Barbara Kingsolver – Page 3

… Kingsolver

For my ABC Wednesday posts I’ve been highlighting either authors or artists whose work I enjoy. This week it’s the letter K and there was no doubt about who that brought to mind – Barbara Kingsolver, who is the author of one of my very favourite books – The Poisonwood Bible.

I bought this book in an airport bookshop just before boarding a plane to go on holiday to Cyprus; that gave me plenty of time to read a good chunk of the book before we landed. I remember being very amused by the description of how the Price family got round the forty-four pound per person luggage limit on their flight to the Congo. I’d just struggled to get our luggage allowance down to the required limit for our holiday, but I hadn’t thought of doing what they did – each of them wearing multiple layers of clothing and other goods, such as tools and cake-mix boxes tucked out of sight in their pockets and under their waistbands. Cake-mixes were an essential item as Mrs Price said, ‘they won’t have Betty Crocker in the Congo.’

I soon read the rest of the book by the side of the pool, my hands covered in sun cream removing the gold lettering of Barbara Kingsolver’s name.

This is the book’s description from the back cover:

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, The Poisonwood Bible is the story of one family’s tragic undoing and remarkable reconstruction over the course of three decades in postcolonial Africa. They carry with them all 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.

It is a brilliant book – one that I’ve read at least twice and would eagerly read again. The setting and historical figures and events are real, even though the characters and story are fictional. Barbara Kingsolver writes in her author’s introduction to the book that she relied on her memory, travel in other parts of Africa and many people’s accounts of the natural, cultural and social history of the Congo/Zaire to write the novel.

She wrote that her parents, who were different in every way from the parents in the book, were

… medical and public-health workers, whose compassion and curiosity led then to the Congo. They brought me to a place of wonders, taught me to pay attention, and set me early on a path of exploring the great, shifting terrain between righteousness and what’s right. (page x)

It’s a book that has stuck long in my memory, maybe because it paints such a remarkable picture based on reality and truth.

I’ve read some of her other books, namely The Bean Trees, Homeland and Other Stories, and Prodigal Summer,and whilst I enjoyed them, none of them were, I thought, as good as The Poisonwood Bible. I have The Lacuna, waiting to be read.

For more information see Barbara Kingsolver’s own website.

I went to the library yesterday and borrowed just four books. As we’re moving house at the end of November I may be able to read these in time. In fact I only have one week to read Dewey: the Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched the World by Vicki Myron. I only have one week because this is part of the library’s “Top Ten Best Sellers” and cannot be renewed.

I first read about this book last year when many book bloggers were writing about how good it is. As Dewey is a ginger cat and a library cat how could I resist borrowing this book. (Our own little ginger cat Lucy also loves books, always rubbing her head round the piles of books lying around the house and trying to read the one I’m reading!) Dewey dropped into the library returns box as a tiny kitten grows into “a strutting adorable library cat whose antics kept patrons in stitches, and whose sixth sense about those in need created hundreds of deep and loving friendships.”

The next book I found is Excursion to Tindari, an Inspector Montalbano Mystery by Andrea Camilleri. “A young Don Juan is found murdered in front of his apartment building early one morning and an elderly couple are reported missing after an excursion to the ancienmt site of Tindari “. I haven’t read anything by Camilleri but I thought this looked good. The praise on the back cover from The Times is “A joy to read”, whilst the NewYork Times calls it a “savagely funny police procedural”.

Moving along the shelves I came across Pigs in Heaven by Barbara Kingsolver. I borrowed this because I loved Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible. Pigs in Heaven is apparently “a spellbinding novel of heartbreak, love and complicated family ties.”

My final choice is Shakespeare: the World as a Stage by Bill Bryson. I’ve liked everything I’ve read by Bryson and I love Shakespeare, so this was an easy choice. Bryson wanted to know more about Shakespeare because the records reveal little about him. “In a journey through Shakespeare’s time, he brings to life the hubbub of Elizabethan England and a host of characters along the way. Bryson celebrates the glory of Shakespeare’s language – his ceaseless inventiveness gave us hundreds of now indispensable phrases, images and words – and delights in details of his fall-outs and folios, poetry and plays.” I thought it would complement 1599: a year in the Life of William Shakespeare by James Shapiro, which I’ve started to read.