The Poisonwood Bible: A Novel (Perennial Classics) (alkuperäinen julkaisuvuosi 1998; vuoden 2005 painos)

This book has gotten a lot of praise — it was featured in Oprah’s Book Club — and there are even study guides devoted to it. It was a big deal when it first came out. Some aspects of the praise were warranted, but more than twenty years later, I don’t think the story has held up well. I can’t see it becoming a classic. It’s just too one-note and mean-spirited.

The Poisonwood Bible is about a fire-and-brimstone minister, Nathan Price, who uproots his family from the American South of 1959 and heads to the Belgian Congo, which is soon to become an independent country. His long-suffering wife, Orleanna, and their four daughters Rachel, Leah and Adah (twins) and Ruth May come with him. The story is about their culture shock as they live in a hut without electricity or running water as their father preaches salvation to the natives, who remain unimpressed. The narration alternates between the first-person voices of the female characters, sometimes jumping ahead to the future after they have left Africa, or to the past when they were younger. Kingsolver has said she intended the book to be a study of a family in crisis, but it comes across more as an exercise in snark.

Right away this very white-bread family is set up so readers can laugh at them in their ignorance. Everything they do, is a failure. Mom has a tear-filled breakdown when the boxed cake mixes she has smuggled in for birthdays get ruined in the Congan humidity; Dad’s garden he plants with American seeds is repeatedly flooded and then fails for lack of appropriate pollination. I enjoyed it up to the middle, then thought, enough. I wanted to see plot progression and feel some emotional weight. Everything felt too anecdotal, like any chapter of it could have appeared in The New Yorker magazine as a short story. It was too overwritten for a novel. The writing was enjoyable, mind you, but got to be too much.

The girls’ narration tired me as well. When the story begins, Rachel, the oldest, is 15 going on 16; the twins are 14, and Ruth May is 5. But they come across as too cerebral, even the youngest. They didn’t seem authentic. I think the author was trying for a William Faulkner The Sound and the Fury approach, crossed with some Holden Caulfield, but I just couldn’t suspend my disbelief.

I gave up halfway in. In light of the current times and current issues of 2020, I was just not comfortable with the mocking tone of it. The Congolese are mocked through the eyes of the narrators, and the narrators, with their 1950s religious fundamentalist mindsets, are set up to the mocked by the readers, or by the author. This may be the fault of the time in which it was published, when it was standard to mock the 1950s through the more “enlightened” filter of the 90s (take the successful movie Pleasantville, for example… ) but the author wasn’t adding anything new to the mix, IMO.

I guess I wanted the characters and their problems handled with more respect, if that makes sense. ( )

Beautifully written epic. The political history of the Congo/Zaire/Democratic Republic of Congo is the backdrop to a story about how a family's time there affects them throughout their lives. ( )

An all-time favorite. I enjoyed rereading this book 20 years after the first time. Kingsolver's characters are fascinating as always, and her prose is unrivaled. ( )

I thought this was an amazing book. It made me think. It changed my mind. It entertained (I laughed, cried, sputtered in anger, etc.). The many different voices were so well done. Great job! ( )

“The road to hell is paved with good intentions” is an old adage that clearly describes the theme for "The Poisonwood Bible". Beginning in 1959, Southern Baptist minister Nathan Price decides to take his wife and four children to the Belgium Congo for a year of missionary work. His goal is to convert Native African’s to Christianity.

Though Price believes thoroughly in his good intentions, he is misguided and overly idealistic. Perhaps he is just blindly self-righteous and arrogant. You will figure that out for yourself as the story progresses. However, the natives of the remote village of Kilanga are repelled by his mission. They don’t think Jesus will put food on the table, protect them from diseases, or shield them from natural disasters. To further complicate matters, the African government is in turmoil which eventually puts his entire family in danger. Revolution is imminent. Several months after their arrival, the Prices are notified they will no longer receive a stipend from the church and the missionary administrator urges them to immediately return home. Nathan however, is convinced they will be protected mystically by God and insists that they stay.

The first line of the book– written by Mrs. Price long after her return to Georgia is, “Imagine a ruin so strange it must never have happened.” Strange? Definitely. Other appropriate adjectives are: horrible, tragic, disturbing, outrageous, and disgusting.

What makes the story particularly interesting is that each of the children take turns narrating: five-year-old Ruth May, the fourteen-year-old twins Leah and Adah, and fifteen-year-old Rachel, with Mrs. Price injecting a few pages throughout. It is clever, funny, frightening, sad, and heartbreaking. The characters in "The Poisonwood Bible" are all fictional, but the details of African history and the events of the 1950s and 60s are very real. Imagine living in a primitive hut without running water or plumbing, no store-bought food, no phone, tv or radio, no car… no roads, just dirt paths leading into the untamed jungle. The Prices arrived totally unprepared in their best clothing carrying useless items like Betty Crocker boxed cake mixes. As fifteen-year old Rachel Price declares, “Man oh man, I thought I had died and gone to hell. But it’s worse than that- I’m alive in hell. It’s enough to give you the weebie-jeebies, believe you me”.

Barbara Kingsolver illustrates the evils of Western Civilization with greedy exploitation and naïve altruistic intruders trying to inflict their own cultural values on the innocent people of Africa. And it becomes abundantly clear that without education, medical attention, infrastructure, technology, and constructive guidance, the common people of Africa are doomed to poverty, stagnant conditions… inconsequentially assigned to oblivion regardless of what God they believe in.

Even the United States did their part in unwanted and self-serving interference, stifling the African’s quest for freedom under the guise of the “good intention” in trying to do everything possible to keep Africa from becoming a communist nation.

"The Poisonwood Bible" was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and was recommended by Oprah Winfrey for her once popular book club members. There has been controversy surrounding the author’s powerful narrative, primarily because of the portrayal of incompetence and ignorance in the character of the Baptist minister Nathan Price. ( )