In 1959, Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist, takes his four young daughters, his wife, and his mission to the Belgian Congo -- a place, he is sure, where he can save needy souls. But the seeds they plant bloom in tragic ways within this complex culture. Set against one of the most dramatic political events of the twentieth century -- the Congo's fight for independence from Belgium and its devastating consequences -- here is New York Times-bestselling author Barbara Kingslover's beautiful, heartbreaking, and unforgettable epic that chronicles the disintegration of family and a nation.
The Things They Carried (
Terri J. Rice)
Barbara Kingsolver's command of languages, especially English, is stupendous. I loved looking at the sentences, the palindromes, the onomatopoeia, the way she makes a sentence sing.
Four sister and a mother are taken single file to the Congo by a father and husband, Nathan, to be missionaries to the savages. This cruel, legalistic man instead only turns people away from his gospel in utter fear. He takes the gospel and uses it to punish his daughters and wife and then the Congolese.
"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 this way they are pale , doomed blossoms, bound to appeal to your sympathies. Be careful. Later on you'll have to decide what sympathy they deserve. The mother especially- watch how she leads them on, pale-eyed, deliberate. Her dark hair is tied in a ragged lace handkerchief, and her curved jawbone is lit with large, false-pearl earrings, as if these headlamps from another world might show the way. The daughters march behind her , four girls compressed bodies as tight as bowstrings, each one tensed to fire off a woman's heart on a different path to glory or damnation..."
The story is told chapter by chapter through the eyes of one of the daughters and less frequently by Nathan's wife, Orleanna.
The story is sad and complex. One man's desire to seek his own glory claiming it as glory for God and in the he end destroys everyone he thought he'd save, including himself.
The Poisonwood Bible: A Novel. By Barbara Kingsolver
The book is successful at helping outsiders understand the complexity that is Africa (
William Haas)
I found it to be well crafted and dense. A mother and four daughters, each with a distinctive personality and voice, take turns giving their particular perspectives on the story of how their family, led by the fire-and-brimstone Free Baptist preaching father of this Georgia clan, ventured into the deepest Congo on a mission to an obscure village named Kilanga during the closing years of the Eisenhower administration. The novel, which runs on for 543 pages, recounts how this mission to Africa affected their family dynamic, their interpersonal relationships, and their futures. But it is much more than just a story of how Southern Baptists adapted (or not) to life in the Congo, it is about the process of self-discovery, the presumptions of proselytizers, the range of different approaches people might take to living in a foreign culture, the impact of colonialism, American hegemony during the Cold War, and the history and natural essence of Mother Africa herself.
The Poisonwood Bible: A Novel. By Barbara Kingsolver
terrible... (
L. Walker)
this book was just plain lousy. I have no idea what message she is trying to convey about missionaries or foreigner arrogance in the midst of the 'natives.' The only message that came across is that the missionaries are psychotic and the natives stupid, hardly a message worth reading about. The characters were two dimensional, especially the 'natives'. The setting was not fully realized and the plot never played through to a believable conclusion.
The Poisonwood Bible: A Novel. By Barbara Kingsolver
Not Buying "The Verse" (
Debbie Fox)
I seriously doubt an evangelical Baptist missionary would use a Bible that contained the Maccabees books with "The Verse" he made his daughters write as punishment. It did help tie up endings but is not realistic to see a Baptist reading Maccabees, which are found in Catholic Bibles, not protestant Bibles. But then The Poisonwood Bible is a work of fiction.
The Poisonwood Bible: A Novel. By Barbara Kingsolver
Too much editorializing, caricature of characters (
A. Kalbag)
This is the first book that I have read that has been featured on Oprah's Book club. It is a good book (definitely not great) and very entertaining in parts. If I am going to read books because of their accolades, then I probably am better of sticking with the classics, the Nobels, Pulitzers and other critical award winners. The two major short comings in my humble opinion are:
1. Simplified characters. You have the bigoted, ultra-evangelical, ignorant father (no problem with that - we need to have books with all kinds of characters, good, sympathetic, unsympathetic etc), but we only see him as a 2-D character. We do not know what makes him tick directly from his actions or from his behavior, only that he is a stereotype - a Jerry Falwell type Christian whose comeuppance is all too eagerly awaited by the reader. What we do know about his inner workings is through editorializing (see point 2.).
Similarly his two daughters, the intelligent, liberal that suffers from white guilt and questions her faith; and the dumb blonde that is ignorant to the point of being racist are stereotypical. Both observe the same crushing circumstances of Africa but have vastly different yet stereotypical reactions.
The mother's character, her motivations and her reactions seem most fertile for development since she devoid of stereotypes. Her character shows a great range of emotions upon being thrust into Africa (shock, discomfort, acceptance, misery, desperation, courage) without ever becoming either a bigot or being swathed in "white-guilt". However her perspective is almost discounted.
2. We all know that every Author has an agenda from Dostoevsky to Flaubert to Crichton, however the great ones let their character and plot advance the agenda rather than the narrator (the book is written in a 1st person with 5 voices - 4 daughters and mother). The book suffers from too much editorializing, which unfortunately adds to the page count. This book could have been shorter and sweeter.
The Poisonwood Bible: A Novel. By Barbara Kingsolver
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