One of my favorites, and also the very first example I ever saw of alternating first person POVs. There is so much depth and wordplay here, and such *naked* pain. My heart aches every time I think about this book!

5

4.75

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 ...

I surprised myself by really enjoying this book. I had expected it to be hard going and a bit of a struggle, but after about 150 pages I was engrossed in it. The experiences the girls face is written very well, and I particularly like the fact it's written from differing perspectives. Some of the political stuff went a bit over my head, but I googled for more information and learned a lot in the process. I will definitely read more of Barbara Kingsolver's novels. I'd say it's not the easiest of books to read and it is an effort but most definitely worth it.

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.

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.

“The forest eats itself and lives forever.”
Image: “The Trees Have Eyes” by Angela Wright

There is magic in these pages. Not the supernatural kind. Not the magical-realism kind. But magic of language and of the TARDIS kind: by some strange sorcery, many huge themes are thoroughly but lightly explored in single volume that is beautiful, harrowing, exciting, tender, occasionally humorous, and very approachable.

“We messengers of goodwill adrift in a sea of mistaken intentions.”

Freedom and Forgiveness

“I was lodged in the heart of darkness… I cowered beside my cage, and though my soul hankered after the mountain, I found... I had no wings.”

This is multi-layered, multi-faceted, and multi-narrated. But the many themes all concern the craving for freedom. Freedom of individuals and of nations, from exploitation, superstition, poverty, hunger, disease, bad relationships, and colonial oppressors.

When freedom is offered, there is the difficulty of recognising it and having the courage to accept it. In the final third, the stories flow in separate channels, yet the theme narrows to the idea that freedom requires letting go. Specifically, we must forgive others and ourselves before we can be truly free.

Genesis, The Revelation, The Judges, Bel and the Serpent, Exodus, Song of the Three Children, and The Eyes in the Trees

The seven sections are titled after pertinent books of the Bible or Apocrypha.

In 1959, a Baptist minister takes his wife and four daughters (Rachel, twins Leah and Adah, and little Ruth May) from suburban Georgia, USA on a one-year mission to a remote village in the Congo, shortly before independence. The first two-thirds concern their departure, arrival, and year in Kilanga. The remainder follows their diverging lives up to 1986 and beyond. The final section is a slightly superfluous race through a couple of decades.

The narration switches between Orleanna, the now elderly wife/mother looking back, and the four daughters nearer the "now" of that stage of the story. All are independent minded and intelligent, each with a distinctive voice, which develops plausibly with the story (except for the one Kingsolver probably least identifies with, who becomes something of a caricature in middle age). Each illustrates a different Western approach to Africa: meidcal fix, submission/immersion, political reform, colonial paternalism. They could easily just be stereotypes (vicar's wife; the sweet sixteen, caring about cosmetics and fashion; the nature-loving, religious tomboy; the silent, thoughtful, limping observer; the gregarious child), but Kingsolver makes each uniquely believable and engaging, especially mute Adah whose words are those of a sensuous, awe-struck, and non-judgemental poet.

Nathan, whose damaged psyche, guilt, and inflexible beliefs are the trigger for everything, is only ever known through the words of the women he despises. Unfair or karma? Giving him a single chapter would seem tokenistic, and equal billing would unbalance the whole book. I think the way Kingsolver has written it rectifies the imbalance of his long-term power over the women in the story.

For Better or Worse

“The hardest work of every day was deciding, once again, to stay with my family. They never even knew.”

Orleanna is married to a man who does not, and probably never could love her. She is pained that “The thing you love more than this world grew from a devil’s seed”, but loves her very different children regardless. She wrestles with whether and how to leave Nathan, considering the consequences for the girls. With hindsight, she wonders what she was guilty of: complicity, loyalty, stupefaction? But she was a victim, too.

That abusive marriage is beautifully contrasted with a tender, devoted couple. They struggle for mere survival and are often forced apart, sometimes for long periods, but their love and commitment never waver. As with freedom and forgiveness, the difficulty is not merely finding love, but recognising it and then daring to grasp it and cling to it.

Themes

I expect different themes dominate, depending on the individual circumstances of each reader. I could write a whole review focusing on any one of these:

•tThe circle of life, eating and being eaten, survival. “Alive, nobody matters much in the long run. But dead, some men matter more than others.”

•tThe butterfly effect: “The sting of a fly… can launch the end of the world.” And “Every life is different because you passed this way.”

•tNature, nurture, how landscape shapes peoples, despite their attempts to shape it.

•tSin, original sin (snakes), sins of the Father and consequences - for individuals, but also in terms of colonialism, reparations, freedom.

•tGuilt, judgement and privilege, especially survivor guilt and white privilege. Everyone here is burdened with guilt, mostly of an unnecessary kind or degree. “God doesn’t need to punish us. He just grants us enough life to punish ourselves.”

•tThe Bible, faith (and loss of), religion: life insurance or life sentence; life-jacket or straitjacket? Truth versus intention of the Bible and God.

•tLanguage, (mis)translation, misunderstanding, wordplay (especially Malapropisms (circus-mission for circumcision!) and palindromes), and literalism – or not – in interpreting the Bible.

•tPolysemy and poisonwood. “Mbote… means hello and goodbye, both.” Dundu is a kind of antelope, a particular plant, a hill, or the “price you have to pay”. The words of “baptism” and “to terrify” sound almost the same. And most disastrously for Nathan, bangala means most precious (Jesus), most insufferable – and poisonwood.

•tRacism - both ways.

•tOpposites, balance, reversal, palindromes, mirrors, ying/yang, pairs, twins.

•tFreedom, liberty, independence – and their cost.

•tEducation: its importance, and especially the need to understand (rather than merely know). “Our hardest task is teaching people to count on a future.”

•tClash of cultures: “Africa swallowed the conqueror’s music and sang a new song of her own.” The need to adapt, and the disastrous consequences of not doing so. “It’s like he’s trying to put rubber tires on a horse” but there are no horses in the Congo, “The point I was trying to make was so true there was not even a good way to say it.”

•tThe role of women: in their own right, but also as wives and mothers.

•tConsumerism, agriculture, colonialism, war, politics, the environment.

•tListening, watching, eavesdropping (“The Eyes in the Trees”): by God, animals, and fellow humans - alive and dead. One of Rachel’s better Malapropisms is “false-eye dolls”.

•tDisability and identity. Disability may “not be entirely one’s fault” but one should have the “good manners to act ashamed” in the face of “the arrogance of the able-bodied”. Yet, being “cured” might not be a blessing.

•tChange, adaptation, and finding one's true self - the character development is really well done. “To live is to be marked. To live is to change. To acquire the words of a story.”

•tLove, loyalty, sacrifice, hope.

•tSymbolism, prophesy, foreboding: Biblical (of course), but others, too, such as the “hope chests” the girls prepare for future marriage: one sees no need, one applies black borders, one does it carefully, and another doesn’t do it at all. Also colonialism of Africa having parallels with individual people.


Sensual and Synaesthetic Quotes

•t"She can feel the touch of his long, curled tongue on the water's skin, as if he were lapping from her hand."

•t“Rainy-season light in my eyes and Congo grit in my teeth.”

•t“Emily Dickinson: No snikcidy lime, a contrary name with a sourgreen taste... She liked herself best in darkness, as do I."

•tBright fabrics “worn together in jangling mixtures that ring in my ears”.

•t“Rattling words on the page calling my eyes to dance with them.”

•t“Once every few years, even now, I catch the scent of Africa.”

•t“While my husband’s intentions crystallized as rock salt… the Congo breathed behind the curtain of the forest, preparing to roll over us like a river.”

•t“All those smells were so loud in my ears.”

•t“The silk texture of that cool air, the smell of Congolese earth curling its toes under a thatch of dead grass.”


Other Quotes

•t"Consecrate myself in the public library."

•t“Here, bodily damage is more or less considered to be a by-product of living, not a disgrace… I enjoy a benign approval… that I have never, ever known in Bethlehem, Georgia.”

•t“Sending a girl to college is like pouring water on your shoes.”

•t“Whatever happens… Father acts like it’s a movie he’s already seen and we’re just dumb for not knowing how it comes out.”

•t“To save my sanity, I learned to pad around hardship in soft slippers and try to remark on its good points.”

•t“The buzzards rise from the leafless billboard tree and flap away like the sound of old black satin dresses beating together.”

•t“I am the smooth, elegant black cat who slips from the house as a liquid shadow… With my own narrow shadow for a boat I navigate the streams of moonlight that run between shadow islands.”

•t“The radio a live mass of wires oozing from his trunk, a seething congregation of snakes.”

•t“Yellow leaves… littering the ground like a carpet rolled out for the approaching footsteps of the end of time.”

•t“The sun hung low on the river, seemingly reluctant to enter this strange day. Then it rose redly into the purpled sky, resembling a black eye.”

•t“Chasing flames that passed hungrily over the startled grass.”

•t“As long as I kept moving my grief streamed out behind me like a swimmer's long hair in water. I knew the weight was there but it didn't touch me.”

•tEven in solitude, there are “exploding moments” of unexpected “companionship and joy” such as “A kiss of flesh-coloured sunrise while I hung out the washing, a sigh of indigo birds exhaled from the grass.”

•t“By [X] I was shattered and assembled, by way of [X] I am delivered not out of my life but through it. Love changes everything.” Inadvertently echoing Nathan’s belief that God delivers us not from suffering, but through it.

•t“I recite the Periodic Table… like a prayer; I take my exams as Holy Communion, and the passing of the first semester was a sacrament.”

•t“Carry us, marry us, ferry us, bury us: those are our four ways to exodus, for now.”


For a very different take on the missionary experience, see Michel Faber's interplantary, The Book of Strange New Things, reviewed HERE.


Image source “The Trees Have Eyes” by Angela Wright:
http://fineartamerica.com/featured/th...

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.

People love this book, and I think I understand why. It's got a collection of strong characters, each chapter is written from a different character's point of view, and it's set in Africa, which is exciting. But there are a few reasons I don't think it's great literature.

The main things I expect from a good novel are: a) that the writer doesn't manipulate her characters for her agenda, b) that the characters' actions are consistent to the world the writer has created for them, c) good, tight prose, and d) the characters are nuanced and aren't entirely perfect or hideous. In this novel, the father character is entirely hideous and the mother and each daughter represent a plight of some kind. Their existence is to present arguments for and against lots of important issues in Africa, but for me that kind of thing is an extremely dissatisfying fiction experience.

I suppose there is an argument for fictionalizing reality in order to make it more palatable and invite a larger audience to your cause, but I don't think this novel is successful in that regard. I found it overly preachy, critical, and completely disrespectful to its characters, whom I believe deserve a better story in which to thrive.

This book literally put me into rage. In fact, I had to put it aside and read something a tad lighter (compared to The Poisonwood Bible even depressing The Lonely Polygamist is a lighter read) to be able to fall asleep. Reading about social injustices can do this to me sometimes.

The Poisonwood Bible is a story of a Baptist preacher Nathan Price who chooses to become a missionary in the Belgian Congo of 1959. Along with his unwavering beliefs and desire to bring salvation and enlightenment to savage natives, Nathan takes his wife and four daughters to Africa. His attempts to introduce Christianity to the residents of a tiny Congolese village are mostly fruitless, as Price knows very little of their language, culture, and religious beliefs. But the preacher is relentless, even when he hears the news of the looming Congolese independence and is warned to leave the country immediately because any westerner is unsafe in the country which is trying to free itself of decades-long white oppression. Nathan decides it is his calling to stay and continue his righteous work at all cost to him and his family. This decision does cost the family dearly. Not one of them comes out of this experience unscathed.

The novel is narrated from the POV of 5 Price women - Nathan's wife and daughters. Each has her own perspective on Nathan's work and on what is happening in the Congo. While none of the women physically takes part in a whirlwind of events the Congo is going through - the Congo's fight for independence from Belgium, first election of the Prime Minister, the CIA-staged coup to eliminate this democratically chosen Prime Minister and to install his replacement who would guarantee the West's access to the Congo's natural resources and safeguard the country as a pillar of capitalism in Africa - each has to carry a burden of responsibility for what has happened to their family specifically and the country in general. The reactions vary from solidified dismissal of the natives and rampant feeling of white supremacy to complete acceptance of the responsibility for atrocities forced onto the African nations by whites.

In a way, the Price family is a symbol of colonialism. Nathan Price symbolizes the colonialist forces that think it is their right (if not responsibility) to bring change to the countries they misunderstand and look down upon, at any cost, including destroying people's cultures, religions, and leadership. And the Price women are representative of all of us, unwitting participants in all of this, who may chose to close our eyes and pretend nothing is happening or to try to do something drastic about it or in the least to acknowledge that such cultural arrogance is wrong.

I suppose some readers will this book off-putting because of its seeming liberal agenda and its negative portrayal of both Christianity and the West (mostly America). Well, I'll leave them to admire Rachel Price's POV and live in denial. I personally found this book very enlightening. Kingsolver speaks my language.

The reason why I am giving The Poisonwood Bible 4 stars and not 5 is because of the last few pages which left me feeling rather helpless. It seems, nothing that we do (including absolutely good-intentioned vaccinations and efforts to save children's lives) can bring anything but hardship to Africa. I guess, Kingsolver's last advice is to leave Africa to its own devices...

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.


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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".