Michael Finocchiaro's Reviews > The Poisonwood Bible

UPDATE: Kingsolver finally won her Pulitzer (albeit shared with a lesser work) for the magnificent Demon Copperhead in 2023. Still, for me, this remains her masterpiece!

This was a fantastic read full of poetry and beautiful prose about the crumbling of a Christian missionary family in the Congo in the late 50's/early 60s. The Price family - a rigid, fundamentalist preacher, his wife, and their four daughters - arrive from Bethlehem, GA in a village in Congo and are faced with the emptiness of their beliefs against the fullness of the life of the Congolese around them. The daughters are all quite different: Rachel, the older beauty, who is in denial of the inadequacy of her moral code and social aspirations among the vines, spiders, and mud; Lea and Adah, the twins, both brilliant in their own ways but Lea being skeptical and healthy whereas Adah is physically impaired and willingly mute; and the baby Ruth-May who is the first one to make a social bond with the kids of the village. As the situation in Congo deteriorates (the horrific Belgian colonial government yielding to a democratically elected Patrice Lumumba who is assassinated with help of the CIA and replaced by the corrupt and violent Mobutu), the family disintegrates. They face famine, flood, ant invasions, and social rejection as their lives unravel.

One of the themes of the book is language - Kingsolver, in an appendix after the book, says that she had a small team of linguists to ensure that her use of Kingala dialect was as accurate as possible. The Bible is, naturally, crucial to the story, but the point is made how interpretation and translation are so critical to the meaning of certain passages. Similarly, the words of Nathan Price's sermons are necessarily translated for the villagers by the helpful Achille, and we learn that the word for "the Lord" is the same word for poisonwood, a tree that causes severe skin rashes - this the title of the book and the confusion of the villagers whom to Nathan's dismay, end up voting Jesus out of their village in an election during a church service. It is a really interesting book!

The story is told with gorgeous descriptions in the voices of all five women characters. The reader is carried along with the catastrophic events and the aftermath as each survivor goes on a different path at the end. One of them rests glued to the past, two of them try to guard some degree of optimism for the future, and one accepts her station and shows little evolution of her colonial mindset. I won't spoil anything for you because you really should take the time to enjoy it yourself.

This book lost out in 1999 to The Hours for the Pulitzer Prize. I can't quite remember that book, I'll need to re-read it, but I think that the imagery and prose of The Poisonwood Bible was probably more deserving of the prize that year.