Barbara Kingsolver
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| The Poisonwood Bible
- Barbara
Kingsolver Review by Hasmita Chander I had seen the name Barbara Kingsolver flitting about here and there on the Internet and each time I took note of it. Then I saw her essay in Orion, the magazine on people and nature. I looked up her work on Amazon.com and found that she'd written some books, one of which was called The Poisonwood Bible. The name intrigued me and it sat down firmly in a prominent fold of my brain. That's how it stuck out a foot and tripped my eyes when I went to a good bookshop and passed the title. I returned to the paperback. The Poisonwood Bible. I read the back of it and the first few paragraphs. This: "First, picture the forest. I want you to be its conscience, the eyes in the trees. The trees are columns of slick, brindled bark like muscular animals overgrown beyond all reason. Every space is filled with life: delicate, poisonous frogs war-painted like skeletons, clutched in copulation, secreting their precious eggs onto dripping leaves. Vines strangling their own kin in the everlasting wrestle for sunlight. The breathing of monkeys. A glide of snake belly on branch. A single-file army of ants biting a mammoth tree into uniform grains and hauling it down to the dark for their ravenous queen. And, in reply, a choir of seedlings arching their necks out of rotted tree stumps, sucking life out of death. This forest eats itself and lives forever." I wasn't going to miss reading the work of a writer who could make me breathe the African jungle while I was merely crouching in an air-conditioned bookstore in a busy city, all within a minute. Moreover, I love nature, and am drawn to jungles, where life is about more than what-to-achieve-by-age-60. And am I glad that name stuck in my head. This book is tremendous in its power to communicate the big things in life by showing how it affects one family. Big things like politics, freedom struggles, poverty, the ecosystem, religion, history and language. Don't get put off by these complex words--by the time you're through with this book, you'll know about them without even noticing you've learnt. And you'll care. You'll often find tears in your eyes, sometimes streaming down your cheeks, not just from the profound wisdom and depth of feeling, but also from laughter. Barbara Kingsolver makes you clutch your stomach, laughing, just as she makes you think, and understand things you wanted to know about but never could. This definitely belongs to my shelf of Favourite Books.
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