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Barbara Kingsolver has entertained and touched the lives of legions of readers with her critically acclaimed and bestselling novels The Bean Trees, Animal Dreams, and Pigs in Heaven. In these twenty-five newly conceived essays, she returns once again to her favored literary terrain to explore the themes of family, community, and the natural world. With the eyes of a scientist and the vision of a poet, Barbara Kingsolver writes about notions as diverse as modern motherhood, the history of private property, and the suspended citizenship of humans in the animal kingdom. Kingsolver's canny pursuit of meaning from an inscrutable world compels us to find instructions for life in surprising places: a museum of atomic bomb relics, a West African voodoo love charm, an iconographic family of paper dolls, the ethics of a wild pig who persistently invades a garden, a battle of wills with a two-year-old, or a troop of oysters who observe high tide in the middle of Illinois.… (more)
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Kingsolver is at her best when she keeps to the personal and those things unique to her experience. She does get preachy at times despite her best efforts, but is always readable. I will gobble up any essays I find by
I especially liked the essays where she talked about her writing career. She laments how book writing has become a business like anything. She reminisces about her short foray with a rock band made up of other novelists, including Stephen King and Amy Tan (coincidentally, King describes this band in his memoir, On Writing). She also relives the moment when she gets her first book deal. I think, despite her success, Kingsolver is still a vulnerable writer, amazed at her success so far, which makes her so believable to me.
This book has definitely piqued my interest into Kingsolver’s fiction. However, I have one more Kingsolver essay collection to get to first, Small Wonders.
One of the
"Every one of us is called upon, probably many times, to start a new life. A frightening diagnosis, a marriage, a move, loss of a job .... And onward full tilt we go, pitched and wrecked and absurdly resolute, driven in spite of everything to make good on a new shore. To be hopeful, to embrace one possibility after another - that is surely the basic instinct.... crying out: High tide! Time to move out into the glorious debris. Time to take this life for what it is." (pg. 15-16, "High Tide in Tucson")
That resonated with me so much in those darker days of just several months ago, and I knew I had to read High Tide in Tucson sooner rather than later.
And so, I hunkered down this holiday weekend with this collection of 25 essays (some of which Kingsolver previously published elsewhere, some of which were revised for the purposes of this collection) and I found myself absolutely entranced.
Barbara Kingsolver has a lyrical way with words and a style that is so warmly familiar, and oftentimes, dead-on funny. She's an absolute craftsman of the creative nonfiction form, and anyone who writes in that form or wants to hone their skills in that form would be wise to read her work. I think this collection would be invaluable for bloggers, actually. She speaks directly at her reader as she writes of many a varied topic here - the landscape (physical and emotional) of her childhood home of Kentucky; a beloved teacher; the deserts of Tucson that are her adopted home; a pet hermit crab; the myth of private property; a family of paper dolls; Hawaii; the javelinas (wild pigs) that descended each night on the family's desert home, and the life of a writer.
(If you are a writer, this collection is a must read, if only for "In Case You Ever Want to Go Home Again," "Jabberwocky," "The Forest in the Seeds," and the downright hilarious sampling of letters Kingsolver has received as an author, "Careful What You Let in the Door.")
The best thing I can do - the only thing I can do - in this review is to give you a sampling of Kingsolver's prose from High Tide in Tucson and let you judge for yourself just how good she is. And, this too: keep in mind that these words were written for a 1995 publication date. I think they ring true - even moreso, really - today, and that is the true mark of a writer for our time.
"I played with a set of paper dolls called 'The Family of Dolls,' four in number, who came with the factory-assigned names of Dad, Mom, Sis, and Junior. I think you know what they looked like, at least before I loved them to death and their heads fell off.
Now I've replaced the dolls with a life. I knit my days around my daughter's survival and happiness, and am proud to say her head is still on. But we aren't The Family of Dolls. Maybe you aren't either. And if not, even though you are statistically no oddity, it's probably been suggested to you in a hundred ways that yours isn't exactly a real family, but an imposter family, a harbinger of cultural ruin, a slapdash substitute - something like counterfeit money. Here at the tail end of our century, most of us are up to our ears in the noisy business of trying to support and love a thing called family. But there's a current in the air with ferocious moral force that finds its way even into political campaigns, claiming there is only one right way to do it, the Way It Has Always Been.
In the face of a thriving, particolored world, this narrow view is so pickled and absurd I'm astonished that it gets airplay."
(This is in 1995, people. Sixteen years ago. The times, they definitely ain't a changin'.)
"You can fool history sometimes, but you can't fool the memory of your intimates. And thank heavens, because in the broad valley between real life and propriety whole herds of important truths can steal away into the underbrush. I hold that valley to be my home territory as a writer." ("In Case you Ever Want to Go Home Again," pg. 36)
"To find oneself suddenly published is thrilling - that is a given. But how appalling it also felt I find hard to describe. Imagine singing at the top of your lungs in the shower as you always do, then one day turning off the water and throwing back the curtain to see there in your bathroom a crowd of people with videotape. I wanted to throw a towel over my head." ("In Case You Ever Want to Go Home Again," pg. 37)
(That's kind of how I feel sometimes when someone who I know in real life admits they've been reading my blog - when I hadn't known they've actually been doing so.)
For each of these quotes, I could have included ten more. But you get the idea. This is a fabulous, fabulous collection of essays. I can't imagine any better way to spend Thanksgiving weekend.
Except, perhaps, with Ms. Kingsolver herself at the table.
"Any family is a big empty pot, save for what gets thrown in. Each stew turns out different. Generosity, a resolve to turn bad back into good, and respect for variety - these things will nourish a nation of children. Name-calling and suspicion will not. My soup contains a rock or two of hard times, and maybe yours does too. I expect it's a heck of a bouillabaise." ("Stone Soup," pg. 145 of High Tide in Tucson)
Barbara Kingsolver takes up this trend, and pushes it a little further. High tide in Tucson. Essays from now or never, her first published collection of essays, is a rather hybrid work. The book is a medley of essays, some about Natural History, and some about very down-to-earth, everyday occurrences in the life of the author and her family.
The author, and editor, make attempts to reconcile this choice by suggesting that the essay collection is on "issues around family, community and ecology." However, this merely seems an example of inventive packaging, an oblique excuse to say that the collection lacks focus.
To be sure, Barbara Kingsolver earned an MA in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from the University of Arizona and has worked as a science writer for a number of years. Still, High tide in Tucson. Essays from now or never is characterized by a paucity in content about Natural History, and the contributions which are about nature or natural science are superficial, and not very specific. However, the natural history essays in this collection are more characterized by literary style, often starting with references to classical authors such as Aristotle, Pliny the Elder or Thoreau. They are interspersed with essays about the most banal topics occurring in the author's family life and local community.
What makes the collection as a whole most readable is its down-to-earth style and being free from pretentiousness. Perhaps High tide in Tucson. Essays from now or never is meant to illustrate that is every scientist, there is also a house wife or house husband.
High tide in Tucson. Essays from now or never is perhaps interesting for readers who enjoy reading weekly columns, and the lighter style essays. Readers expecting to discover the naturalist in Barbara Kingsolver better move on.
A book to make you think and challenge your thinking. I will never agree with all of her positions, but I don't need to. I do need to read them,
Then there are the topics we can agree on. Motherhood. The value of life. The joy of watching nature unfold around us. The complexity of people and their ways. When I read her writing on these topics it sounds like poetry or song in my ears. I love the way she uses language to enter one's soul.
Kingsolver was already a successful novelist when this collection of essays was published. She relates her thoughts on family, home, politics, nature, social issues and personal responsibility with humor, compassion, wit and integrity. Her training as a scientist
As she ponders what is meaningful in life and what one person’s impact may be, she takes the reader to a number of surprisingly diverse locations and situations: from a small village in West Africa (where she obtained a voodoo love charm), to her backyard (where she battled the wild pigs intent on digging up her lovingly tended plants), to a museum of atomic bomb relics (which she found both fascinating and horrifying), to a bird-watching hike in the Virginia mountains. She examines the impact of too much television, or the use of pesticides, against the natural wonder of nature and biodiversity.
As I did with Small Wonder, I read this through as I would a novel. But this collection is probably best enjoyed by reading a chapter/essay now and again.