The Poisonwood Bible: A Novel by Barbara Kingsolver
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Book Reviews of The Poisonwood Bible: A Novel
Book Review: My Introduction to Writing
Summary: 5 Stars
This is a book folks have probably already described as one of those you'll compare all that you've read before and since. I will describe it as my introduction to literature, to writing. Perhaps I'm late to the party, what's new? The book was an Oprah book, so lots of us have already been all over this juan, and writefully so.
This story is told first person by 5 persons. I would say girls or women, but can't because it's not that simple, better than that and it wouldn't be fair. A mom and four daughters. Each and every one of them tell this story in turn. These ladies go to Africa with their baptist minister dad, Nathan Price. I want to tell you about these Prize girls and their mom. I'll let them tell you about brother Nathan Price and the other parts. This wheel has already been invented and perfected.
I was thinking earlier today that stories must dream of being told by Kingsolver, like (may god forgive me) an egg wants to be an Egg McMuffin in a corny McDonalds kind of way. To be told by Kingsolver is to be told well. She goes in and doesn't come back out until there are no story prisoners left behind. Like a net dropped into the ocean and brought up and released on deck. The details are there jumping all over the place in plain sight now, as exciting as all get out. Everyone of them will be touched and moved to their rightful place. Every marvelous one of them. I had no idea there was that much just under the surface.
Barbara does 5 entire souls in about 543 paperback pages. Before I finished I knew I was going to go again, and I did. I'm like what am I gonna read now?
From Rachel, the oldest daughter: If anyone presumed I was too young for a conversation about adulters and not getting babies they had another think coming.
From Leah, one of the twins: It struck me what a wide world of difference there was between our sort of games -- "Mother May I?", "Hide and Seek" -- and his: "Find Food", "Recognize Poinsonwood", "Build a House". And here he was a boy no older than eight or nine. He had a younger sister who carried the family's baby everywhere she went and hacked weeds with her mother in the manioc field. I could see that the whole idea and business of childhood was nothing guaranteed. It seemed to me, in fact, like something more or less invented by white people and stuck onto the front end of grown-up life like a frill on a dress.
From Orlenna, mom: I was just one more of those women who clamp their mouths shut and wave the flag as their nation rolls off to conquer another in war. Guilty or innocent, they have everything to lose. They are what there is to lose. A wife is the earth itself, changing hands, bearing scars.
From Adah, the other twin, my favorite: And all of us with our closed eyes smelled the frangipani blossoms in the big rectangles of open wall, flowers so sweet they conjure up sin or heaven, depending on which way you are headed.
From Rachel, describing her twin sisters: They spent so much time staring at each other's faces before they were born they can go the rest of their lives passing up mirrors without a glance.
From Leah describing Mama Tataba, their house-mom. She had a blind eye. It looked like an egg whose yolk had been broken and stirred just once. As she stood there by our garden, I stared at her bad eye, while her good eye stared at my father.
From Adah: 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. ... It is true I do not speak as well as I can think. But that is true of most people, as nearly as I can tell.
And one more from mom: I know how people are, with their habits of mind. Most will sail through from cradle to grave with a conscience clean as snow. It's easy to point at other men, conveniently dead, starting with the ones who first scooped up mud from riverbanks to catch the scent of a source. Why, Dr. Livingstone, I presume, wasn't he the rascal! He and all the profiteers who've since walked out on Africa as a husband quits a wife, leaving her with her naked body curled around the emptied-out mine of her womb. ...
This is a book I'll always have a copy of to lend, if I'm lucky to have copies of any. There is just so much in this book, so much to love about these women and Africa. The excerpts above are just that, excerpts. None of us can be rightfully described by an excerpt. No way. But a glimpse. The bar has been raised by Kingsolver.
Book Review: Brilliant
Summary: 5 Stars
Although this book arrived in my hands heavy with praise, I felt not a little trepidation at the thought of reading it. Maybe this was because all the other books I'd read by Barbara Kingsolver had featured female protagonists doing heroic female things like bringing up other people's children and hugging each other a lot, i.e. the sorts of things likely to leave the average male reader cold and confused. Where were the apocalyptic weapons of mass destruction? Where for that matter were the hidden ancient mysteries unearthed and the gratuitous sex scenes?
Kingsolver herself sees this book as the fruition of her writing career, and when I finished the book I could understand why.
The Poisonwood Bible tells the story of a missionary who drags his wife and four daughters into the steaming heart of the Belgian Congo during the 1960's. The narrative is provided through the eyes of his wife and children, switching between their different perspectives chapter by chapter. Starting during the plane ride to the Congo the story leads us through the arrival of the family in their small Congolese mission and their clumsy attempts at adapting to the utterly foreign environment that surrounds them. Before long the Prices find themselves stranded in the Congo by their fanatical father's beliefs and the escalating political unrest of the region. Isolated from Western contact they begin sliding into the dreamlike, chaotic reality, which seems to creep upon them from the surrounding jungle.
Although the story is a tragic one in many ways, it is often hilariously funny in presenting from a child's point of view the spectacle of the western world-view obstinately trying to assert itself in the face of an utterly alien environment. Time and time the attempts to civilize and indoctrinate made by the fanatical, autocratic Reverend Price are met with comical confusion, misinterpretation and quiet, embarrassed dismissal by the community he attempts to civilize.
There is no plot as such to elucidate; rather, the magic of this novel lies in the narrative insights Kingsolver provides into issues as diverse as childhood, nature and religion. Besides these facets of life, she also imaginatively explores the political events surrounding the death of Lumumba, and the subsequent rise to power of Mobuto. Many of the events surrounding this troublesome period brought to light by Kingsolver will serve to shock the reader into a recognition of to what extent self-serving political interference by Western powers has caused suffering in the lives of innocent people in developing countries.
There aren't too many books around that are relevant, insightful and beautifully written. Fewer still will captivate a reader in any frame of mind and transport them into another world. When I finally put this book down, compelled by the strength of the narrative to read the last 100 pages in frigid bathwater, it was with the realisation that Barbara Kingsolver is one of those few individuals who have mastered their art; now all you have to do is partake of it.
Book Review: A Gem of Postcolonial Literature
Summary: 5 Stars
"Jesus is Bangala!" declares Reverend Nathan Price to his ragtag congregation deep in the Congolese jungle. The exclamation is full of irony; in the villagers' native Kikongo, "bangala" means either "precious and dear" or "poisonwood tree," depending on the pronunciation. Rev. Price blithely uses the latter pronunciation, characteristically misunderstanding his would-be flock as he blunderingly tries to superimpose Christianity and American customs onto their culture. The consequences of Price's ignorance (and arrogance) are grave, playing out alongside the exploitative history of Belgian colonialism, the struggle for independence, and the subsequent CIA coup that replaced the Congo's first elected leader.
Kingsolver's engrossing novel is narrated by the five Price females, each coping in her own way with what they have been part of. Orleanna is a missionary wife who, as a woman in the late 1950s, has little choice but to obey her husband, but who later struggles with her complicity in Nathan's--and America's--interventions in the Congo. Rachel, the eldest daughter, is vain and superficial (when the house is besieged by army ants, Rachel rescues not one of her weaker siblings, but her mirror), with an attitude of pure condescension toward the villagers she lives among. Then there are the twins: Leah, a tomboy who tries in vain to win her father's love, and the dark, poetic Adah, who was crippled in the womb. The youngest daughter, Ruth May, is most beloved by Orleanna, who struggles to protect her from the dangers of the jungle. Some make it out of the Congo; others do not, whether by tragedy or by choice. In the latter half of the book, the surviving members come to terms with their time in the Congo in different ways: becoming part of the machinery of exploitation, shunning whiteness and assimilating into Congolese culture, entering the healing profession, or turning inward.
Only Nathan remains essentially untransformed by the Congo, although he does evolve into a more grotesque version of himself. Unlike the (mostly) dynamic Price females, he is a one-dimensional character with no redeeming qualities, quick to anger and incapable of seeing past his rigid views. While he is a poignant symbol of colonialism and post-colonial intervention, trying to baptize the village children in crocodile-infested waters, the flatness of his character makes him seem inhuman.
"The Poisonwood Bible" is beautifully written, and the story of Price family is absorbing, as is the history of Western intervention in the Congo. A brilliant novel.
Book Review: poisonwood bible versus my missionary kid experience
Summary: 5 Stars
Dear Ms. Kingsolver,
Your book,The Poison Wood Bible, took me into my past. I am an MK(missionary Kid)I was born in Korhogo, Ivory Coast,(then French West) West Africa in 1948. I am a third world kid, neither African nor American in culture.
Your book reveals the dogmatism, religious fervor, the western mindset of the 'great' missionary movement. It uncovers the reasons for being, that exist in many sectors of mission denominations, namely....to "save the lost at any cost,"(My phrase.)
My parents went to Africa in the late 40's. My twin and I were born just 8 weeks after their arrival, poor Mom!
As we grew to school age, we were shipped to boarding school in Africa, to Guinee(then a republic)3000 miles away. We stayed in that place of horrors for 9 plus months out of each year, four years straight. Each four year term was interrupted by a one year stint in the USA, for fund raising at supporting churches.
We grew up in boarding school starting at 6 years of age.
The dialogue of each family member in your book, from mother to each child,is striking. I see and remember things I had forgotten with each chapter. This book resonates with my life in personal ways.
I am writing my own story.I am tying together the issues of abuse and their impact not only in my life and the lives of an army of missionary kids who are now grown, to the Native American boarding school experience. There is linkage between our histories.
You have brought the glory and terror of living in a foreign country for years at a time, to the fore front of my mind.
Thank you!
Nyinge (third daughter)aka Vivian Harvey
Book Review: Ms. Kingsolver at her best...and that says something!
Summary: 5 Stars
This novel is such a favorite of mine that I have actually read it more than once. Although I do have some gripes with it--namely that I'm not sure the author did enough research on the Baptist sect--it is to this day one of the most amazing books I have ever read. The way Ms. Kingsolver differentiates in the narratives of the five main characters takes my breath away--the mother, Orleanna, with her thoughts on motherhood; Rachel, the eldest, stays true to her wordly character; Adah the mute with her backwards rhymes could not have been easy for Ms. Kingsolver to narrate; Leah, the bold one, the religious one in the beginning, whose world falls apart, the author captures in such a way that I wonder if she had a similar experience; and when narrating Ruth May, Ms. Kingsolver actually wrote like I would expect a five year old to think.
That said, the fact that the author obviously did plenty of research on the history of the Congo, and yet had so many questionable "facts" about Baptist ministers/missionaries, surprised me. I wonder if Ms. Kingsolver meant for Nathan Price to be such a strange mix of Pentacostal, Methodist, and Baptist, and hope that that was the case, and not that she just shirked her research on this issue.
In the end, shoddy research or not, the main idea of this book is the growth and development of five women who were changed immeasurably by their time in the Congo, and the true humanity of the characters, along with Ms. Kinsolver's beatiful prose, make this a must-read!