I started this book around 4 or 5 years ago and couldn’t get into it. My psyche was trying to tell me not to bother. I decided to finish it (for some reason picked it over a classic like Les Miserables) and I did like the writing style and I did like the story, but it is very much anti-American, anti-Christian, and pro-communist! I should have expected exactly that from an Oprah book club book.

The book praises Patrice Lumumba (the Congo’s first democratically elected prime minister) for being a communist who believes in democracy and conversely vilifies Mobutu Sese Seko (the man who took power after Lumumba was assassinated) for being a dictator who believes in capitalism. Mobutu was not a capitalist. He was a dictator who ran a kleptocracy (a government that extends the personal wealth and political power of government officials and the ruling class at the expense of the population). Dictatorships are bad and Mobutu was no exception. He made the people of the Congo suffer enormously, but the book does not make him a villain for being a dictator, it makes him a villain for being a so-called capitalist (Dictatorships are okay for Liberals due to their favorite communist dictator Fidel Castro).

The incessant glorification of communism and the opposing drawl of America (and Christianity) is bad in this book is sickening. The Christian minister is portrayed as a controlling father and husband who puts his whole family in danger by staying in Africa in an unstable political climate and who ends up going crazy. The previous Christian minister is someone who actually lives Christian principles, but was kicked out of position of minister by his own church for cavorting too closely with the natives. Leah defines communists as people who “do not fear the Lord, and they think everybody should have the same kind of house” and from her standpoint “it is hard to fathom the threat” of communism (oh please as if millions of people haven’t died due to communist rule). Rachel, who argues with her sisters against communism, is portrayed as a dumb blonde who misuses words and who also happens to be shallow and heartless. Adah who is seen as the smart one of course agrees with whatever Leah thinks. This theme culminates near the end of the book the sisters get together and go sight-seeing. They go to a palace in Africa where human bones and remains were used as building materials. Leah suggests that we shouldn’t judge the chief for murdering all those people to build his palace just because we are from the West and don’t understand. She says that what looks like “mass murder to us is probably misinterpreted ritual. They probably had ways of keeping their numbers in balance in times of famine”. Both Rachel and the Bible are then made fun of by Leah and Adah when Rachel points out ‘thou shalt not kill’. So … if you are a chief in Africa facing elimination by starvation it is okay to knock off a few people to save the rest, but if you are an American in a world full of nuclear weapons capable of eliminating life on this planet you shouldn’t take out one man who may increase the chances of nuclear holocaust (according to the book Lumumba’s assassination was orchestrated by Eisenhower to eliminate an additional communist threat during the Cold War). If you think one is okay, you have to think the other is too. You can’t justify one just because of where you live or what color your skin is. Nice hypocritical message Barbara Kingsolver.

When I first started reading this I was honestly confused as to what was happening. And the plot wasn't what I was expecting, I wasn't sure exactly what I was expecting but it wasn't a story about a missionary to the Congo. I was pleasantly surprised though and eventually ended up getting really into the book when I got about a third of the way through, so much so that I was reading it while I was supposed to be working, hopefully my supervisor didn't notice I was MIA. I did think that the book was slow at times and dragged on, especially towards the end. And it was kind of funny that the ending felt  sort of like the conclusion paragraphs of an essay where it was kind of summarizing all the characters and their perspective etc . It was kind of hard at times to sit through the book because I kept wanting their dad to just die or fuck off honestly, but I think that indicates that the book did a pretty good job getting me emotionally invested.

There's plenty of Goodreads reviewers who felt differently, but I found The Poisonwood Bible to be a very strong and very different piece of historical fiction. It's a slower story than I normally like, something you might want to consider before deciding whether to try this 600+ page exploration of colonialism, postcolonialism and postcolonial attitudes, but I very much enjoyed this incredibly detailed portrait of a family and a society set in the Belgian Congo of 1959. And I, unlike some other readers, didn't see evidence of a narrow-minded agenda in Kingsolver's tale. I didn't really see this as a book about lessons or morals, I saw it as a close look at the reality of this time and the different way it can be perceived depending on your point of view.

I like writers who explore without trying to impart a lesson, who lay out a canvas but let the reader draw their own conclusions from it. This adds depth and a layer of complexity to the novel that allows for that dreaded word - interpretation - to rear its head. But different interpretations make for very interesting conversations. And I love it when reading a book creates a two-way stream of ideas, those of the author and those of the reader, the kind of book that asks me to think instead of proceeding to think for me. Lectures on colonialism? Been there, done that, give me this more thought-provoking method any day.

I particularly like what Tatiana said about the different POVs of the Price family and how each showed a different side and a different attitude to colonialism. From those who saw it as the West's duty to educate and industrialize "savages" and rid them of such damaging practices as genital mutilation and infanticide; to those who feel embarrassed at what the West has done to the postcolonial world and believe in the need for cultural respect. It's complex because there isn't a simple answer to the questions raised by colonialism. Do objective, absolute truths ever exist? Where does culture end and universal human rights begin? Is humanitarian intervention a responsibility or an excuse to impose Western beliefs and values on postcolonial societies? Kingsolver shows the many sides to this issue and lets you draw your own conclusions.

The story is about Nathan Price and his family. Nathan is an evangelical Baptist from Georgia who believes God has sent him on a mission to save - through religious conversion - the "savage" citizens of the Belgian Congo. With him are his wife and four daughters and the novel alternates between each of these five perspectives. I'm not usually a fan of any more than two POVs but this book turned out to be a rare exception. Maybe because Kingsolver spent the necessary time developing each individual character so none of the perspectives felt unnecessary or like filler.

I've spent a lot of time comparing this book to another I read recently - A Thousand Splendid Suns. They are both books about countries and cultures that I was only vaguely familiar with and they are both about a very specific turning point in each country's history. And while they are both good, in my opinion, they are also two very different kinds of novels. A Thousand Splendid Suns is a fast-paced, emotional, dramatic page-turner that has you constantly on the edge of your seat. I read it in a single day and wanted to recommend it to every person who hadn't read it. The Poisonwood Bible, on the other hand, is a slower, more complex, more demanding work that is even more satisfying when you look back over it and observe its clever details as a whole. It's not for everyone and I'm sure my Empire and Decolonization course helped prepare me somewhat for it.

Ultimately, I really liked how Kingsolver uses the different perspectives to take on the different attitudes to postcolonialism. For me, this is a clever and thought-provoking novel that goes beyond what many other books of its kind have achieved.

Updated August 13, 2018
Reading this book was like visiting some old friends and catching up. It was a really nostalgic read for me, and I thoroughly enjoyed Kingsolver's writing in this novel.

The Poisonwood Bible is about the Price family who is on a mission trip to Congo during the 1950s. The Dad, Nathan Price is a Minister who sets out to saving souls for Christ and baptizing everyone who comes in his path. There are a lot of cultural, spiritual and political things in play that hinders Price from achieving his goal- including his family.

What absolutely loved about this novel was the writing. The book is told from the POVs of the mother and the daughters in the family. It is uncanny how distinct each voice it and I thoroughly appreciated that.

This is a solid five star novel for me.

July 12, 2016
It took me 9 days to finish this book. NINE DAYS. I feel like I just finished running a marathon. I am exhausted, emotional, annoyed, happy, unhappy, angry, vindicated, tired- I am feeling just about every emotion after finishing this book.

Like running a marathon, there were times where I felt I would never finish this book. There were times where I just didn't want to continue reading, but Kingsolver is a master storyteller, it was impossible to stop once I started.

I have to say, Kingsolver's character development and use of varying POVs is impeccable. I am amazed at how she goes between four characters and each have a very distinct voice. At first I thought all of this would falter coming to the end but these characters are very consistent. I would go out on the limb and say, I have never read a book with such strong character POVs.

I honestly loved this book. I think I rushed through some of the parts because I just wanted to be over, but overall, this is a must read.

Also, how am I JUST finding this book when it seems half my Goodreads friends read it already! Late to the party much.

MUST. READ.

The Poisonwood Bible covers a cataclysmic period in the life of the Price family of Bethlehem, Georgia.
Nathan Price, a Baptist preacher takes his wife and three daughters deep into the jungle of the Belgian Congo to spread the word of god. His unswerving path is clear, unarguable and dictated directly from above. He is driven, single minded and stubborn.
However, we soon begin to suspect that Nathan will find it hard to save or convince anybody ....... including his family!
His long suffering wife and three daughters have some love and respect for Nathan but this gradually dissolves in the heat, dust and massive privations that follow.
Orleanna his dazed (but strong) wife soon questions this life changing move and their children are rocked by culture shock. Ruth May is a precocious five year old, Leah a fifteen year old tomboy, Adah is Leah’s frighteningly intelligent disabled twin and Rachel is 16, pretty and vain and continually aghast at her surroundings.
The story is cleverly told through their multiple view points.
The mission house is the only brick built building amongst huts and the Price family live an uneasy life apart from the villagers.
They are tolerated, sometimes with good humour sometimes with irritation and distrust but are never really seen as anything more that a curiosity. Christianity is rarely considered as a serious competitor to the ancient gods that have served the villagers since time began.
As the Price’s grapple with the incomprehensible and hostile world around them, violent political change is spreading across the Congo. Independence looms as Europe, Russia and American hover like vultures with eyes on the vast mineral wealth.
Nationalism, racism, and the harm done to Africa by rich foreign powers are all themes that thread through this story.
The novel builds up gradually, with great narrative skill to a shocking climax but then spends perhaps too long on the aftermath as we follow the main characters into the future and see how their collision with Africa has shaped their lives. Although interesting, the book in the latter stages, seems to lose focus and become a little drawn out.
Reservations aside though, The Poisonwood Bible is an engrossing saga full of memorable characters, vivid set pieces and a lot of dark humour.
A modern classic I think, and I’m eager to explore more works by Barbara Kingsolver.

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.

The ratings and reviews for this book are mixed, and I can understand that because I am balancing some love/hate feelings myself. But it's compelling in it's unique way, and it's certainly tragic.

The story is about a fanatical Baptist preacher from Georgia who takes his wife and 4 daughters on a Christian mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. If that's
not the perfect recipe for disaster then I haven't seen one.

The history of this part of Africa, especially the political history, is so convoluted that it defies understanding. And the methods used by some of these Christian missions is also quite baffling. That's certainly the case here.

The book is written from 5 points of view, the mother and the 4 daughters. They are the ones most adversely affected by the move, the culture shock, but mostly the influence of an abusive, and severely misguided father. The views and personalities of these characters are so different, it's hard to believe they are part of the same family.

The genius of Kingsolver's writing is her ability to bring all this together into a believable and interesting plot. It's a difficult an disturbing read, with characters that have flaws, and events that leave the reader heartbroken.

4 stars.

Loved re-reading this book for book club.
An amazing story!

"Imagine a ruin so strange it must never have happened.
First, picture the forest. I want you to be its conscience, the eyes in the trees. The trees are columns of slick, brindled bark like muscular animals overgrown beyond all reason. Every space is filled with life: delicate, poisonous frogs war-painted like skeletons, clutched in copulation, secreting their own precious eggs onto dripping leaves. Vines stragling their own kin in the everlasting wrestle for sunlight. The breathing of monkeys. A glide of snake belly on branch. A single-file army of ants biting a mammoth tree into uniform grains and hauling it down to the dark for their ravenous queen. And, in reply, a choir of seedlings arching their necks out of rotted tree stumps, sucking life out of death. This forest eats itself and lives forever.
Away down below now, single file on the path, comes a woman with four girls in tow, all of them in shirtwaist dresses. Seen from above, they are pale, doomed blossoms, bound to appeal to your sympathies. Be careful. Later on you'll have to decide what sympathy they deserve."

Alternately profound, beautiful, and terrifying, The Poisonwood Bible is the story of a Baptist missionary who brings his wife and four daughters to a village in the Congo in the 1950s so he can convert the heathens. If you're backing away in apprehension now, don't worry. The story is told through the changing viewpoints of the wife and the four daughters, none of whom really want to be there. It's an incredible and eye-opening read, and I especially appreciated how Kingsolver seemed to cover all the lessons and subjects Chinua Achebe tried to in Things Fall Apart, only she does it so, so much better. Yes, I know Achebe's book is supposed to be the more valid read because he's a native of the country he's writing about and not a white imperialist etc etc, but I don't care. When it comes down to eloquence and storytelling ability, Kingsolver wins by a landslide. Everyone should read this book. They should read Things Fall Apart only if they really feel like it.

Chinua Achebe can suck it. He got beat at his own post-colonial game by a white imperialist American lady writer. BURN.

Rating this was difficult because instinctively I wanted to give it five stars because it so irritated a certain conservative christian anti communist lobby who so irritate me. However I couldn't, because the characters were just so unbelieveable that I think they would have been dead within a month. My background means I have come across this sort of missionary who wanders off to another culture because the Lord has called them to spread the word with no regard to local custom or belief. But the Price family were a spectacularly disasterous example, even by those standards. And to the old Belgian Congo as well. I had real prtoblems suspending belief. I think the book is so well known that I don't need to outline the story.
Having said all of that the book is well written, the characters do have a spark; the real star is Africa and the backdrop the historical events surrounding the departure of the Belgians, the election of Lumumba and his CIA inspired murder. I felt the book lost its way when things started to go badly wrong. Electing to use the voices of the four daughters and occasionally the mother was an interesting ploy, but I really wanted to hear the interior dialogue of Nathan Price, who was by far the most interesting character because he was by far the most flawed.
An easy enough read, but just too unbelieveable; the juxtaposition of the Price family and their new setting was just too sharp and lacking in nuance. The author was also way too preachy, even though I agreed with her.

Prelepa knjiga, sjajan prevod Gorana Kapetanovica :)

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."