The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver

Ok this is gonna be a long read because I have to gush about this book.

I closed the last page on Barbara Kingsolver's acclaimed classic The Poisonwood Bible a day or two ago and it's been buzzing around in my head since. Such an emotionally poignant story that manages to be simultaneously intimate and epic, charting the course of a single family's growth and disintegration in the midst of seismic shifts of an country's history and future.

For those unaware, the book is about a husband and wife and their 4 girls moving from small-town Georgia, USA to a middle-of-nowhere village in the Congo in 1959. The father is a Baptist preacher and his goal to convert the Congolese people of this village into good ol' Christians. Suffice to say that things don't really go according to plan.

Now that I've finished the book and have had a chance to ruminate upon it, I'm starting to realize how all-encompassing it is. The crux of the narrative is about the 4 sisters, as each chapter alternates between their POV and focuses on their character development. It's astonishing how well Kingsolver manages to create a specific writing style for each sister, giving each of them a unique voice and personality.

The characters are really what make the novel so powerful, and they're all complex and well-developed. It's compelling, fascinating and often tragic to see them grow and change over the 3 decades that pass in the books, incorporated into the rough and hardscrabble life of 1950s Africa.

And ultimately, this story was a tragedy, and a profoundly sad one at that. The slow disintegration of the Price family, the distance created between each of them, drives the story forward. Like with any great historical fiction, the time and place of the story has a significant impact. I personally am not too knowledgeable about the history of Congo in the 50s/60s/70s, so I can't speak to the accuracy of what's portrayed here, but in the context of the story it felt fully realized, respectful and immersive.

I was especially impressed at how well Kingsolver made the setting of the village feel so real. It felt grand, mysterious, dangerous, hostile, beautiful, scary all at once. There are incredible sequences that live in my head rent-free, such as the "night of the ants" with the entire village trying to escape the march of the millions of driver ants as they make their way through the village. Or the chapter where Leah joins the villagers on a hunt, and they create a circle of fire to trap and kill the animals. These sequences took on a surreal, almost mythical vibe. Dare I say, biblical?

I had some concerns that I may run into the "white saviour" or "noble savages" trope but I was happy to see that if anything, those tropes were turned on their heads. Nathan Prices goes to Africa to become a white religious saviour, but he ends up broken by it, his ambitions ultimately literally going up in flames. And the Congolese are given a lot of depth and complexity in their portrayal. They're mysterious and unknowable to the Prices - which makes sense given the immense gulf in their respective culture and lifestyle - but they're flawed humans all the same.

There's a fair bit of commentary on colonialism and its impacts, and it's mostly well done. One of my few nitpicks with the book is that this commentary/insight was a bit surface level and never went beyond "colonialism bad".

It didn't bother me too much though because it's really more of a character-driven book. All the protagonists get their time in the sun but it did seem like Kingsolver was especially partial to Leah, as she seemed to get the most page time devoted to her journey and development. It felt like each of the Prices represented a different version of how a "stranger in a strange land" would be.

I haven't even touched on the prose in the book yet, which is magnificent. This is the first book I've read from Kingsolver, and I plan on diving deeper into her catalog if this level of writing is what I can expect.

The story ultimately left me with a feeling of bittersweet melancholy, thinking about how what was supposed to be one small part of a family's life ended up becoming the defining event, and ended up driving them apart from each other, and left them feeling half-empty and incomplete - at least, that's the impression I got, because despite what Leah, Adah, Rachel and Orleanna end up achieving post-Kingala, it felt like they never were the same again.

I guess the death of Ruth May was the point where the division started. This was another part of the book that left me devastated - did not see that one coming at all. I noticed a marked difference in how the narrative before and after she passed - post-death, the narrative felt much more fragmented, more detached and dreamlike, missing the more grounded, earthy feel of the 2/3rds. I took it as a reflection on how her death affected the rest of the family, leaving them adrift and directionless in their lives.

I could go on and on but damn, this was a straight-up banger of a story. 10/10 and couldn't give a more glowing recommendation