own sisters. I would never think of saying or doing some of the things these sisters did to each other, even if upset or hurt.


--
Read for my own project of clearing my shelves (this book has been on it for too many years to count...) and for Book Riot's Read Harder 2018 Challenge of "an Oprah Book Club selection".

"Nathan was something that happened to us. " Nathan Price and his wife Oleanna are missionaries in the Belgian Congo (later Zaire). Nathan has brought his family from their comfortable Georgia existence despite having been advised by his church not to go. While Nathan, with complete disregard for the interests and customs of the Congolese, attempts to bring the gospel to heathens, his wife and four daughters struggle to cope with the absence of all of the small comforts to which they were accustomed.

The daughters ranged in age from 5 to 16 at the start of the mission and the story of their lives is told by them (and occasionally by Oleanna, but never by Nathan) in alternating chapters. The narrator of the audio book did a pretty good job of differentiating the voices, although neither the author nor the narrator was very convincing as five year old Ruth May. There were also the teenagers Rachel and the twins Leah and Adah (who was mute and had been damaged at birth).

I was absolutely enthralled by the story of this family in the beginning. The language that the author used and the images she painted were beautiful and perceptive. Nathan was a bully who got worse as he became more and more unhinged. The Congolese were not exactly receptive to his teachings. The strangeness of the environment challenged all of them. They faced tarantulas, snakes, torrential rains, malaria and rivers of ants. The book showed the benevolent arrogance of missionaries who knew nothing about a place yet assumed that they were qualified to tell the people who live there how to live. Their only credentials were their whiteness and their belief in the superiority of their religion. Comparisons were subtly drawn to the treatment of the Congo by Belgium and America.

However, the last half of the book sort of fell off the rails for me. As the girls matured, Adah and especially Leah became politicized and all subtlety was lost as the book became overtly pedantic about the history of the Congo. The only character I cared to read about in the last half of the book was Rachel, who reminded me of one of the vain, oblivious survivors in an Edith Wharton novel. I found her entertaining but I wouldn't want to spend any time with either Adah or Leah.

Overall, I liked this book a lot, and if the second half had been as good as the first, I would have loved it.

among the better summer reading list books i've read. visual and deep-hitting. the characters and events of this book have stuck with me in the year-plus since i read it.

This still is in my top five books of all time. It, along with Alan Paton's Cry the Beloved Country, began my interest in Africa and colonialism, and put me on teh path I've followed up to this day with my PhD focus in British colonial history in South Africa. That being said, this is a top-notch novel. In 2000, at the age of fifteen, this is what I had to say right after reading it:

"Barbara Kingsolver has eloquently crafted a marvel here. In the Poisonwood Bible, she relates the story of fiery, self-righteous Baptist minister Nathan Price, who drags his wife and four daughters into the Congo in 1959 for missionary work. Settling in the village Kilanga, on the Kwilu River, adventure soon unfolds.Told from the point of view of all five female characters, the story is related very differently. Rachel, the teenager, the adolescent twins Adah and Leah, the child Ruth May, and the mother, Orleanna make up this tale.While this delivery in tale is unorthodox and rewarding, the characters all have their flaws. Rachel's self-centeredness and misplaced priorities are frustrating--she genuinely cries over a hole in her favorite dress while children starve outside--as well as her inability to use correct phrasing (a "tapestry of justice"). Ruth May is childly simplistic in her delivery (look for her speech on segregation in the first part of the book), and Orleanna's Earth Mother, wandering style grows tedious in the lengthy middle section.Leah and Adah are the most interesting, and I gravitated to Adah, with her disability and scorn for mankind. She is clearly brilliant, but ignored by all, especially by her smugly self-righteous (to the point of being insufferable) father.The Poisonwood Bible is at first a slow read, for the first 150 pages, but it soon picks up as the tension rises and falls...characters like Tata Ndu, Brother Fowles, and Anatole only add to the excitement, as does the revelation of what became of each of the wayward sisters as the book ends around 1998. A fiction that dips into politics, the Poisonwood Bible is an enjoyable read."

I've re-read it twice since then, and while my enthusiasm has died a slight bit, it is still one of the most arresting and powerful things I've written. Great job, Barbara.

Riveting...We read this aloud at home and I found it to be beautifully and movingly written, by turns charming and horrifying. Her articulation of the most subtle nuances of experience, the profoundly different narrative voices she assumes like an experienced character actress, and the way she fluently plays with language, show Kingsolver's love and mastery of her craft.
Having been brought up by ultra-religious Christian parents myself, I found the children's and wife's experience strongly resonant and painfully authentic.
I think you have to have lived it to know how accurate and insightful she is in her exposition of the nature of evangelical authoritarianism, it's effect on character, the power of rigidly imposed gender roles, the monomaniacal aspects of monotheism, the not-so-subtle and pervasive racism and sexism.
I think the comparison to imperialism is smack on, and a valuable association that deserves, even needs, to be drawn, particularly in the world in which we live today, where the confluence of these two rivers of inhumanity threaten more every day to once again overflow with devastating consequences.

It cannot be too boldly stated that these twin terrors have together shaped our world for the worse, anciently and modernly.
As a victim and survivor of both, to greater or lesser extent, Ms. Kingsolver has a natural right to portray them, and does so authoritatively.
Both have an inherent dismissivness toward the dignity and value of individuals, engendering similar resentment, hopelessness, and a sense of helplessness, in their victims.
The conceit and destructiveness inherent in both clearly make them horses of the very same color. We ignore their resemblance and relationship at our peril.
It's important to know that this is Kingsolver's most autobiographical novel. She's writing from personal experience, as well as an impressively large body of knowledge about Africa and it's politics.
She knows these people and places like the back of her hand.
Like her main characters, she carries them wherever she goes.