|
Loading... The Poisonwood Bibleby Barbara Kingsolver
LibraryThing recommendationsMember recommendations
Loading...
won't like
will probably not like
will probably like
will like
will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. Great book! (  ) daisygrl09 | Nov 6, 2009 |  nkuhn | Oct 30, 2009 | I bought this knowing absolutely nothing about it except that a lot of people really liked it. Sometimes that's the best way for me to approach a book. After all, if someone had told me it was about a Baptist preacher and his family doing missionary work in the Congo (now Zaire) in 1960, I probably would have passed it by. I'm glad I didn't, though, because it's is so much more than that. Told in alternating narratives between the preacher's wife and their four daughters - snooty Rachel, overeager Leah, cynical Adah, and brutally honest Ruth May - the story unfolds to reveal their individual perceptions and prejudices. Though there is some political discussion (the history of that area is pretty turbulent in places). it is presented in such a way that it comes across as the opinions of the characters, as opposed to leaving the reader feeling badgered by the author. Likewise with the frequent thoughts on religion. In short, this is an extremely well-written and engrossing story and I look forward to reading more by Kingsolver in the future. (  )1  melydia | Oct 28, 2009 | http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1332114... The Price family move to the Belgian Congo as Baptist missionaries in mid-1959, against all advice but in line with the sense of mission felt by Nathan, husband and father. The story is told through the perspectives of his wife and three daughters, as the family endures tragedy and disaster, and each of them eventually settles their own terms with Africa and with each other. Nathan Price comes across as an absurdly unsympathetic character, sacrificing his family for his improbable mission, but each of the women gets a good bit of narrative to themselves. Not knowing the DRC, as it now is, I can't speak to Kingsolver's accuracy, but she seems to have done her research. I was struck that a number of write-ups of the book seemed to think that it was about what the US did to Zaire (as it then was) and Africa, when in fact this is simply political backdrop, taken for granted, for the more human drama of the Price sisters and their mother. Having said that, of course the political circumstances shape the environment, and Nathan's simplistic and disastrous attempts to bring Christianity to the natives are a direct parallel with the American fascinatiom with warding off Communism. Anyway, a fascinating and thought-provoking read. ( )1 nwhyte | Oct 24, 2009 | I will be honest. I dislike this book primarily because of the American ethnicity of it. In the end, it is sentimental and indulgent. I feel that the author is expecting me to be at one with an American take on the story, so that I am shocked by the divergence from the American ideal. It seems to me to specifically be a book written FOR Americans to read. Nothing wrong in that, of course but I think it does leave the whole thing short of a beating heart for Europeans in the same way that perhaps Graham Swift might be less accessible to Americans. I'm much more taken with Paul Theroux's "The Mosquito Coast" which deals with a similar story and equivalent themes in a more universal way. (  )3 dylanwolf | Oct 4, 2009 | 
 Kingsolver once wrote that ""The point [of portraying other cultures] is not to emulate other lives, or usurp their wardrobes. The point is to find sense.'' Her effort to make sense of the Congo's tragic struggle for independence is fully realized, richly embroidered, triumphant.  A writer who casts a preacher as a fool and a villain had best not be preachy. Kingsolver manages not to be, in part because she is a gifted magician of words--her sleight-of-phrase easily distracting a reader who might be on the point of rebellion. Her novel is both powerful and quite simple. It is also angrier and more direct than her earlier books. The Congo permeates ''The Poisonwood Bible,'' and yet this is a novel that is just as much about America, a portrait, in absentia, of the nation that sent the Prices to save the souls of a people for whom it felt only contempt, people who already, in the words of a more experienced missionary, ''have a world of God's grace in their lives, along with a dose of hardship that can kill a person entirely.'' Although ''The Poisonwood Bible'' takes place in the former Belgian Congo and begins in 1959 and ends in the 1990's, Barbara Kingsolver's powerful new book is actually an old-fashioned 19th-century novel, a Hawthornian tale of sin and redemption and the ''dark necessity'' of history.
Amazon.com (ISBN 0060786507, Paperback)Oprah Book Club® Selection, June 2000: As any reader of The Mosquito Coast knows, men who drag their families to far-off climes in pursuit of an Idea seldom come to any good, while those familiar with At Play in the Fields of the Lord or Kalimantaan understand that the minute a missionary sets foot on the fictional stage, all hell is about to break loose. So when Barbara Kingsolver sends missionary Nathan Price along with his wife and four daughters off to Africa in The Poisonwood Bible, you can be sure that salvation is the one thing they're not likely to find. The year is 1959 and the place is the Belgian Congo. Nathan, a Baptist preacher, has come to spread the Word in a remote village reachable only by airplane. To say that he and his family are woefully unprepared would be an understatement: "We came from Bethlehem, Georgia, bearing Betty Crocker cake mixes into the jungle," says Leah, one of Nathan's daughters. But of course it isn't long before they discover that the tremendous humidity has rendered the mixes unusable, their clothes are unsuitable, and they've arrived in the middle of political upheaval as the Congolese seek to wrest independence from Belgium. In addition to poisonous snakes, dangerous animals, and the hostility of the villagers to Nathan's fiery take-no-prisoners brand of Christianity, there are also rebels in the jungle and the threat of war in the air. Could things get any worse?In fact they can and they do. The first part of The Poisonwood Bible revolves around Nathan's intransigent, bullying personality and his effect on both his family and the village they have come to. As political instability grows in the Congo, so does the local witch doctor's animus toward the Prices, and both seem to converge with tragic consequences about halfway through the novel. From that point on, the family is dispersed and the novel follows each member's fortune across a span of more than 30 years. The Poisonwood Bible is arguably Barbara Kingsolver's most ambitious work, and it reveals both her great strengths and her weaknesses. As Nathan Price's wife and daughters tell their stories in alternating chapters, Kingsolver does a good job of differentiating the voices. But at times they can grate--teenage Rachel's tendency towards precious malapropisms is particularly annoying (students practice their "French congregations"; Nathan's refusal to take his family home is a "tapestry of justice"). More problematic is Kingsolver's tendency to wear her politics on her sleeve; this is particularly evident in the second half of the novel, in which she uses her characters as mouthpieces to explicate the complicated and tragic history of the Belgian Congo. Despite these weaknesses, Kingsolver's fully realized, three-dimensional characters make The Poisonwood Bible compelling, especially in the first half, when Nathan Price is still at the center of the action. And in her treatment of Africa and the Africans she is at her best, exhibiting the acute perception, moral engagement, and lyrical prose that have made her previous novels so successful. --Alix Wilber (retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:18 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
Abebooks |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
