The poisonwood Bible : a novel / Barbara Kingsolver.
"The Poisonwood Bible is a story told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them everything they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it—from garden seeds to Scripture—is calamitously transformed on African soil. What follows is a suspenseful epic of one family's tragic undoing and remarkable reconstruction over the course of three decades in postcolonial Africa. The novel is set against one of the most dramatic political chronicles of the twentieth century: the Congo's fight for independence from Belgium, the murder of its first elected prime minister, the CIA coup to install his replacement, and the insidious progress of a world economic order that robs the fledgling African nation of its autonomy. Against this backdrop, Orleanna Price reconstructs the story of her evangelist husband's part in the Western assault on Africa, a tale indelibly darkened by her own losses and unanswerable questions about her own culpability. Also narrating the story, by turns, are her four daughters—the self-centered, teenaged Rachel; shrewd adolescent twins Leah and Adah; and Ruth May, a prescient five-year-old. These sharply observant girls, who arrive in the Congo with racial preconceptions forged in 1950s Georgia, will be marked in surprisingly different ways by their father's intractable mission, and by Africa itself. Ultimately each must strike her own separate path to salvation. Their passionately intertwined stories become a compelling exploration of moral risk and personal responsibility."--Amazon.ca.
Record details
- ISBN: 9780060175405
- ISBN: 9780060930530 (pbk.)
- ISBN: 0060175400
- ISBN: 0060930535 (pbk.)
- Physical Description: x, 546 p. ; 25 cm. : ill.
- Edition: 1st ed.
- Publisher: New York : HarperFlamingo, 1998.
Content descriptions
General Note: | Also: New York : HarperPerennial, 1999. |
Bibliography, etc. Note: | Includes bibliographical references (p. 545-546). |
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Genre: | Domestic fiction. |
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Available copies
- 14 of 18 copies available at BC Interlibrary Connect. (Show)
- 1 of 1 copy available at Prince Rupert Library.
Holds
- 1 current hold with 18 total copies.
Show Only Available Copies
Location | Call Number / Copy Notes | Barcode | Shelving Location | Holdable? | Status | Due Date |
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Prince Rupert Library | KING (Text) | 33294001021765 | Adult Fiction - Second Floor | Volume hold | Available | - |
- BookPage Reviews : BookPage Reviews 1998 November
Barbara Kingsolver was a little girl of seven when she and her family left their Kentucky home to spend two years in the Congo. When she returned, the world looked totally different to her. "I understood the way we lived in my little corner of Kentucky was just that," says the author. "One little corner where we had certain things we did, possessed, believed in, but there was a great big world out there where people had no use for many of the things my community held dear."I came home with an acutely heightened sense of race, of ethnicity. I got to live in a place where people thought I was noticeable and probably hideous because of the color of my skin."These weren't easy lessons, says Kingsolver, but they were priceless. She has not forgotten what the Congo taught her. It made her the person, the writer, she is."I'm extremely interested in cultural difference, in social and political history and the sparks that fly when people with different ways of looking at the world come together and need to reconcile or move through or celebrate those differences. All that precisely describes everything I've ever written, Animal Dreams, Pigs in Heaven, all of it." It also describes Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible, a novel of post-colonial Africa which brings to bear all she observed as a child in the Congo and all she came to understand of it as an adult."Given that this is what we did as a nation in Africa, how are we to feel about it now?" asks the author. "How do we live with it and how do we move on? Given that this is our history, what do we do with it? One thing is very clear, there isn't a single answer, there's a spectrum of answers."Representing that spectrum is Nathan Price, a Baptist missionary, his wife, and their four daughters. The Prices arrive in Africa believing God is on their side. That changes quickly. "I always believed any sin was easily rectified if only you let Jesus Christ into your heart," says Nathan's daughter Leah, "but here it gets complicated."Indeed. A stranger tells Nathan, "I do not think the people are looking for your kind of salvation. . . . they are looking for. . . the new soul of Africa." But in his eagerness to save everyone's soul, Nathan is deaf to the truth, just as he is deaf to the nuances of the Congolese culture."We sang in church, Tata Nzolo! Which means 'Father in Heaven' or 'Father of Fish Bait,' depending on just how you sing it," recalls Nathan's wife, Orleanna, who returns from her time in the Congo marked and stricken by loss.Leah, on the other hand, embraces Africa in the 30-year course of the book, even at the risk of rejecting the cornerstones of her past. "I had only faith in my father and love for the Lord. Without that rock of certainty underfoot, the Congo is a fearsome place to sink or swim."Leah's bookish twin, Adah, is a darker presence, a witness to the country's horrors. Rachel the eldest Price daughter, is vain, contemptuous of her new life and full of comic malapropisms, given, as she is to "feminine tuition." Ruth May, the youngest, is the Price always in a hurry, propelled by a child's innocence and enthusiasm.The Price girls and their mother narrate The Poisonwood Bible in alternating chapters. Kingsolver chose multiple voices to portray the enormity, the complexity of her subject. That choice, however, created complexities of its own."I wasn't very far into this book when I realized what I set out to do was impossible." The author laughs. "Or at least extremely difficult, much harder than anything I ever did it before. The most difficult thing was to fine tune the voices - five narrators, all in the same family, most of them about the same age. How do you make each voice distinct enough that the reader could open to any page and know who's speaking?"It led to many quiet little fits of flying paper in my office. But it was also great fun. What I love best about being a novelist is I get to do something different every time. When you're flying by the seat of your pants, you're never bored."Writing is Kingsolver's passion, but she's no artiste. "I consider myself a writer of the working class, I'm a little bit smug about it, have so little tolerance for writers who have elaborate three-hour rituals before they even get down to work. I think, oh, please. My idea of a pre-writing ritual is getting the kids on the bus and sitting down." The years she worked as technical writer taught her "to produce whether I wanted to or not. It would be easy to say oh, I have writers' block, oh I have to wait for my muse. I don't. Chain that muse to your desk and get the job done."I love revision. Revision is where the art really happens, when you begin to manipulate, shift things around so your theme begins to shine through."While Kingsolver was revising her novel, the Congo itself began its own revision. Mobutu, the Congolese dictator in power for over 30 years, died and his regime fell. The new president, Laurent Kabila has clashed with Tutsi rebels, and the Congo is once again in the throes of bloody strife. "It's very odd," says Kingsolver. "This book is in some way timely, and nothing could surprise me nore. When I began writing, I thought my primary task would get my readers to believe there was a dictator called Mobuto, that all these things really happened somewhere far away and they should care."As America and the United Nations study the Congo and analyze strategies for intervention, Kingsolver hopes governing bodies will heed some of the lessons she learned as a child, the lessons of The Poisonwood Bible."We can never know, never look at history with anything but a narrow and distorted window," says the author. "We can never know the whole truth, only what's been recorded for us and what our cultural and political predisposition understands. Leah says history is never much more at a mirror we can tilt to look at ourselves."Ellen Kanner is a writer in Miami, Florida. Copyright 1999 BookPage Reviews - Kirkus Reviews : Kirkus Reviews 1998 September #1
The first novel in five years from the ever-popular Kingsolver (Pigs in Heaven, 1993, etc.) is a large-scale saga of an American family's enlightening and disillusioning African adventure. It begins with a stunningly written backward look: Orleanna Price's embittered memory of the uncompromising zeal that impelled her husband, Baptist missionary Nathan Price, to take her and their four daughters to the (then) Belgian Congo in 1959, and remain there despite dangerous evidence of the country's instability under Patrice Lumumba's ill-starred independence movement, Belgian and American interference and condescension, and Joseph Mobutu's murderous military dictatorship. The bulk of the story, which is set in the superbly realized native village of Kilanga, is narrated in turn by the four Price girls: Leah, the ``smart'' twin, whose worshipful respect for her father will undergo a rigorous trial by fire; her retarded'' counterpart Adah, disabled and mute (though in the depths of her mind articulate and playfully intelligent); eldest sister Rachel, a self-important whiner given to hilarious malapropisms (``feminine tuition''; ``I prefer to remain anomalous''); and youngest sister Ruth May, whose childish fantasies of union with the surrounding, smothering landscape are cruelly fulfilled. Kingsolver skillfully orchestrates her characters varied responses to Africa into a consistently absorbing narrative that reaches climax after climax and that, even after you're sure it must be nearing its end, continues for a wrenching hundred pages or more, spelling out in unforgettable dramatic and lyric terms the fates of the surviving Prices. Little recent fiction has so successfully fused the personal with the political. Better even than Robert Stone in his otherwise brilliant Damascus Gate, Kingsolver convinces us that her characters are, first and foremost, breathing, fallible human beings and only secondarily conduits for her book's vigorously expressed and argued social and political ideas. A triumph. (Author tour) Copyright 1998 Kirkus Reviews - Library Journal Reviews : LJ Reviews 1998 July #1
Fiery evangelist Nathan Price takes his wife and four daughters to the Belgian Congo in 1959, where they find that they are more transformed than transforming. Kingsolver's first since Pigs in Heaven. Copyright 1998 Library Journal Reviews - Library Journal Reviews : LJ Reviews 1998 September #1
It's been five years since Kingsolver's last novel (Pigs in Heaven, LJ 6/15/93), and she has used her time well. This intense family drama is set in an Africa on the verge of independence and upheaval. In 1959, evangelical preacher Nathan Price moves his wife and four daughters from Georgia to a village in the Belgian Congo, later Zaire. Their dysfunction and cultural arrogance proves disastrous as the family is nearly destroyed by war, Nathan's tyranny, and Africa itself. Told in the voices of the mother and daughters, the novel spans 30 years as the women seek to understand each other and the continent that tore them apart. Kingsolver has a keen understanding of the inevitable, often violent clashes between white and indigenous cultures, yet she lets the women tell their own stories without being judgmental. An excellent novel that was worth the wait and will win the author new fans. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 7/98.] Ellen Flexman, Indianapolis-Marion Cty. P.L. Copyright 1998 Library Journal Reviews - Publishers Weekly Reviews : PW Reviews 1998 August #1
In this risky but resoundingly successful novel, Kingsolver leaves the Southwest, the setting of most of her work (The Bean Trees; Animal Dreams) and follows an evangelical Baptist minister's family to the Congo in the late 1950s, entwining their fate with that of the country during three turbulent decades. Nathan Price's determination to convert the natives of the Congo to Christianity is, we gradually discover, both foolhardy and dangerous, unsanctioned by the church administration and doomed from the start by Nathan's self-righteousness. Fanatic and sanctimonious, Nathan is a domestic monster, too, a physically and emotionally abusive, misogynistic husband and father. He refuses to understand how his obsession with river baptism affronts the traditions of the villagers of Kalinga, and his stubborn concept of religious rectitude brings misery and destruction to all. Cleverly, Kingsolver never brings us inside Nathan's head but instead unfolds the tragic story of the Price family through the alternating points of view of Orleanna Price and her four daughters. Cast with her young children into primitive conditions but trained to be obedient to her husband, Orleanna is powerless to mitigate their situation. Meanwhile, each of the four Price daughters reveals herself through first-person narration, and their rich and clearly differentiated self-portraits are small triumphs. Rachel, the eldest, is a self-absorbed teenager who will never outgrow her selfish view of the world or her tendency to commit hilarious malapropisms. Twins Leah and Adah are gifted intellectually but are physically and emotionally separated by Adah's birth injury, which has rendered her hemiplagic. Leah adores her father; Adah, who does not speak, is a shrewd observer of his monumental ego. The musings of five- year-old Ruth May reflect a child's humorous misunderstanding of the exotic world to which she has been transported. By revealing the story through the female victims of Reverend Price's hubris, Kingsolver also charts their maturation as they confront or evade moral and existential issues and, at great cost, accrue wisdom in the crucible of an alien land. It is through their eyes that we come to experience the life of the villagers in an isolated community and the particular ways in which American and African cultures collide. As the girls become acquainted with the villagers, especially the young teacher Anatole, they begin to understand the political situation in the Congo: the brutality of Belgian rule, the nascent nationalism briefly fulfilled in the election of the short-lived Patrice Lumumba government, and the secret involvement of the Eisenhower administration in Lumumba's assassination and the installation of the villainous dictator Mobutu. In the end, Kingsolver delivers a compelling family saga, a sobering picture of the horrors of fanatic fundamentalism and an insightful view of an exploited country crushed by the heel of colonialism and then ruthlessly manipulated by a bastion of democracy. The book is also a marvelous mix of trenchant character portrayal, unflagging narrative thrust and authoritative background detail. The disastrous outcome of the forceful imposition of Christian theology on indigenous natural faith gives the novel its pervasive irony; but humor is pervasive, too, artfully integrated into the children's misapprehensions of their world; and suspense rises inexorably as the Price family's peril and that of the newly independent country of Zaire intersect. Kingsolver moves into new moral terrain in this powerful, convincing and emotionally resonant novel. Agent, Frances Goldin; BOMC selection; major ad/promo; author tour. (Nov.) Copyright 1998 Publishers Weekly Reviews - Voice of Youth Advocates Reviews : VOYA Reviews 1999 October
In 1959, Baptist missionary Nathan Price moves his family from Georgia to the Belgian Congo, with the single-minded goal of converting the natives of the remote village of Kilanga to Christianity. The family is woefully unprepared for the physical,spiritual, social, and political realities of Africa. They arrive at a time of political upheaval, with the Congo attempting to wrest its independence from Belgium. Kingsolver intertwines three parallel stories: the relationships within the Pricefamily, the imposition of the Baptist mission on Kilanga, and the Congo's battle against colonial tyranny. The mother and four Price daughters tell the story in alternating chapters: sixteen-year-old, self-centered Rachel; teenage twins Leah and Adah; and five-year-old Ruth May. Their distinct voices and viewpoints paint a colorful picture of the humorand tragedy of their situation. They suffer through floods, drought, malaria, and attacks by ants and snakes. Price, righteous and tyrannical, shows little understanding or respect for the villagers or his own family. His arrogance has tragicconsequences, dealt with over the ensuing years by each family member in her own characteristic way. This compelling novel, with its many levels, has the ability to grab and hold the reader just as Africa did the Price family. Kingsolver has created a cast of characters hard to forget. Though the novel's length may deter some young adult readers,the teenage narrators should appeal to many. Anyone who has read and liked Kingsolver's previous works, such as The Bean Tree (Harper, 1988) or Pigs in Heaven (HarperCollins, 1993), will appreciate this fine work-Vicky Yablonsky. Copyright 1999 Voya Reviews