Fiction

[weezo]

I tend to agree that Rachel had more on the ball than one gets from the first reading. The more I think about her, the more she seems like a solid surviver. She used sex/marriage only until she got to a comfortable place, and then let it go by. She was not into being a wife or a sex partner. She wanted to be her own person.

I was disappointed when she would not let Leah and Anatole stay at her hotel, but having lived in the south for some forty years, I have met other people who are and remain as firm on their prejudice no matter how much the times change, as long as they have even an inch of ground to stand on.

And, yes, you are right about the bonding between the twins to the exclusion of Rachel. Sometimes sisters are that close who are not twins, and can exclude other sisters. When my sisters and I got together to bury our mother, which was somewhat similar to the search for Ruth May's grave without the frustration, there was a point when the five of us were riding in the car visiting old haunts, and the two youngest were rolling their eyes about the ecstacy us older ones were enjoying over seeing how small and insiginificant some landmarks really were (There are actually six of us, but Edith was too ill to make the trip accorss the continent.)

The story brought up so many special feelings about my own sisters, and that made the book special to me.

[madupont]

Okay, so I decided that anybody who could get the message from Doris Lessing, in 1975 when Kingsolver was  20, and who studied with Prose, is not without merit. (I'm wondering if Francine reviewed her book?....)

Here's her publisher's Reading Guide:Topics for Discussion:
1. What are the implications of the novel's title phrase, the poisonwood bible, particularly in connection with the main characters' lives and the novel's main themes? How important are the circumstances in which the phrase comes into being?

2. How does Kingsolver differentiate among the Price sisters, particularly in terms of their voices? What does each sister reveal about herself and the other three, their relationships, their mother and father, and their lives in Africa? What is the effect of our learning about events and people through the sisters' eyes

3. What is the significance of the Kikongo word nommo and its attendant concepts of being and naming? Are there Christian parallels to the constellation of meanings and beliefs attached to nommo? How do the Price daughters' Christian names and their acquired Kikongo names reflect their personalities and behavior?

4. The sisters refer repeatedly to balance (and, by implication, imbalance). What kinds of balance--including historical, political, and social--emerge as important? Are individual characters associated with specific kinds of balance or imbalance? Do any of the sisters have a final say on the importance of balance?

5. What do we learn about cultural, social, religious, and other differences between Africa and America? To what degree do Orleanna and her daughters come to an understanding of those differences? Do you agree with what you take to be Kingsolver's message concerning such differences?

6. Why do you suppose that Reverend Nathan Price is not given a voice of his own? Do we learn from his wife and daughters enough information to formulate an adequate explanation for his beliefs and behavior? Does such an explanation matter?

7. What differences and similarities are there among Nathan Price's relationship with his family, Tata Ndu's relationship with his people, and the relationship of the Belgian and American authorities with the Congo? Are the novel's political details--both imagined and historical--appropriate?

8. How does Kingsolver present the double themes of captivity and freedom and of love and betrayal? What kinds of captivity and freedom does she explore? What kinds of love and betrayal? What are the causes and consequences of each kind of captivity, freedom, love, and betrayal?

9. At Bikoki Station, in 1965, Leah reflects, "I still know what justice is." Does she? What concept of justice does each member of the Price family and other characters (Anatole, for example) hold? Do you have a sense, by the novel's end, that any true justice has occurred

10. In Book Six, Adah proclaims, "This is the story I believe in . . ." What is that story? Do Rachel and Leah also have stories in which they believe? How would you characterize the philosophies of life at which Adah, Leah, and Rachel arrive? What story do you believe in?

11. At the novel's end, the carved-animal woman in the African market is sure that "There has never been any village on the road past Bulungu," that "There is no such village" as Kilanga. What do you make of this?


I'd love to know.  Anybody, who considered one,some, or all of the publisher's points, in the course of reading the B.K. novel, like to comment on their thoughts on the subject?

[madupont]

caclark   re: was it,#174 ?

I think that what happened was Kingsolver, having gone into Journalism, as a practising journalist, got in the habit of that format without even realizing that it made her less objective about her own "fictional constructions"; fiction as a literary genre by comparison to the rules of journalists.   

In either  case, both present their own difficulties which you realize when you set out to do it.

[Lhoffman]

"Imagine a ruin..." 

Impressive observation.  The sense of doing and undoing is extended into the first paragraph as the forest springs to life causing its own destruction/giving itself life.  It is and it isn't.  And Adah, with her forward/backward way of viewing the world, is and isn't.  Is done and is undone in the jaws of the lion.  Is hemiplegic/nothemiplegic...The Congolese name her for her crooked walk and when she begins to walk upright, that identity is undone. 

And it is Adah who is the most ambivalent about the Congo.

[Lhoffman]

"Orleanna" could be related to the Hebrew "Orli" which means "light is mine.  It isn't biblical. 

To me, the name was suggestive of a large flower that thrives in the climate of the South, more fragile in appearance than in reality.  Perhaps there is even the idea that she/it doesn't transplant well, which is soundly disproved upon removal to a harsher climate.

[Lhoffman]

One interesting aspect of Kingsolver's voicing in PB is her distinctive use of language for each character.  Ruth May speaks like a child, often misunderstanding and misrepeating phrases.  Rachel uses malaprops.  Adah uses wordplay and palindromes.  Leah learns to speak Congolese as well as French.  Methuselah curses.  And, to the Congolese, the most offensive misuse of language is to be found in the reverend's sermons and his insistance that "Tata Jesus is bangala"...poisonwood.

[madupont]

http://tinyurl.com/2n9trx  No Ice Cream Cones In a Heart of Darkness
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
Published: October 16, 1998

http://tinyurl.com/3x8as9  Going Native
By VERLYN KLINKENBORG
Published: October 18, 1998

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobutu_Sese_Seko

 By, Mobutu's Belgian son-in-law, Pierre Janssen, À la cour de Mobutu. Michel Lafon. ISBN 2-84098-332-X

"A year before the Congo's independence he had been head-hunted by the director of the CIA in the country. Two years later he was given the US Legion of Merit by President Kennedy. Then he met George Bush, just before Bush became the head of the CIA and agreed to make Zaire the headquarters for all CIA operations in central Africa.
Mobutu was hooked and absorbed huge quantities of CIA money in return for his services. The Americans used him as an intermediary in channelling money to Jonas Savimbi's UNITA in Angola.

A former head of the CIA in Zaire told Janssen that nearly $25m was sent through Kinshasa to the UNITA rebels. Mobutu made sure to take his cut."

[madupont]

I love this quote best, which Klinkenborg uses for his review:

"The Congolese are not savages who need saving, the Price women find, and there is nothing passive in their tolerance of missionaries. They take the Americans' message literally -- elections are good, Jesus too -- and expose its contradictions by holding an election in church to decide whether or not Jesus shall be the personal god of Kilanga. Jesus loses. "

[madupont]

Reader 5232, re"#181

"The last name is certainly self evident".  I noticed immediately that Kingsolver resolves character names as Charles Dickens did.   I have many times gone, "Drats!" because often people have names so appropo to their character that when you want to fictionalize a story that involves them, you are at a loss when their original real names are so much better than anything you can think up and of course you have to think up something as you can't go around publishing their real-names.

[weezo]

I am not a great consumer of fiction, and the Posionwood Biblee was a departure from my usual reading, but I felt it was a good read and woth my time. I am not interested in figuring out how she chose the name of the daughers and mother, but am more concerned with how she differetiated the voices of each in accordance with their ages and personalities That is what impressed me.

I am not one who reads deeply into a work of fiction - I like it and it sticks with me,or it doesn't. I have always found that too much introspection of a fiction book is just a means of folks to gild the lily, or take the sap our of it's fragile beauty.

I like Poisonwood Bible because whe preseted real and believable female characters and put the male characters a bit behind the scene, perhspa stereotyped in their actions. She is a writer of wome's deep philosophical interpretations and actions, unique in that they are sisters who are close in childhoos and branch out as intivituals as adults. She does not present her women as stereotypes, and for that she goes up a notch in my thinking.

[madupont]

I  have had just two thoughts about Orleanna,the name, because Kingsolver "Implies" when she gives a person a name.

First I thought of Janet Fitch's, White Oleander, which is about the poisonous relationship of Mother/Daughter, but that came out a year after Kingsolver's family saga.

Second, David Mamet's play, in 1992, Oleanna, about the difference of opinion between a  young woman and a man who is an educator and the issue is whether or not he molested her and whose word counts?

So it really depends whether Kingsolver implies that the Reverend missionary molested his wife Orleanna into this role of taking to the jungle after bearing all those kids.  What were those words again, in which one of the reviews, where she looks back on her marriage as ....?

If Kingsolver saw this play -- it seems to me it actually showed up on tv, and heard the tension in it that I heard, she might have found it strangely attractive as more than a thought to describe some kinds of relationships between women and men that are so distressful that there is no communication other than complete misunderstanding of what is being said either way.

In this particular case, it is written by a man, so you might say, he had the last word.

Even if you opt for, well he only sexually harrassed her; did Orleanna's husband harrass her into going to the Congo?

The harrassment that I have in mind is like the harrassment of:" we shall go down to the water and have the baptism...".

Which of course is why I did not opt to read what I had been told was there and knew was there.

I may be able to watch Apocolypto after telling myself it is only a movie(knowing historically this is a matter of fact) but in no way is this like sitting on an airliner and pretending I am not flying.

Other than that, I will keep looking around to spot Orleanna somewhere in the oleander bushes before she kills her lover in an injudicious moment thus leaving her daughter behind while having to do time. This obviously was something Kingsolver's Orleanna was not about to do, leave the kids behind, either way; or I can stand outside the building on campus and look at my watch to see what time Oleanna goes into the professor's office and what time she comes out again, after which he will say it was all a misunderstanding.  Because I've never run into that name, Orleanna, before now.

[Donotremove]

Oh wonderful joy.  All of you have such interesting takes on this book (PB).  I'm having a much better time reading your comments than I did reading the book.  A note: In an interview Kingsolver did that I read while Googling, Kingsolver said, "It's true that I want to change the world."

[madupont]

"Imagine a ruin so strange it must never have happened." and  'it must never have happened' and I start thinking about the course of the family and its curiously non-visual dissolution.'  Reader5232 re:#177

but this may be what I had in mind "What were those words again, in which one of the reviews, where she looks back on her marriage as ....?"

[madupont]

Reader5232, re: #193

"The children are portrayed initially as blossoms (paragraph 2).  They are the four 'pale, doomed blossoms' bound to appeal to our sympathies." 

Yes, of course they are, surrounded as they are by Congo Negre.   I have too many years of conditioning to feel overly much about that, because when I sat down with a young person going off to college in 1959, or rather had gone off to a totally white environment to study psychology,I pointed out Fanon and the fact that psychology is cultural (Black Faces, White Masks).  There is obviously reason to be more concerned about the indigenous people who are the majority and live with these conditions forever.


Whereas, re:#192 "The jungle is life, but it is death too.  The jungle is both these things combined and ever combining."
"life and death [interwoven]within the context of the jungle"

And in #194,"Many of the verbs are peculiar to motion (or combat), yet they appear in the description of a setting one might justifiably expect to be far more quiescent.

Believe it or not, Mel Gibson cinematically made this epically experience, in: Apocolypto
Often by making how clear, absolutely an act causes a reaction to rebalance because it is the Law of Nature. When his people, who refer to the forest as their forest(meaning belonging to their tribe, and which may look more of a jungle to you, as they know what everything is used for)  are first seen by you, they are hunting in a group whom you soon realize are ranked socially by their age and experience and directed by the eldest; and, when they chase and hunt and trap a tapir, you notice the trap springs and throws off a length of humerous bone, from the pelvic socket of a large animal, that was used as just part of the material suitable for the device, functionally, and the net drops, but it is not until later when they dislodge the animal from the impaling device that you begin to see how it actually works.  Needless to say, the functionability of recycled bone, that allows them to kill a large dangerous animal that will provide them with food, lets you know (as the outsider) where you are immediately!

You are now involved with a family group, when they encounter strangers who are very bedraggled and on the move, the procedure of interaction to ascertain  (who is there?), becomes "What do you want?, then silence, then again a very firm,"What do you want?". As this other group passes onward, the elder strongly tells his son, what you have just seen is "Fear", "Do not allow Fear in or allow it to take over you".  Nevertheless, this encounter brings on nightmares typical of anywhere in the world where the gruesome remains in our psyche; and they are foretelling prophetic nightmares.

The family of tribesmen in their turn are trapped like animals, enslaved to be transported, and like the tapir to be killed to feed "pure energy" so that the eclipse of the Sun moves off until it eventually will threaten darkness about five years from now in accord with the Mayan calender when the alignment of two different axials conjoin to tilt the earth off course. Even those who survive by a coincidence of timing are not free to go but must play the game which as we know was played in a ball-court by athlete-warriors as contenders. Like Children's games, the winner is he who can manage to run away and escape  while being the running target, and stay ahead of the pack of hunters in pursuit because he got away from their first volleys. He has to pit all his "forest" skills against their pursuit, and in every case success depends on the fact that it is "his forest" in which he has grown up his entire life, not threatening anybody else.

By analogy, the little family of pale blossoming missionaries has little likelihood of survival in the test to make inroads; but, I understand that they persist with another generation,etc.  during some of the most startling periods of Africa's history. 

Gibson's forest dwellers in the Peninsula of Central America survive the test of, well, Survival and do it with additional new life. Yet, on a peaceful morning, they look out from under the shadow of the trees toward the water and see strange large winged butterflies bobbing upon the water while a small  open vessel of men standing in armor moves toward them across the water. The hero's wife asks, Shall we let them know we are here?.  He says the equivalent of: Of course not, silly, we will go into our forest.

[madupont]

Did you mean to say your Latin verbs aren't ovulating?

We have too many eggs for our baskets in either case,wrestling with Ovid or running out of the jungle.(excuse me, "forest"). Now, I'm wondering when ever did the concept "jungle" fall into disrepute, to discribe a tropical forest?