The Poisonwood Bible

HUH!

"huh" is the sound of my mind processing, thinking, overwhelmed by the possibilities. I've been running around these last few days asking people to read this book to chat it out with me, and offering to loan my copy if friends would read it, just so I could talk about it with someone. I am simply incapable of clearly articulating the many thoughts it has prompted in my mind.
I read The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver over the Thanksgiving weekend and it's a doozy in more ways than just its 543 pages! As I've been studying worldview with my teens and preparing them to evaluate the worldview of literature's great authors, I'm more inclined to examine the worldview evidenced in The Poisonwood Bible. Who does she say God is? What does she say happens to man after death? And what is our purpose while here on this earth? I don't agree with her worldview, but I did enjoy the depths of this story and the way it challenged me to contrast her worldview against my own.

To borrow from her website, "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."

As the story unfolds, the reader is confronted with the politics of the Congo as it asserts its independence and the politics of other nations who have an interest in the Congo (or at least its natural resources). I found this aspect of the story fascinating and it makes me want to learn more about this well-researched (she has a two-page bibliography at the end of a fictional novel!) history. The reader also discerns the theme of guilt running through the story--what do we do with our guilt? Some run away from it, some attempt to atone for it, others deny the need for it. Her painting of these scenarios catches the heart and causes introspection.

There are so many themes and morals woven within this story I couldn't begin to express them all. While I read it rather quickly (because I just *had* to see what happened), I still had to pause over some of her pithy little summations:

• Listen. To live is to be marked. To live is to change, to acquire the words of a story (385).
• Sometimes you just have to save your neck and work out the details later (405).
• We are our injuries as much as we are our successes (496).
• You can't just sashay into the jungle aiming to change it all over to the Christian style, without expecting the jungle to change you right back (515).

I found it interesting that the story, like Mudbound, was advanced through the perspective of multiple characters. While the idea of this seems confusing to me, Kingsolver also pulls it off (so maybe it's not as difficult as I would expect). Her characterization is a joy to experience. Each narrator has her own unique voice and grows in ways consistent with her initial character. I enjoyed the cynical, ironic personality of one sister as much as the innocence of another. My fellow lovers of language will also appreciate the fun the author had with puns and palindromes, and I smiled more than once at one character's malapropisms such as a "tapestry of justice" (rather than a travesty of justice) and "I revert my eyes" (rather than avert) or "I prefer to remain anomalous". These mistakes were all the more humorous as they always seemed to take place when she was trying to show her superiority in some way.

While I'm not a proponent of "America as the big, bad West who lives too richly at the expense of other countries" philosophy, I have to admit to cringing in some embarrassment for my culture while reading this book. Reading books like One Million Arrows, Crazy Love, Radical, Hole in Our Gospel, and the more recent Kisses from Katie has already exacerbated my feelings toward excessively indulgent lifestyles. And I think we truly have no idea how pampered we are in this country even as we have the tendency to compare ourselves to those who have more than we do and think we're not overindulging. Opening our minds and expanding our horizons to learn more about other cultures certainly encourages a sense of contentment and would calm the greed I see in Americans that ruins so many lives and relationships.

When I go with them to the grocery, they are boggled and frightened and secretly scornful, I think. Of course they are. I remember how it was at first: dazzling warehouses buzzing with light, where entire shelves boast nothing but hair spray, tooth-whitening cream, and foot powders. It is as if our (shallow, selfish sister) had been left suddenly in charge of everything.

'What is that, Auntie? And that?" (the child) asks: a pink jar of cream for removing hair, a can of fragrance to spray on the carpet, stacks of lidded containers the same size as the jars we throw away each day.

'They're things a person doesn't really need.'

'But, Auntie, how can there be so many kinds of things a person doesn't really need?'

I can think of no honorable answer. Why must some of us deliberate between brands of toothpaste, while others deliberate between damp dirt and bone dust to quiet the fire of an empty stomach lining? There is nothing about the United States I can really explain to this child of another world (441).

I could (as usual) go on and on about this book, but I'm afraid my review is quite long enough. Now, who would like to read this book and talk about it with me??