The Poisonwood Bible

White People Suffering/Going Mad in Jungle is one of my favourite genres, so Kingsolver would have had to fuck up quite substantially to turn me against this story. Telling it via multiple first-person (children, at that) narratives is a high-risk choice, but the voices of all four sisters are solidly established early on, and they all stand up to repeated exposure, although the tics that help establish Adah (wordplay) and Rachel (malapropisms), although deployed cleverly, do begin to grate after a while. The other thing that would have spoiled it for me is lopsided perspective — too much indulgence or mockery of the hapless Americans, or an insufficiently grounded portrayal of the long-suffering Congolese — but I think the balance show more is pretty spot on. What I like about this kind of book is the sticky, icky, sweaty, savage hostility of the jungle, and it's described copiously and thrillingly here. In their first year in the Congo, The Prices are faced with swarms of ants, noxious plants, horrible food, no food, hungry crocs, killer snakes, deluge, drought, and a who's who of tropical maladies. It's great. And just like in The Mosquito Coast, it's all because of a mad dad — in this case a God-botherer, but the real issue is his incurable egomania.

The last 150 pages are a very attenuated epilogue, and I got the feeling that the various "what happened next" stories were Kingsolver's way of restating her critique of colonialism/American imperialism in case you didn't get the point earlier or, like me, were primarily here for overheated malarial Heart of Darkness hellishness. They might also have been written to get her past the 500-page mark required for reviewers and publicists to use the word "epic". Still, I ripped through this book like a plague of ants through an unattended chicken. show less

First read June 2006
Re-read June 2017

Beginning in 1959, this is the story of the Price family, led into the Congo by Southern Baptist preacher Nathan Price. His wife Orleanna and daughters Rachel, Leah, Adah, and Ruth May each take turns narrating, Orleanna from years later, in Georgia, and her daughters during and after the family's time in the Congo.

Nathan is single-minded and inflexible; he expects to convert people without listening to them and gaining an understanding of their current beliefs, or why they do things the way they do them. Orleanna or any of her daughters (except Rachel) would have done a better job; Nathan simply alienates and frightens the people of Kilanga, all the time ignoring his wife's labor and the danger his show more family is in, both from local perils (e.g. snakes) and larger political events.

The Price family's intrusion into the Congo is a microcosm of international interference in the Congo and other African nations, particularly concerning the mindset that white European/American culture, education, lifestyle, and religion are superior to the black "primitive" way of life, without respect to the differences in history, culture, and climate.

On both a personal and political level, these intrusions and interferences have disastrous consequences.

Quotes

"...sometimes He doesn't deliver us out of our hardships but through them." (Father to Leah, 78)

No matter what happens on God's green earth, Father acts like it's a movie he's already seen and we're just dumb for not knowing how it comes out. (Rachel, 162)

I know about this kind of story - the lonely look down upon the hungry; the hungry look down upon the starving. The guilty blame the damaged....It makes everyone feel much better. (Adah, 174)

Watching my father, I've seen how you can't learn anything when you're trying to look like the smartest person in the room. (Leah, 229)

...it's still frightening when things you love appear suddenly changed from what you have always known. (Leah, 236)

But where is the place for girls in that Kingdom? The rules don't quite apply to us, nor protect us either. (Leah, 244)

In Congo, it seems like the land owns the people. (Leah, 283)

The point I was trying to make was so true there was not even a good way to say it.
"My father's idea of what will make things work better doesn't fit anything here." (Leah to Anatole, 284)

And perhaps it was not evil I saw but merely the way of all hearts when fear has stripped off the husk of kind pretensions. (Adah, 305)

"Don't expect God's protection in places beyond God's dominion. It will only make you feel punished....When things go badly, you will blame yourself....Don't try to make life a mathematics problem with yourself in 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." (Anatole to Leah, 309)

...we messengers of goodwill adrift on a sea of mistaken intentions. (Orleanna, 323)

As long as I kept moving, my grief streamed out behind me like a swimmer's long hair in water. (Orleanna, 381)

Every betrayal contains a perfect moment, a coin stamped heads or tails with salvation on the other side. (Adah, 414)

It's as if history can be no more than a mirror tipped up to show us exactly what we already knew. (Leah, 448)

What happened to us in the Congo was simply the bad luck of two opposite worlds crashing into each other, causing tragedy. (Rachel, 465)

The arrogance of the able-bodied is staggering....We would rather be just like us, and have that be all right. (Adah, 493)

We came, we saw, we took away and we left behind, we must be allowed our anguish and our regrets. (Adah, 493)

...everything you thought you knew means something different in Africa. (Leah, 505)

There is not justice in this world. (Leah, 522)

[Father] stamped me with a belief in justice, then drenched me in culpability. (Leah, 525)

Culture is a slingshot moved by the force of its past....Poor Africa. No other continent has endured such an unspeakably bizarre combination of foreign thievery and foreign goodwill. (Adah, 528) show less

When a mentally unhinged, abusive minister decides to take his wife and four young daughters on a mission trip to the Congo, the entire family will be changed forever. Told through the eyes of the women in the story, it becomes clear that the Congo is not a primitive, heathenish land awaiting the illuminating light of the Western world. The inhabitants of their remote village are not impressed with the ignorant, bombastic sermons of the family patriarch. In fact, they take it upon themselves to help care for the floundering family. Without the help of their neighbors, they would be unable to feed themselves or meet their own basic needs.

Each daughter has her own journey and her own lessons to learn in the Congo. After independence, the show more church tries to recall the family, but the father decides that they will remain even as racial cleansing begins. Matters become even more bleak as they each must struggle to survive and their neighbors are less able to help as famine descends. These five women must pull together if they are to survive the minister and the jungle.

This is a powerful novel about family, religion, politics, and the consequences of generational injustice. show less

I have avoiding reading this book for a number of years now. Why? Well, I don't really know... I just felt as though I had to be in the right frame of mind for what I saw as just another missionary family heading to Africa to spread the Christian word. I have never been a big fan of 'converting' individuals to a different belief system, so I was expecting a bit of heavy handed scripture preaching of the fire and brimstone kind. Well that is in there, in the form of Nathan's bullying personality, I discovered instead a sharp, poignantly written story from the point of view of the Price women... and what a story it is! You know this isn't going to be a typical story when it starts off with the family figuring out how to get all their show more "essential" belongings (including cake mixes and pinking shears - I had to refresh my memory as to what pinking shears are) to the Congo when each passenger is restricted to forty-four pounds of luggage, "and not one iota more.". Set against a backdrop of dramatic political events - and the hostility of villagers to Nathan's fiery brand of Christianity - this story has it all: sin, redemption, social injustice... pretty much everything but salvation, unless salvation comes in the form of understanding and accepting moral risk, personal responsibility and the ways in which private lives can be shaped and shattered by the events we find ourselves exposed to. There is probably a lot more symbolism to be found in this story, but for me, it is the attention to detail and the wonderful unique voices Kingsolver has given to the five Price women that made this a spellbinding read for me, even if we never get to find out what is going on in Nathan's mind... I guess we are just to assume that Nathan is the person described by the women of his family.

A captivating read for anyone interested in Congolese political history or life in an equatorial rain forest, sans luxuries of indoor plumbing, clean drinking water and electricity. show less

The writing made the characters so real to me that I just wanted to shout at them and shake them into seeing what the hell was really going on. This book made me furious, and I highly recommend it to all.

there are so many layers to peel back in this, so many avenues to explore. she does so much in 550 pages, i'm sure i didn't get it all. it is lush in language and so full of lessons and meaning.

she is brilliant. this might not be her easiest read - when does politics make for a fun or breezy book - but it is so worth it. through the backdrop of colonialism and american intervention in foreign governments (perhaps a favorite recurring theme of hers?) in the congo in 1959-61, she weaves a tale of grief and loss - and how we carry it or lay it down, and how that changes us. a story about what we lose and what we gain, and how they are sometimes correlated. a parable with the lesson of humility and being willing to hear, understand, and show more learn from other perspectives. that's just on the surface. this book is about so much.

when i first read it i remember being less interested in the political aspects of the story, and focused more on the religious commentary. this time, i think the political statements she's making are the main crux of it, and it's all just supported by the religious aspects of the story. the price family and their casual arrival in the african village they feel they have a right to come to and that they believe should bend and change for them, no matter what the villagers believe or desire, mirrors the political story of how america feels the congolese government should do as they want, regardless of what's best for their own people, or what those people want. america brings democracy! ok, but wait, we don't like the person the congolese people voted for, so we will kill him and replace him with someone who we can influence, to the utter destruction of the congo and her people. no matter, this wasn't about them anyway. how much of nathan price's preaching of jesus and forced baptisms was about gaining true believers versus having a ledger of "souls" to bring back to the mission leaders? it's all farcical. except for the people who the missionaries and the governments are interfering with.

as to religion, i always love stories where the missionary is the one who is the least good example of goodness in the story, and this is no exception. it's not christianity she has a problem with. i think that brother fowles is a great character and shows positivities of religion, and maybe even of missionary work. or at least a way to do it that respects the native population. (but then, that's why he was removed by the mission.) but the idea of coming in to a place that makes no sense to you, and bringing a religion that makes no sense to the people, it's shown to be ludicrous. it's useless - it's like a goat with wheels in a mud storm, as someone in the book might say. but the native religion, that grows from the life and the people in the area, the ideas and songs and rituals that make sense to them, she's not saying that they are all bad. they might need some reworking, and could stand to undergo debate, but they're not necessarily bad. (i'm more of the religion is bad philosophy, but she makes me think here, and i appreciate that.) there's something, too, to how leah used religion as a shield when she was hiding out with the nuns, waiting for anatole to be released from prison.

i love what she does with adah and her disability - with the language and how it really emphasizes nathan's mistakes with language to have her so in tune with words and their sounds and meanings. and then also how she allows adah to grow out of it. i'm not sure what that was about, maybe that too often we let others define us or tell us how we are or should be, so much so that it can feel impossible to be who we really are. that the weight of others expectations can be so great as to keep us from being ourselves or even knowing who we'd be if we could.

there is *so* much here. how each remaining sister moves forward from what happened to them in africa, so differently from each other. how understandable they all are, but how truly awful rachel seems by the end. how leah names a child after nathan in the end, indicating forgiveness and continued love, in spite of it all. (perhaps showing the most christian charity of anyone.) how religion ends up not featuring in their lives, except when it does. how exploitative white people are to the people and the country of the congo.

she has her political point about colonialism and white manifest destiny and racism. her other, personal point (and my main takeaway), is what we set ourselves up to lose when we are unable to let anything go, and how much we ultimately can gain, if only we're willing to not hold on to everything so tightly.

this book is not always fun or easy but it is incredible. she has written an absolute masterpiece.

about halfway through i stopped tagging lines and ideas because there were so many and because so many of them needed context. i feel like if i marked books, that a significant portion of this one would be underlined.

from the author's note at the beginning: "I was the fortunate child of medical and public-health workers, whose compassion and curiosity led them to the Congo. They brought me to a place of wonders, taught me to pay attention, and set me early on a path of exploring the great, shifting terrain between righteousness and what's right."

"Some of us know how we came by our fortune, and some of us don't, but we wear it all the same. There's only one question worth asking now: How do we aim to live with it?"

"Yet we sang in church 'Tata Nzolo' ! Which means Father in Heaven or Father of Fish Bait depending on just how you sing it, and that pretty well summed up my quandary. I could never work out whether we were to view religion as a life-insurance policy or a life-sentence."

"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 Poisonwood,' '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. For the first time ever I felt a stirring of anger against my father for making me a white preacher's chid from Georgia. This wasn't my fault. I bit my lip and labored on my own small house under the guava tree, but beside the perfect talents of Pascal, my own hands lumbered like pale flippers on a walrus out of its element. My embarrassment ran scarlet and deep, hidden under my clothes."

"For time and eternity there have been fathers like Nathan who simply can see no way to have a daughter but to own her like a plot of land."

"Oh, mercy. If it catches you in the wrong frame of mind, the King James Bible can make you want to drink poison in no uncertain terms."

"I envied them with an intensity near to love, and near to rage."

"But who, if not me, and for how many generations must we be forgiven by our children?"

"Illusions mistaken for truth are the pavement under our feet."

(4.5 stars - because parts are tough, but i bet next time it'll be 5)

from dec 2008:
i only wish she published more often...a beautiful book. she's brave enough to tackle religion (and their missionaries) and the american gov't's policies around the world (specifically the eisenhower administration's policy in the congo, as far as the story is concerned, but we know what she means.)

a surprisingly good book to read for someone who is struggling with religion.

"I could never work out whether we were to view religion as a life-insurance policy or a life sentence."

"...the game always went to those who knew the rules without understanding the lesson."

"...I've seen how you can't learn anything when you're trying to look like the smartest person in the room." (4 stars) show less

A missionary takes his wife and four daughters to a tiny village in the Congo in 1959. As events will show he is not a particularly good missionary. Nor is he a particularly good husband or father, but he will shape and scar their lives indelibly with his certainties and his vanities and his colossal foolishness. The story is told through the voices of the wife and the four daughters, the women who will be made and remade by the missionary and by Africa, just as the Congo is being made and remade by other men with their own agendas and certainties and vanities. They're not very good missionaries or fathers to this country, either.

Told in the most beautiful, brilliant, expressive prose that describes lush jungles, the intricacies of show more village life, the thoughts and feelings of four girls and one woman as they struggle to live in this new place. Wonders and horrors abound, the everyday joys and cruelties of a community with its own ways and its own voices. The story takes us through the slow degradation of the missionary, mostly because of his own ignorance, to a terrible family tragedy that catapults the survivors out onto the larger tragedy of the Congo, it liberation and betrayal and brutal exploitation.

An incredible, epic, powerful, deeply moving novel that vibrates with anger and struggles with terrible questions of life and survival in the midst of brutality. show less