At 15, Rachel, the whiny would-be beauty queen who Kingsolver does a nimble job of delineating the Price girls' responses to Africa and their father's decision to uproot them. Moving fluently from one point of view to another, Ms. Like Ike." Here, there are plagues of killer ants, hordes of malaria-carrying mosquitoes and unseen parasites, and lions and tarantulas and snakes - a fearsome world of nature whose perils are magnified by political and racial tensions. a tiny cluster of mud houses devoid of all the ordinary amenities of life back home in "the easy land of ice cream cones and new Keds sneakers and We Narrated in alternating chapters by Nathan's wife, Orleanna, and their four daughters, Rachel, Leah, Adah and Ruth May, "The Poisonwood Bible" begins with the arrival of the Price family in the remote Congolese village of Kilanga
Nathan Price and his family and their journey into the heart of darkness. These previous works, however, also grappled with social injustice, with the intersection of public events with private concerns and the competing claims of community and individual will - some of the very themes that animate the saga of Kingsolver's earlier work ("The Bean Trees," "Pigs in Heaven," "Animal Dreams," "Homeland and Other Stories"),įiction set for the most part in the American South and Southwest and dealing, most memorably, with the plight of single mothers trying to sort out their lives. On the surface, certainly, "Poisonwood" might seem to have little in common with Ms.
The novel's central character, a fiery evangelical missionary named Nathan Price, is part Roger Chillingworth, the coldhearted, judgmental villain of Hawthorne's "Scarlet Letter," and part Ahab, Melville's monomaniacalĬaptain who risks his own life and the lives of those closest to him in pursuit of his obsessive vision. Powerful new book is actually an old-fashioned 19th-century novel, a Hawthornian tale of sin and redemption, and the "dark necessity" of history. Lthough "The Poisonwood Bible" takes place in the former Belgian Congo and begins in 1959 and ends in the 1990s, Barbara Kingsolver's OctoBOOKS OF THE TIMES 'The Poisonwood Bible': A Family a Heart of Darkness By MICHIKO KAKUTANI 'The Poisonwood Bible': A Family a Heart of Darkness
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