Re: GEN: Summer reading for us?

["J. Kimball" <jkim@BORG.COM>]

I would like to recommend a novel, The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara
Kingsolver.  It is set in Africa, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo
in the late 1950's and early 1960's before and after Belgium gave the Congo
independence. The story centers around a missionary family, an American
minister and his wife and children from Georgia, who live in a remote
native village about 100 miles from Stanleyville (now Kisangani), a city on
the Congo River.

The book on its own merits is a gripping novel of human and family
relationships, and of people from different cultures trying (and not
trying) to understand each other.  Kingsolver employs an unusual device to
help us get close to the characters.  She has each female member of the
family, the mother and the four daughters, rotate as the narrator, telling
a part of the tale in turn. Their distinct personalities come through
forcefully, and you feel you are right there when the women are struggling
to get enough to eat or being attacked by red ants or trying to cope with
their increasingly fanatical minister father.

For me, the story was even more poignant as I lived through the same era in
another part of the Congo.  Much of the detail Kingsolver limns evoked my
own memories as a young mother during the anarchic days after independence
in 1960. The novel rings true whether you know the history or not, but the
events of that era forty years ago haunt us now, and this story may, while
it entertains, help us envision central Africa today.

Joan Kimball  jkim@borg.com

Joan Kimball   Librarian, Writer, Storyteller.
Clinton NY.     jkim@borg.com

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