Review: The Poisonwood Bible
Mar. 19th, 2015 11:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livingdebBarbara Kinsolver's The Poisonwood Bible shows up on a lot of lists of recommended books set in the Congo. I'd actually heard of this book before because I overheard some of my co-workers taking about how much they liked it, but I didn't hear why they liked it. One of the gals was very religious, so I assumed it was some kind of religious book.
No, not really.
It's about a missionary who brings his family to a small town in the Congo. The story is told mostly from the point of view of his four daughters (each with very different personalities) and occasionally from the point of view of his wife. (Exception: the last chapter is from a broader view, perhaps that of the forest.)
The book covers the entire time the family is in the missionary house, which takes up much of the book. This is fascinating and really sucked me in.
At the end you get to find out more about what happens to each of the characters after this. Not a happy/fascinating one-liner like you often get at the end of movies, but some real detail on each of the main characters. This part is not as powerful, but it was nice to have so many questions answered.
The writing style is read-aloud quality. Here's a good sentence: "It only takes five days in hot weather for a Kentucky Wonder bean to gather up its vegetable willpower and germinate."
Admittedly two of my favorite sections are on religion. The shorter one is from the viewpoint of the twin born with one side of her body not working quite right about a time before she arrived in the Congo:
According to my Baptist Sunday-school teachers, a child is denied entrance to heaven merely for being born in the Congo rather than, say, north Georgia, where she could attend church regularly. This was the sticking point in my own little lame march to salvation: admission to heaven is gained by the luck of the draw. At age five I raised my good left hand in Sunday school and used a month's ration of words to point out this problem to Miss Betty Nagy. Getting born within earshot of a preacher, I reasoned, is entirely up to chance. Would Our Lord be such a hit-or-miss kind of Saviour as that? Would he really condemn some children to eternal suffering just for the accident of a heathen birth, and reward others for a privilege they did nothing to earn? I waited for Leah and the other pupils to seize on this very obvious point of argument and jump in with their overflowing brace of words. To my dismay, they did not. Not even my own twin, who ought to know about unearned privilege. This was before Leah and I were [declared to be] gifted; I was still Dumb Adah. Slowpoke poison-oak running-joke Adah, subject to frequent thimble whacks on the head. Miss Betty sent me to the corner for the rest of the hour to pray for my own soul while kneeling on grains of uncooked rice. When I finally got up with sharp grains imbedded in my knees I found, to my surprise, that I no longer believed in God. The other children still did, apparently. As I limped back to my place, they turned their eyes away from my stippled sinner's knees. How could they not even question their state of grace? I lacked their confidence, alas. I had spent more time than the average child pondering unfortunate accidents of birth.
My other favorite religious selection is much more pro-Christianity, even if you have to modify the religion a bit for different geographies. Here's a paragraph from that:
Oh, and the camel. Was it a camel that could pass through the eye of a needle more easily than a rich man? Or a coarse piece of yarn? The Hebrew words are the same, but which one did they mean? If it's a camel, the rich man might as well not even try. But if it's the yarn, he might well succeed with a lot of effort, you see?
Here's another quote, from the least gifted sister:
Well, Hallelujah and pass the ammunition. Company for dinner! And an eligible bachelor at that, without three wives or even one as far as I know. Anatole, the schoolteacher, is twenty-four years of age, with all his fingers still on, both eyes and both feet, and that is the local idea of a top-throb dreamboat. Well, naturally he is not in my color category, but even if I were a Congolese girl I'm afraid I'd have to say thanks but no thanks on Anatole. He has scars all over his face. Not accident scars, but thin little lines, the type that some of them here get done to them on purpose, like a tattoo. I tried not to stare but you end up thinking, How did somebody get all the cuts to line up so perfect like that? What did they use, a pizza-pie cutter or what? They were fine as a hair and perfectly straight, approximately a blue million of them, running from the middle of his nose to the sides of his face, like the ridges on a black corduroy skirt sown on the bias, with the seam running right down the middle. It is not the kind of thing you see very much of here in our village, but Anatole is not from here. He is Congolese all right, but he has a different kind of eyes that slant a little bit like a Siamese, only more intellectual. We all had to make every effort not to stare. There he sat at our dinner table with his smooth haircut and a regular yellow button-down shirt and his intelligent brown eyes blinking very normal when he listened to you, but then, all those nerve-jangling scars. It gave him a mysterious air, like a putative from the law. I kept stealing glances at him across a plate of antelope meat and stale Potato Buds, which I guess just goes to show you how unaccustomed to the male species I have become.
The book addresses some of the big questions in life, like how to be good.
But life is harsh for these folks, so it's only the writing style that makes it fun to read. Well, no, the characters are all different and interesting.
There's a lot to this book, figuratively and literally (543 pages). I'm not sure how to review it. It's gripping. It's sticking with me. It feels epic.
Just one more thing: I was pretty dismayed to find that local custom was to take newborn twins out into the woods to die, just like in Nigeria, many, many miles away. Is there something about jungle life that makes raising twins so dangerous that two different cultures forbid it? Or are the two cultures just more connected than I thought?
This author has many other books and they appear to be less intense. I'm inclined to try some.
No, not really.
It's about a missionary who brings his family to a small town in the Congo. The story is told mostly from the point of view of his four daughters (each with very different personalities) and occasionally from the point of view of his wife. (Exception: the last chapter is from a broader view, perhaps that of the forest.)
The book covers the entire time the family is in the missionary house, which takes up much of the book. This is fascinating and really sucked me in.
At the end you get to find out more about what happens to each of the characters after this. Not a happy/fascinating one-liner like you often get at the end of movies, but some real detail on each of the main characters. This part is not as powerful, but it was nice to have so many questions answered.
The writing style is read-aloud quality. Here's a good sentence: "It only takes five days in hot weather for a Kentucky Wonder bean to gather up its vegetable willpower and germinate."
Admittedly two of my favorite sections are on religion. The shorter one is from the viewpoint of the twin born with one side of her body not working quite right about a time before she arrived in the Congo:
According to my Baptist Sunday-school teachers, a child is denied entrance to heaven merely for being born in the Congo rather than, say, north Georgia, where she could attend church regularly. This was the sticking point in my own little lame march to salvation: admission to heaven is gained by the luck of the draw. At age five I raised my good left hand in Sunday school and used a month's ration of words to point out this problem to Miss Betty Nagy. Getting born within earshot of a preacher, I reasoned, is entirely up to chance. Would Our Lord be such a hit-or-miss kind of Saviour as that? Would he really condemn some children to eternal suffering just for the accident of a heathen birth, and reward others for a privilege they did nothing to earn? I waited for Leah and the other pupils to seize on this very obvious point of argument and jump in with their overflowing brace of words. To my dismay, they did not. Not even my own twin, who ought to know about unearned privilege. This was before Leah and I were [declared to be] gifted; I was still Dumb Adah. Slowpoke poison-oak running-joke Adah, subject to frequent thimble whacks on the head. Miss Betty sent me to the corner for the rest of the hour to pray for my own soul while kneeling on grains of uncooked rice. When I finally got up with sharp grains imbedded in my knees I found, to my surprise, that I no longer believed in God. The other children still did, apparently. As I limped back to my place, they turned their eyes away from my stippled sinner's knees. How could they not even question their state of grace? I lacked their confidence, alas. I had spent more time than the average child pondering unfortunate accidents of birth.
My other favorite religious selection is much more pro-Christianity, even if you have to modify the religion a bit for different geographies. Here's a paragraph from that:
Oh, and the camel. Was it a camel that could pass through the eye of a needle more easily than a rich man? Or a coarse piece of yarn? The Hebrew words are the same, but which one did they mean? If it's a camel, the rich man might as well not even try. But if it's the yarn, he might well succeed with a lot of effort, you see?
Here's another quote, from the least gifted sister:
Well, Hallelujah and pass the ammunition. Company for dinner! And an eligible bachelor at that, without three wives or even one as far as I know. Anatole, the schoolteacher, is twenty-four years of age, with all his fingers still on, both eyes and both feet, and that is the local idea of a top-throb dreamboat. Well, naturally he is not in my color category, but even if I were a Congolese girl I'm afraid I'd have to say thanks but no thanks on Anatole. He has scars all over his face. Not accident scars, but thin little lines, the type that some of them here get done to them on purpose, like a tattoo. I tried not to stare but you end up thinking, How did somebody get all the cuts to line up so perfect like that? What did they use, a pizza-pie cutter or what? They were fine as a hair and perfectly straight, approximately a blue million of them, running from the middle of his nose to the sides of his face, like the ridges on a black corduroy skirt sown on the bias, with the seam running right down the middle. It is not the kind of thing you see very much of here in our village, but Anatole is not from here. He is Congolese all right, but he has a different kind of eyes that slant a little bit like a Siamese, only more intellectual. We all had to make every effort not to stare. There he sat at our dinner table with his smooth haircut and a regular yellow button-down shirt and his intelligent brown eyes blinking very normal when he listened to you, but then, all those nerve-jangling scars. It gave him a mysterious air, like a putative from the law. I kept stealing glances at him across a plate of antelope meat and stale Potato Buds, which I guess just goes to show you how unaccustomed to the male species I have become.
The book addresses some of the big questions in life, like how to be good.
But life is harsh for these folks, so it's only the writing style that makes it fun to read. Well, no, the characters are all different and interesting.
There's a lot to this book, figuratively and literally (543 pages). I'm not sure how to review it. It's gripping. It's sticking with me. It feels epic.
Just one more thing: I was pretty dismayed to find that local custom was to take newborn twins out into the woods to die, just like in Nigeria, many, many miles away. Is there something about jungle life that makes raising twins so dangerous that two different cultures forbid it? Or are the two cultures just more connected than I thought?
This author has many other books and they appear to be less intense. I'm inclined to try some.