Status
Available
Call number
Publication
Harper (1999), Edition: 1st, 560 pages
Description
The drama of a U.S. missionary family in Africa during a war of decolonization. At its center is Nathan Price, a self-righteous Baptist minister who establishes a mission in a village in 1959 Belgian Congo. The resulting clash of cultures is seen through the eyes of his wife and his four daughters.
Subjects
Original publication date
1998 (1e édition originale américaine, Harper Collins, New York)
1999-08-20 (1e traduction et édition française, Littérature étrangère, Payot et Rivages)
2001-03-01 (Réédition française, Poche, Littérature étrangère, Rivages)
2014-09-24 (Réédition française, Poche, Littérature étrangère, Rivages)
Media reviews
Kingsolver once wrote that ""The point [of portraying other cultures] is not to emulate other lives, or usurp their wardrobes. The point is to find sense.'' Her effort to make sense of the Congo's tragic struggle for independence is fully realized, richly embroidered, triumphant.
A writer who casts a preacher as a fool and a villain had best not be preachy. Kingsolver manages not to be, in part because she is a gifted magician of words--her sleight-of-phrase easily distracting a reader who might be on the point of rebellion. Her novel is both powerful and quite simple. It
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is also angrier and more direct than her earlier books. Show Less
The Congo permeates ''The Poisonwood Bible,'' and yet this is a novel that is just as much about America, a portrait, in absentia, of the nation that sent the Prices to save the souls of a people for whom it felt only contempt, people who already, in the words of a more experienced missionary,
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''have a world of God's grace in their lives, along with a dose of hardship that can kill a person entirely.'' Show Less
Although ''The Poisonwood Bible'' takes place in the former Belgian Congo and begins in 1959 and ends in the 1990's, Barbara Kingsolver's powerful new book is actually an old-fashioned 19th-century novel, a Hawthornian tale of sin and redemption and the ''dark necessity'' of history.