1,000 Books to Read Before You Die by James Mustich

Author:James Mustich
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Workman Publishing Company
Published: 2018-08-09T03:42:36+00:00

Into Africa

Barbara Kingsolver’s novels seem to expand our sense of life and our capacity to tackle it. Before she published The Poisonwood Bible in 1998, she had won wide readership for novels and stories that charted the struggles of women to find—or make—homes in the contemporary world, often in the face of trying circumstances. Leavened by humor and an alertness to the public and private echoes of clashing cultures, the drama of these books—The Bean Trees (1988), Animal Dreams (1990), and Pigs in Heaven (1993)—have a domestic core, enlarged by the author’s expansive imagination. They’re wonderfully readable and strangely—remarkably—encouraging.

Although The Poisonwood Bible is in some ways just as intimate as the earlier books in its depiction of a family’s life, its scope and setting are anything but domestic. At the start of the story, the family in question belongs to Nathan Price, an American fundamentalist missionary who has brought his wife and four daughters into the Congo to convert the Africans to his brand of evangelical Christianity. Yet as the narrative unfolds from 1959 through the 1980s—it is told alternately in the voices of the five Price women—the family slips from Nathan’s grasp, each of its members declaring her independence from his patriarchal and increasingly fanatical rule. One might even say they enact in miniature the turmoil of rebellion, confusion, corruption, growth, and loss that the Congo itself suffers in its battle for independence from Belgian colonial rule and American interference.

Kingsolver is brilliant at delineating the peculiar estrangements that infiltrate families. The girls weather cultural displacement (“We came from Bethlehem, Georgia, bearing Betty Crocker cake mixes into the jungle,” says one), physical discomfort, and emotional and political awakening. As they do so, each embraces or evades the historical moment with fateful consequences; tragedies of close-order and large-scale oppression transpire in tandem. The author’s huge ambition is matched by her fidelity to the tenor of each major character’s soul, giving her novel an extraordinary, compelling power.

At the end of the book, looking back on their African experience many years later, one of the sisters says, “History holds all things in the balance, including large hopes and short lives.” So do novels—at least the best of them, of which The Poisonwood Bible is certainly one.

What: Novel. When: 1998. Also By: Fiction: Prodigal Summer (2000); The Lacuna (2009). Nonfiction: High Tide in Tucson (1995); Animal, Vegetable, Miracle (2007). Try: The Grass Is Singing by Doris Lessing. Burger’s Daughter by Nadine Gordimer. At Play in the Fields of the Lord by Peter Matthiessen.

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