Poisonwood Bible (eBook)

Barbara Kingsolver (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2008 | 1. Auflage
640 Seiten
Faber & Faber (Verlag)
978-0-571-24621-2 (ISBN)

Infos

**NOW INCLUDING THE FIRST CHAPTER OF DEMON COPPERHEAD** TWICE WINNER OF THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER FOUR MILLION COPIES SOLD WORLDWIDE WITH OVER 7,000 5* REVIEWS 'A masterpiece.' MARIAN KEYES 'Breathtaking.' SUNDAY TIMES 'Beautiful.' INDEPENDENT An international bestseller and a modern classic, this suspenseful epic of one family's tragic undoing and their remarkable reconstruction has been read, adored and shared by millions around the world. This story is told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them everything they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it - from garden seeds to Scripture - is calamitously transformed on African soil. Readers loved The Poisonwood Bible: 'This remains one of the most fascinating books I have ever read.' ????? 'I felt every emotion under the sky with this book.' ????? 'Riveting.' ????? 'This novel left a lasting - YEARS LASTING - impression.' ????? 'This is one of those books that stands the test of time and is worth rereading.' ?????

Barbara Kingsolver is the global prize-winning and bestselling author of novels including Unsheltered, Flight Behaviour, The Lacuna, The Poisonwood Bible and Demon Copperhead, as well as books of poetry, essays and creative non-fiction. Her work of narrative non-fiction is the influential bestseller Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. Kingsolver's work has been translated into more than thirty languages and has earned literary awards and a devoted readership at home and abroad. She has won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction and is the first author to win the Women's Prize twice. Barbara lives with her family on a farm in southern Appalachia.

Rezensionen

Brilliant. Now, that is no sort of measured critical reaction but it is how I feel I must begin - with a one-word shout of praise for this superb epic novel. [Barbara Kingsolver] says she spent thirty years waiting for the wisdom and maturity to dare to write this book. Never has such patience been more rewarded.

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.

Of daunting material she has wrought a rich, readable saga. Both provocative and affecting.

Barbara Kingsolver's brilliantly realised epic of one family's journey to the heart of darkness. A richly poetic and often harrowingly beautiful saga that does not falter for a moment.

Barbara Kingsolver's prose is both precise and lyrical, soaring at times like the sermons she parodies or inverts, at others immediate and sensuous - particularly in the descriptions of African village life. Her art is proof of the way today's fiction is traversing new boundaries in its ability to engage with conflicting realities.

The Poisonwood Bible shows what happens when one of the most talented writers of our generation comes to maturity. [It] ranks with the most ambitious works of postcolonial literature and it should at last establish Kingsolver's reputation in Europe as one of America's most gifted novelists.

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

Fully realized, richly embroidered, triumphant.

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

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.

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

Textauszug

 

Imagine a ruin so strange it must never have happened. 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.

Away down below now, single file on the path, comes a woman with four girls in tow, all of them in shirtwaist dresses. Seen from above this way they are pale, doomed blossoms, bound to appeal to your sympathies. Be careful. Later on you’ll have to decide what sympathy they deserve. The mother especially – watch how she leads them on, pale-eyed, deliberate. Her dark hair is tied in a ragged lace handkerchief, and her curved jawbone is lit with large, false-pearl earrings, as if these headlamps from another world might show the way. The daughters march behind her, four girls compressed in bodies as tight as bow­strings, each one tensed to fire off a woman’s heart on a different path to glory or damnation. Even now they resist affinity like cats in a bag: two blondes – the one short and fierce, the other tall and imperious – flanked by matched brunettes like bookends, the forward twin leading hungrily while the rear one sweeps the ground in a rhythmic limp. But gamely enough they climb together over logs of rank decay that have fallen across the path. The mother waves a graceful hand in front of her as she leads the way, parting curtain after curtain of spiders’ webs. She appears to be conducting a symphony. Behind them the curtain closes. The spiders return to their killing ways.

At the stream bank she sets out their drear picnic, which is only dense, crumbling bread daubed with crushed pea­nuts and slices of bitter plantain. After months of modest hunger the children now forget to complain about food. Silently they swallow, shake off the crumbs, and drift downstream for a swim in faster water. The mother is left alone in the cove of enormous trees at the edge of a pool. This place is as familiar to her now as a living room in the house of a life she never bargained for. She rests uneasily in the silence, watching ants boil darkly over the crumbs of what seemed, to begin with, an impossibly meager lunch. Always there is someone hungrier than her own children. She tucks her dress under her legs and inspects her poor, featherless feet in their grass nest at the water’s edge – twin birds helpless to fly out of there, away from the disaster she knows is coming. She could lose everything: herself, or worse, her children. Worst of all: you, her only secret. Her favorite. How could a mother live with herself to blame?

She is inhumanly alone. And then, all at once, she isn’t. A beautiful animal stands on the other side of the water. They look up from their lives, woman and animal, amazed to find themselves in the same place. He freezes, inspecting her with his black-tipped ears. His back is purplish-brown in the dim light, sloping downward from the gentle hump of his shoulders. The forest’s shadows fall into lines across his white-striped flanks. His stiff forelegs splay out to the sides like stilts, for he’s been caught in the act of reaching down for water. Without taking his eyes from her, he twitches a little at the knee, then the shoulder, where a fly devils him. Finally he surrenders his surprise, looks away, and drinks. She can feel the touch of his long, curled tongue on the water’s skin, as if he were lapping from her hand. His head bobs gently, nodding small, velvet horns lit white from behind like new leaves.

It lasted just a moment, whatever that is. One held breath? An ant’s afternoon? It was brief, I can promise that much, for although it’s been many years now since my children ruled my life, a mother recalls the measure of the silences. I never had more than five minutes’ peace unbroken. I was that woman on the stream bank, of course. Orleanna Price, Southern Baptist by marriage, mother of children living and dead. That one time and no other the okapi came to the stream, and I was the only one to see it.

I didn’t know any name for what I’d seen until some years afterward in Atlanta, when I attempted briefly to consecrate myself in the public library, believing every crack in my soul could be chinked with a book. I read that the male okapi is smaller than the female, and more shy, and that hardly anything else is known about them. For hundreds of years people in the Congo Valley spoke of this beautiful, strange beast. When European explorers got wind of it, they declared it legendary: a unicorn. Another fabulous tale from the dark domain of poison-tipped arrows and bone-pierced lips. Then, in the 1920s, when elsewhere in the world the menfolk took a break between wars to perfect the airplane and the automobile, a white man finally did set eyes on the okapi. I can picture him spying on it with binoculars, raising up the cross-haired rifle sight, taking it for his own. A family of them now reside in the New York Museum of Natural History, dead and stuffed, with standoffish glass eyes. And so the okapi is now by scientific account a real animal. Merely real, not legend. Some manner of beast, a horseish gazelle, relative of the giraffe.

Oh, but I know better and so do you. Those glassy museum stares have got nothing on you, my uncaptured favorite child, wild as the day is long. Your bright eyes bear down on me without cease, on behalf of the quick and the dead. Take your place, then. Look at what happened from every side and consider all the other ways it could have gone. Consider, even, an Africa unconquered altogether. Imagine those first Portuguese adventurers approaching the shore, spying on the jungle’s edge through their fitted brass lenses. Imagine that by some miracle of dread or reverence they lowered their spyglasses, turned, set their riggings, sailed on. Imagine all who came after doing the same. What would that Africa be now? All I can think of is the other okapi, the one they used to believe in. A unicorn that could look you in the eye.

*

In the year of our Lord 1960 a monkey barreled through space in an American rocket; a Kennedy boy took the chair out from under a fatherly general named Ike; and the whole world turned on an axis called the Congo. The mon­key sailed right overhead, and on a more earthly plane men in locked rooms bargained for the Congo’s treasure. But I was there. Right on the head of that pin.

I had washed up there on the riptide of my husband’s confidence and the undertow of my children’s needs. That’s my excuse, yet none of them really needed me all that much. My firstborn and my baby both tried to shed me like a husk from the start, and the twins came with a fine interior sight with which they could simply look past me at everything more interesting. And my husband, why, hell hath no fury like a Baptist preacher. I married a man who could never love me, probably. It would have trespassed on his devotion to all mankind. I remained his wife because it was one thing I was able to do each day. My daughters would say: You see, Mother, you had no life of your own.

They have no idea. One has only a life of one’s own.

I’ve seen things they’ll never know about. I saw a family of weaver birds work together for months on a nest that became such a monstrous lump of sticks and progeny and nonsense that finally it brought their whole tree thundering down. I didn’t speak of it to my husband or children, not ever. So you see. I have my own story, and increasingly in my old age it weighs on me. Now that every turn in the weather whistles an ache through my bones, I stir in bed and the memories rise out of me like a buzz of flies from a carcass. I crave to be rid of them, but find myself being careful, too, choosing which ones to let out into the light. I want you to find me innocent. As much as I’ve craved your lost, small body, I want you now to stop stroking my inner arms at night with your fingertips. Stop whispering. I’ll live or die on the strength of your judgment, but first let me say who I am. Let me claim that Africa and I kept company for a while and then parted ways, as if we were both party to relations with a failed outcome. Or say I was afflicted with Africa like a bout of a rare disease, from which I have not managed a full recovery. Maybe I’ll even confess the truth, that I rode in with the horsemen and beheld the apoca­lypse, but still I’ll insist I was only a captive witness. What is the conqueror’s wife, if not a conquest herself? For that matter, what is he? When he rides in to vanquish the untouched tribes, don’t you think they fall down with desire before those sky-colored eyes? And itch for a turn with those horses, and those guns? That’s what we yell back at history, always, always. It wasn’t just me; there were crimes strewn six ways to Sunday, and I had my...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 4.9.2008
• Verlagsort: London
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Romane / Erzählungen
• Schlagworte: baileys prize winner • Barbara Kingsolver new book • bernardine evaristo delia owens margaret atwood • books for women best seller books 2021 baileys prize winner booker prize winner women's prize for fiction • Demon Copperhead • Heart of Darkness • kate chopin the awakening • Missionary novel • new barbara kingsolver novel unsheltered how to fly kent haruf plainsong our souls at night • new Chimamanda novel • new zadie smith novel • obama oprah's book club reese witherspoon bookclub shortlisted • penguin classics great literature books that shaped our world • prodigal summer animal dreams flight behaviour the lacuna • victoria hislop monique roffey kate atkinson rohinton mistry betty smith arundhati roy jung chang min jin lee jeffrey eugenides sue monk kidd chimamanda ngozi adichie
• ISBN-10: 0-571-24621-4 / 0571246214
• ISBN-13: 978-0-571-24621-2 / 9780571246212