The Barnes & Noble Review
Barbara Kingsolver calls her new novel, The Poisonwood Bible, her "magnum opus." And it is — 500-plus pages of "the deepest-delving" fiction she's ever written, not to mention a fresh new locale. Packed with themes of cultural diversity, political morality, and environmental ethics, this one, unlike her three previous Southwestern novels, is set in postcolonial Africa. The narrative begins in the relatively tame Belgian Congo of the late 1950s, gains speed in the tumultuous early '60s (with the coup of the independent Lumumba government toppled by the CIA-backed, UN-funded Mobutu government), then branches out several decades in the future. "I set out to ask a very long question," Kingsolver says. "What have we done as a nation, a culture, a people to Africa, and where do we go from here?"

Kingsolver has been waiting her entire life to write this novel. When she was seven years old, her mother and father, both public health officials, moved their family to the Congo for several years. She laughs and says, "I'm happy to say my parents are wonderful people, not at all like the family in the book." There they practiced their medicine while young Barbara kept a journal. She explains the impact: "Living in that part of the world during the formative years of my childhood introduced me to the possibility that everything I had always assumed was right could be totally wrong in another place." Although the story is in no way about her personal familial experience, much of the setting and detail are torn from the pages of that journal. That's not to say she didn't do a heapofresearch; there's an extensive bibliography included at the end of the novel. She also made a number of trips back to Africa and had many experts comment on the manuscript, including the activist, journalist, convicted murderer, and cause célèbre Mumia Abu-Jamal, who gave it the thumbs-up from his cell in the Pennsylvania state penitentiary.

The Poisonwood Bible is the saga of the Price family, a rural Georgia family wrestling with inner demons while living in the small African village of Kilanga. It revolves around Nathan Price, an abusive southern Baptist evangelical minister who forsakes his family on his quest to save the souls of the natives. What begins as a church-sanctioned mission ends in a dangerous battle of wills that separates the Price family forever. The action is filtered primarily through Nathan's four daughters, à la As I Lay Dying, with future-time flashbacks from the mother's point of view. It's through the girls that we learn about Nathan's proclivity toward physical and mental abuse, his lack of fear regarding growing political unrest, and his stubborn insistence that the villagers be baptized in crocodile-infested waters. And through their mother, Orleanna, we find out why Nathan lives with such a heavy and hurtful God-fearing heart: In World War II his entire company died during the Bataan Death March. Although Nathan was honorably discharged, survivor's guilt led him to the jungles of Africa and did not permit him to retreat, no matter what the cost. The price of this intractable attitude is disease, death, and madness.

The novel's post-Congo years, which describe what the Price women do with their lives after the 17 months in the bush, are slightly anticlimactic, but the first 400 pages of this book are stunning and historically accurate to boot. Two scenes in particular are extraordinarily vivid and powerful. The first is a depiction of the biannual migration of ants, a literal sea of ants eating its way across Africa. Kingsolver has seen this natural phenomenon firsthand. "It's thought of as a cleansing. You try to remember the baby and the chickens and let the ants go on about purifying the country." The second happens the day the villagers, plagued by starvation, set fire to the high grass to burn out game. Kingsolver has the ability, in a beautifully painful sort of way, to make these scenes come alive with a single sentence: "Birds hit the wall of fire and lit like bottle rockets."

Although Kingsolver does as few media appearances as she can and ignores media hype with "every molecule" of her being, she has once again consented to do a multicity book tour for her new novel. "I was raised Southern," she says. "It's almost not in me to disappoint people. But what's most important to me is being a mother, a writer, and a responsible member of the community in which I live. The other stuff is incidental. Somehow our culture has dragged authors into this celebrity scene, and it's a place where we really don't belong. I have more to offer if I stay at home and write another book."

The Poisonwood Bible is certainly Kingsolver's most daring and quite possibly her most engaging and provocative outing yet. And if staying at home means another book like it, well, surely the world will survive with one less book tour.

Nelson Taylor is a freelance writer who lives in Brooklyn, New York. He currently writes for Time Out, Paper, Bikini, Bomb, and Salon.

This story of Nathan Price, a Baptist missionary to the Belgian Congo in 1959, on the eve of Congolese independence, is a deep, multifaceted narrative. Told in alternating chapters by Nathan's wife and four daughters, it's the compelling story of a wife stretched beyond her limits, of daughters struggling to grow up in an alien environment, and of the Congo's development. Reminiscent of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, it is a story of the insanity that can befall a white man set on bending Africa's landscape and people to his own will. Kingsolver is a great talent, ably using African languages in her prose while developing a story with all the elements of a true classic.
— Book: The Magazine for the Reading Life

Haunting . . . A novel of character, a narrative shaped by keen-eyed women.

Fully realized, richly embroidered, triumphant.

Powerful . . . Kingsolver is a gifted magician of words.

Beautifully written . . . Kingsolver's tale of domestic tragedy is more than just a well-told yarn . . . Played out against the bloody backdrop of political struggles in Congo that continue to this day, it is also particularly timely.

Tragic, and remarkable..A novel that blends outlandish experience with Old Testament rhythms of prophecy and doom.

The book's sheer enjoyability is given depth by Kingsolver's insight and compassion for Congo, including its people, and their language and sayings.

Most impressive are the humor and insight with which Kingsolver describes a global epic, proving just how personal the political can be.

Compelling, lyrical and utterly believable.

A triple-decker, different coming-of-age novel, but also a clever look at language and cultures.

A novel that brims with excitement and rings with authority.

Kingsolver's work is a magnum opus, a parable encompassing a biblical structure and a bibliography, and a believable cast of African characters.

In The Poisonwood Bible, Kingsolver is at the top of her fiction form. She writes spectacularly in the varied voices of the four daughters and the wife of Baptist missionary Nathan Price. The big bully of the pulpit transplants his family from Bethlehem, Georgia, to the Belgain congo, where they are often hilariously, but finally woefully, unprepared for the hardships of the jungle. Kingsolver also masterfully explicates the complex and tragic history of the Congolese rebels of 1959, their struggle for independence, and the outbreak of war.
— The Progressive

Beautifully written.
—Entertainment Weekly

A bravura performance . . . A subtle and complex creation, dealing with epic subjects with invention and courage and a great deal of heart.

A powerful new epic . . . She has with infinitely steady hands worked the prickly threads of religion, politics, race, sin and redemption into a thing of terrible beauty.

Compellinglyrical and utterly believable.

Haunting..A novel of character, a narrative shaped by keen-eyed women.

As these characters let go of old beliefs and construct new visions, Barbara Kingsolver leads us to see the limits of our own.
—Women's Review of Books

In this risky but resoundingly successful novel, Kingsolver leaves the Southwest, the setting of most of her work (The Bean Trees; Animal Dreams) and follows an evangelical Baptist minister's family to the Congo in the late 1950s, entwining their fate with that of the country during three turbulent decades. Nathan Price's determination to convert the natives of the Congo to Christianity is, we gradually discover, both foolhardy and dangerous, unsanctioned by the church administration and doomed from the start by Nathan's self-righteousness. Fanatic and sanctimonious, Nathan is a domestic monster, too, a physically and emotionally abusive, misogynistic husband and father. He refuses to understand how his obsession with river baptism affronts the traditions of the villagers of Kalinga, and his stubborn concept of religious rectitude brings misery and destruction to all. Cleverly, Kingsolver never brings us inside Nathan's head but instead unfolds the tragic story of the Price family through the alternating points of view of Orleanna Price and her four daughters. Cast with her young children into primitive conditions but trained to be obedient to her husband, Orleanna is powerless to mitigate their situation. Meanwhile, each of the four Price daughters reveals herself through first-person narration, and their rich and clearly differentiated self-portraits are small triumphs. Rachel, the eldest, is a self-absorbed teenager who will never outgrow her selfish view of the world or her tendency to commit hilarious malapropisms. Twins Leah and Adah are gifted intellectually but are physically and emotionally separated by Adah's birth injury, which has rendered her hemiplagic. Leah adores her father; Adah, who does not speak, is a shrewd observer of his monumental ego. The musings of five- year-old Ruth May reflect a child's humorous misunderstanding of the exotic world to which she has been transported. By revealing the story through the female victims of Reverend Price's hubris, Kingsolver also charts their maturation as they confront or evade moral and existential issues and, at great cost, accrue wisdom in the crucible of an alien land. It is through their eyes that we come to experience the life of the villagers in an isolated community and the particular ways in which American and African cultures collide. As the girls become acquainted with the villagers, especially the young teacher Anatole, they begin to understand the political situation in the Congo: the brutality of Belgian rule, the nascent nationalism briefly fulfilled in the election of the short-lived Patrice Lumumba government, and the secret involvement of the Eisenhower administration in Lumumba's assassination and the installation of the villainous dictator Mobutu. In the end, Kingsolver delivers a compelling family saga, a sobering picture of the horrors of fanatic fundamentalism and an insightful view of an exploited country crushed by the heel of colonialism and then ruthlessly manipulated by a bastion of democracy. The book is also a marvelous mix of trenchant character portrayal, unflagging narrative thrust and authoritative background detail. The disastrous outcome of the forceful imposition of Christian theology on indigenous natural faith gives the novel its pervasive irony; but humor is pervasive, too, artfully integrated into the children's misapprehensions of their world; and suspense rises inexorably as the Price family's peril and that of the newly independent country of Zaire intersect. Kingsolver moves into new moral terrain in this powerful, convincing and emotionally resonant novel.

It's been five years since Kingsolver's last novel (Pigs in Heaven, LJ 6/15/93), and she has used her time well. This intense family drama is set in an Africa on the verge of independence and upheaval. In 1959, evangelical preacher Nathan Price moves his wife and four daughters from Georgia to a village in the Belgian Congo, later Zaire. Their dysfunction and cultural arrogance proves disastrous as the family is nearly destroyed by war, Nathan's tyranny, and Africa itself. Told in the voices of the mother and daughters, the novel spans 30 years as the women seek to understand each other and the continent that tore them apart. Kingsolver has a keen understanding of the inevitable, often violent clashes between white and indigenous cultures, yet she lets the women tell their own stories without being judgmental. An excellent novel that was worth the wait and will win the author new fans. --Ellen Flexman, Indianapolis-Marion Cty. P.L.

...Kingsolver...is a gifted magician of words -- Her novel is both powerful and quite simple....also angrier and more direct than her earlier books.
— Time Magazine

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.
— The New York Times

There are few ambitious, successful and beautiful novels. Lucky for us, we have one now.
— Washington Post Book World

A quantum-leap breakthrough...learned, tragicomic and sprawling.

A powerful new epic..She has with infinitely steady hands worked the prickly threads of religion, politics, race, sin and redemption into a thing of terrible beauty.

Barbara Kingsolver has dreamed a magnificent fiction and a ferocious bill of indictment..What we have here'with this new, mature, angry, heartbroken, expansive out-of-Africa Kingsolver'is at last our very own Lessing and our very own Gordimer.

In her most complex novel to date, Kingsolver presents her five narrators—the wife and daughters of a Baptist missionary sent to the Belgian Congo in 1959. The characters are fully developed and their compassionate telling of their story is truly memorable.

A triple-decker, different coming-of-age novel, but also a clever look at language and cultures.

The first novel in five years from the ever-popular Kingsolver (Pigs in Heaven) is a large-scale saga of an American family's enlightening and disillusioning African adventure.

It begins with a stunningly written backward look: Orleanna Price's embittered memory of the uncompromising zeal that impelled her husband, Baptist missionary Nathan Price, to take her and their four daughters to the (then) Belgian Congo in 1959, and remain there despite dangerous evidence of the country's instability under Patrice Lumumba's ill-starred independence movement, Belgian and American interference and condescension, and Joseph Mobutu's murderous military dictatorship.

The bulk of the story, which is set in the superbly realized native village of Kilanga, is narrated in turn by the four Price girls: Leah, the 'smart' twin, whose worshipful respect for her father will undergo a rigorous trial by fire; her 'retarded' counterpart Adah, disabled and mute (though in the depths of her mind articulate and playfully intelligent); eldest sister Rachel, a self-important whiner given to hilarious malapropisms ('feminine tuition'; 'I prefer to remain anomalous'); and youngest sister Ruth May, whose childish fantasies of union with the surrounding, smothering landscape are cruelly fulfilled.

Kingsolver skillfully orchestrates her characters' varied responses to Africa into a consistently absorbing narrative that reaches climax after climax, and that, even after you're sure it must be nearing its end, continues for a wrenching hundred pages or more, spelling out in unforgettable dramatic and lyric terms the fates of the surviving Prices. Little recent fiction has so successfully fused the personal with the political. Better even than Robert Stone in his otherwise brilliant Damascus Gate, Kingsolver convinces us that her characters are, first and foremost, breathing, fallible human beings and only secondarily conduits for her book's vigorously expressed and argued social and political ideas. A triumph.

There are few ambitious, successful and beautiful novels. Lucky for us, we have one now, in Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible . . . this awed reviewer hardly knows where to begin.” — Jane Smiley, Washington Post Book World

“Fully realized, richly embroidered, triumphant.” — Newsweek

“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.” — Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

“A powerful new epic . . . She has with infinitely steady hands worked the prickly threads of religion, politics, race, sin and redemption into a thing of terrible beauty.” — Los Angeles Times Book Review

“Powerful . . . Kingsolver is a gifted magician of words.” — Time

“Beautifully written . . . Kingsolver’s tale of domestic tragedy is more than just a well-told yarn . . . Played out against the bloody backdrop of political struggles in Congo that continue to this day, it is also particularly timely.” — People

“Tragic, and remarkable. . . . A novel that blends outlandish experience with Old Testament rhythms of prophecy and doom.” — USA Today

“The book’s sheer enjoyability is given depth by Kingsolver’s insight and compassion for Congo, including its people, and their language and sayings.” — Boston Globe

“Compelling, lyrical and utterly believable.” — Chicago Tribune

A powerful new epic . . . She has with infinitely steady hands worked the prickly threads of religion, politics, race, sin and redemption into a thing of terrible beauty.

Tragic, and remarkable. . . . A novel that blends outlandish experience with Old Testament rhythms of prophecy and doom.

Compelling, lyrical and utterly believable.

There are few ambitious, successful and beautiful novels. Lucky for us, we have one now, in Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible . . . this awed reviewer hardly knows where to begin.

Powerful . . . Kingsolver is a gifted magician of words.

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.

Fully realized, richly embroidered, triumphant.

This dense and intricate family chronicle follows a Baptist missionary family into the Congo, circa 1959, where their faith in Jesus, democracy, and what we call civilization is severely challenged. The five female narrators range from a teenaged Malaprop pining for soda pop and the bunny hop to a child prodigy who comprehends words, phrases and whole books backwards and forwards. We hear African dialects, and smatterings of French and Afrikaans. What a challenge for a narrator! Dean Robertson does not do a lot of "acting" in this performance. She doesn't strain to distinguish voices or milk the emotions. So you begin to imagine you're listening to the author herself, presenting the text simply, in a matter-of-fact, slightly rural Southern voice. S.P. ©AudioFile, Portland, Maine