Gli occhi negli alberi (1998)

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.

Hard to find the words to describe this book. It's wonderfully written, but dark & twisty & sad. I couldn't put it down. ( )

Of books that switch cyclically between voices, I think this one most masterfully helped me remember who is who. More so than Amy Tan, more so than Julia Alvarez. The writing is next level. So much so that sometimes I wish Kingsolver was more selfish and didn't make Ruth May as a 5 year old, who fails at some words, so convincing. I know that would ruin the magic of the book though.

The philosophical discussions are laid out primarily as banter between sisters and not as a lecture at readers. For example, one might get the impression that the book is strictly anti-missionary because of the fall of Tata Price, because of his overbearing and unrelenting vision of what that means. But the debate and tension between Father Price and Brother Fowles gives room to develop sympathy for those missionaries that respect the local culture and incorporate that into the spirit of Christian missionary work. For many other issues, as with this one, Kingsolver takes the same kind of care to present multiple voices.

For another example, Kingsolver might seem to devolve into the strawman view that moral truths as applied to a person are made true by whatever that person's culture holds sacrosanct---what we might call cultural relativism. But she shies away from this, even as we might read this endorsement off of Kingsolver when Leah and Adah make fun of Rachel for failing to step out of her American shell. And we cannot get this from Kingsolver even if, as part of the subtext, Leah and Adah are the "smart" ones. It is merely that:

"here where we pay soothsayers and acrobats to help lose our weight, then yes, for a child to die from hunger is immoral. But this is just one place. I'm afraid I have seen a world. In the world, the carrying capacity for humans is limited...[W]hen families have spent a million years making nine in the hope of saving one, they cannot stop making nine. Culture is a slingshot moved by the force of its past. When the strap lets go, what flies forward will not be family planning..."

It is just a reminder that how moral principles are applied depend on context and circumstance, which Kingsolver, thankfully, is careful not to use as an excuse to deny the stringent force of morality. It is similar to being able to say that what gravity does to a mason jar on a coffee table in Boston is not what it would do to the mason jar on a corner of Mars, which does not at all deny gravity its fully objective presence or the universality of physics. Cultural, and therefore, context sensitivity is consistent with upholding universal or objective values.

Adah goes on, perhaps anticipating this confusion: "Mother says I have no heart for my own kind. She doesn't know. I have too much. I know what we have done, and what we deserve." This is compatible with an objective/non-cultural-dependent sense of wrongdoing, of desert and retribution. So at this point, we can read the previous passage as Kingsolver's rejection of such notions for cultural relativism, juxtapose it with this passage, and therefore easily dismiss Kingsolver as a bad, hypocritical thinker displaying blatant contradictions. Or we can read her as being a careful and compassionate writer, which I think she is, who weaves her way in and out of various complex ideas, using them at the same time to show how the Price sisters grew apart, and occupying a space that is more subtle than This or That. Props for that. ( )

Lush with Barbara Kinsolver’s typical detail, this story transported me to a time and place I knew little about. The characters have distinct, interesting voices, and though I could see the train-wreck of a culture clash coming from the very first page, I read on, pulled inexorably toward the disaster, and then through it to the interesting things the surviving characters made of their lives afterward. I came away wanting to know more about the history of the Congo and maybe all of Africa.

As always when I read something like this, I found myself wondering what other important twentieth century events and movements my high school “World History” managed to completely skip.

I did find it difficult to believe a Southern Baptist preacher would be as immersed in the Apocrypha as the Reverend Price was, and that made me wonder about how accurately other cultures might be portrayed in the book. But perhaps Kingsolver took more trouble to research the various African groups than the American cultures she wasn’t fully part of.

This issue, however, is trifling, and on the whole, The Poisonwood Bible was well worth reading. Not, perhaps, good enough to make it onto my keeper shelf (for books I frequently reread), but close. ( )

I put off reading this book for over five years, being drawn to it on one hand by its numerous literary awards as well as for its purported insights into life in post-colonial Central Africa. On the other hand, I kept asking myself if I really wanted to read a book that just might be about the hardships of an American missionary wife and her four daughters sent to the Congo during the 1960's. Reader's reviews didn't settle the case, with a few considering the book long and boring, or somehow insulting to Christianity and / or the foreign policy of the United States, and others describing the book with highest praise. Finally swung by a fairly high cumulative rating by the Goodreads community, I picked up the book, and ultimately found it hard to put down. I found I had nothing to fear from those who's sensibilities dealing with their faith or their politics were somehow offended, for that was far from the case. While true that the unforgiving fire and brimstone preaching Reverend Price was not portrayed as a likable character, other Christian missionaries discussed were characterized as highly effective and likable characters. But those were side issues, for the book isn't about U.S. foreign policy nor about a Baptist mission in the Congo. It's really about the lives of the American missionary family who volunteered to spend a year in Africa. The book is reminiscent in style of another recent popular book, "The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society", in that both stories are told not in a continuous narrative style, but rather in the form of alternating letters or memories of the affected individuals, specifically in this case, the wife of Reverend Price, and her four daughters. As the individual stories were told, the personality, strengths and weaknesses of each was developed, and I became drawn to hear more of the story from each of their perspectives. It seemed that the responses of each of the women represented the wide spectrum of responses possible to hardship and adversity, such as avoidance, acceptance, rebellion, and triumph, as well as an ability to see the world at large and beyond a parochial American viewpoint. The story begins with the family's initial mission in the Congo, and then continues and shows how the time in Africa impacted each of their lives. I thought the book was well researched and presented an accurate portrayal of African life as well as missionary life. And although the responses of each individual cannot be taken as expected nor predictable, they can be considered to inclusive in terms of the types of response one might expect after being uprooted and transported to such a different place and lifestyle. ( )