Steve said the other day that I am voracious reader. That is both true and not true. I think I do read every day, but it takes me a very long time to read. He explained that he meant I always have a book going; I may not read two or three books at once, as he does, but I’m always reading something. If that is voracious, then I agree. However, if a voracious reader greedily devours books, then I can’t agree. I savor them. I like to roll their words around on my tongue and taste them.

I have just finished The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver. I cannot tell you how long I’ve been reading it. It seems like months. But this is not a book that you can read casually. You need to devote what time you have to it. Finally, you need to devote time you don’t have to it. I asked Steve if he could remember reading a book and thinking it was destined to be a Classic. By that, I mean we will be studying it in schools. It will survive the ages as an important work of literature. It will be To Kill a Mockingbird, Moby-Dick, or, perhaps most appropriately, Heart of Darkness, for it is to that last which it owes the most. I must admit that I don’t often reach the conclusion while I’m reading a contemporary novel that it will reach the status of the great novels of the past and become a part of the fabric of our culture. I know this novel will. It is deep and rich. It is complex. I think every American should read it. Since it was published in 1998, it may take some time before the educational establishment recognizes this book for what it is, but mark my words: this book will be required reading for your children, if it isn’t for you.

The back-of-the-book jacket blurb is not such a bad place to start:

The Poisonwood Bible is a story 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 out that all of it — from garden seeds to Scripture — is calamitously transformed on African soil. What follows is a suspenseful epic of one family’s tragic undoing and remarkable reconstruction over the course of three decades in postcolonial Africa. The novel is set against one of the most dramatic political chronicles of the twentieth century: the Congo’s fight for independence from Belgium, the murder of its first elected prime minister, the CIA coup to install his replacement, and the insidious progress of a world economic order that robs the fledgling African nation of its autonomy. Taking its place alongside the classic words of postcolonial literature, this ambitious novel establishes Kingsolver as one of the most thoughtful and daring of modern writers.

Kingsolver has posted an excerpt on her website. It will give you a flavor for the rich poetry of her prose. So many sentences in this book I read several times in order to truly taste them, let them roll over my tongue. The descriptions are lavish: I had no trouble picturing the settings, from the village of Kilanga, to Kinshasa; from the Equatorial Hotel in the French Congo to Sanderling Island, Georgia.

Nathan leads his family from Bethlehem, Georgia (which I had NO trouble picturing since I used to live maybe five miles from Bethlehem in Winder) to the Belgian Congo, which became Zaire from 1971-1997. If I had one problem with the book, it was the simple reference to Bethlehem High School. It bothered me for a time until I realized why Kingsolver invented the school. As far as I know, such a school never existed. I student-taught at the only high school in Barrow County at the time, Winder-Barrow High School, in 1996-1997. Since that time, another high school has been built. I did some research, and I cannot determine if there was a Bethlehem High School in the late 1950s. There doesn’t seem to be any information to indicate that there was. However, I understand why Kingsolver invented one. Not to invent Bethlehem High School would have distracted her readers unfamiliar with Barrow County, Georgia. I am sure it isn’t that she didn’t do her research — that she plainly does. I think she is judicious about which details are important, and explaining that the girls went to Winder-Barrow High School and why instead of a fictional Bethlehem High School would have taken up space on a trifle.

Of the novel, Kingsolver said:

England has a strong tradition of postcolonial literature but here in the U.S., we can hardly even say the word “postcolonial.” We like to think we’re the good guys. So we persist in our denial, and live with a legacy of exploitation and racial arrogance that continues to tear people apart, in a million large and small ways.

This story, Kingsolver maintains, is an allegory. I need to file that away for the next time my students ask me if writers mean to use symbolism or we’re just inventing stuff the writer didn’t intend. Nathan Price and his daughters each represent different responses to America’s role in raping the Congo. Kingsolver says that Nathan represents the “historical attitude”:

The Prices carry into Africa a whole collection of beliefs about religion, technology, health, politics, and agriculture, just as industrialized nations have often carried these beliefs into the developing world in an extremely arrogant way, very certain of being right (even to the point of destroying local ideas, religion and leadership), even when it turns out-as it does in this novel-that those attitudes are useless, offensive or inapplicable. I knew most of my readers would feel unsympathetic to that arrogance. We didn’t make the awful decisions our government imposed on Africa. We didn’t call for the assassination of Lumumba; we hardly even knew about it. We just inherited these decisions, and now have to reconcile them with our sense of who we are. We’re the captive witnesses, just like the wife and daughters of Nathan Price. Male or female, we are not like him. That is what I wanted to write about. We got pulled into this mess but we don’t identify with that arrogant voice. It’s not his story. It’s ours.

Each of the female characters that tell the story represent different reactions or responses to America’s involvement in the Congo’s struggles for independence:

The four sisters and Orleanna represent five separate philosophical positions, not just in their family but also in my political examination of the world. This novel is asking, basically, “What did we do to Africa, and how do we feel about it?” It’s a huge question. I’d be insulting my readers to offer only one answer. There are a hundred different answers along a continuum, with absolute paralyzing guilt on the one end and “What, me worry? I didn’t do it!” on the other end. Orleanna is the paralyzed one here, and Rachel is “What, me worry?” Leah, Adah, and Ruth May take other positions in between, having to do with social activism, empirical analysis, and spirituality, respectively.

It is in the climactic moment when Price blood is shed that each character takes her role. Rachel is maddening in her refusal to be changed by all that she has seen, but she still has some keen insights to offer. Her name means “ewe,” and like so many of the sheep in America, she denies we are complicit in any wrongdoing. Leah is outraged upon awakening to the injustices of the world and wants to change them. Adah is the scientist, examining the evidence with an empirical eye, if not an entirely cold eye. Orleanna begs forgiveness — before she was paralyzed to stop — to question Nathan or simply to leave him, ensuring her children’s safety. She is unable to act until it is “too late.” Ruth May is unwavering in her faith in her father and his religion: “Whither thou goest, I will go” — just like the biblical Ruth for which she is named.

Just like Orleanna, I dreaded the climactic death that would set the Prices’ feet in motion upon their particular paths. It was as inevitable as the political events it paralleled. Now, like Orleanna, I find myself wanting forgiveness.

The Bean Trees, the last book by Kingsolver which I read and reviewed, was also political. Kingsolver wants us to think and challenge ourselves and our government.

This story came from passion, culpability, anger and a long-term fascination with Africa, and my belief that what happened to the Congo is one of the most important political parables of our century. I’ve been thinking about this story for as long as I’ve had eyes and a heart. I live in a countery [sic] that has done awful things, all over the world, in my name. You can’t miss that. I didn’t make those decisions, but I have benefited from them materially. I live in a society that grew prosperous from exploiting others.

Kingsolver said she hoped the book would make her readers laugh a little at times, cry at others. I did this and more. It really made me think. This novel is so dense I cannot possibly compress it for you. You just need to read it.

Note: Kingsolver quotes were all taken from her website.

I have just completed Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston. If you haven’t read the book and plan to, I warn you that there are some spoilers here.

Alice Walker, a great admirer of Hurston’s (and responsible for the revival of interest in Hurston since the 1975 publication of her article “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston” in Ms. magazine, which can be read in In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose) said of this novel: “There is no book more important to me than this one.”

I did enjoy the book a great deal, but I cannot say it was impossible to put down. It made me laugh out loud, and it made me tear up, but it did not resonate with me as it did Walker.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. said that “Hurston became a metaphor for the black woman writer’s search for tradition.” I can see the influence of Hurston strongly in Alice Walker’s short story “Everyday Use.” Hurston was a student of anthropology, and she brings that to bear in her fiction as well. It really gives the novel a particularly genuine feeling.

Janie is the main character. The novel begins as she returns to town. The old gossips watching her on the porch wonder why she’s back, and did that no-account Tea Cake she ran off with take all her money, leaving her no option but to return to town in shame? Her friend Pheoby (spelled as Hurston did) comes over to talk to Janie and find out what happened. What enfolds is the entire story of Janie’s self-discovery. It begins like this:

Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men.

Janie was abandoned by her parents and raised by her grandmother, who wanted her to choose a secure man to marry. Her grandmother didn’t listen to what Janie wanted. She silenced her dreams.

She saw a dust-bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom; the thousand sister calyxes arch to meet the love embrace and the ecstatic shiver of the tree from root to tiniest branch creaming in every blossom and frothing with delight. So this was a marriage!

This was, I think, what Janie would have liked to have had from marriage. She did as her grandmother asked, but felt empty. When Jody Starks wandered down the road, he looked like adventure. He took her to Eatonville, one of the all-black towns established in the early part of the 1900s, and so asserted himself among the townsfolk that he was quickly elected mayor. Once this happened, he silenced Janie with intimidation, verbal abuse, and physical abuse. She grows to despise him for suppressing her:

“Ah knowed you wasn’t gointuh lissen tuh me. You changes everything but nothin’ don’t change you — not even death. But Ah ain’t goin’ outa here and Ah ain’t gointuh hush. Naw, you gointuh listen tuh me one time befo’ you die. Have yo’ way all yo’ life, trample and mash down and then die ruther than tuh let yo’self heah ’bout it. Listen, Jody, you ain’t de Jody Ah run off down de road wid. You’se whut’s left after he died. Ah run off tuh keep house wid you in uh wonderful way. But you wasn’t satisfied wid me de way Ah was. Naw! Mah own mind had tuh be squeezed and crowded out tuh make room for yours in me.”

After Jody’s death, she relished her new freedom for a while when along came Tea Cake Woods, whose deadly eyes captivated Janie despite the fact that he was much younger than she. She found herself falling in love, but Tea Cake was different from her grandmother, her first husband, and Jody: he treated her as an equal (most of the time) and valued her voice. He encouraged her to be herself, because he loved the real Janie. With the exception of $200 he spent when they first married, he never appropriated any of her money — and he always referred to it as her money. He was extremely likable and charming. He respects Janie as a person and an individual.

After Janie finds her voice, she learns how to use it. According to Mary Helen Washington, at the 1979 MLA convention, Robert Stepto of Yale “raised the issue that has become one of the most highly controversial and hotly contested aspects of the novel: whether or not Janie is able to achieve her voice in Their Eyes.” Stepto brought up the courtroom scene near the end of the book, which is told through the narrator. Janie is “curiously silent in this scene.” It’s a pivotal scene in her life. She must prove to the jury, in her mind, that she had honestly loved Tea Cake:

It was not death she feared. It was misunderstanding. If they made a verdict that she didn’t want Tea Cake and wanted him dead, then that was a real sin and a shame. It was worse than murder.

The narrator (and Janie) are silent, too, after Tea Cake beats Janie for the one and only time. Stepto put forth the idea that “the frame story in which Janie speaks to Pheoby only creates the illusion that Janie has found her voice, that Hurston’s insistence on telling Janie’s story in the third person undercuts her power as speaker.” Alice Walker, at that same conference, countered that this was not so. Janie had not only found her voice, but she had also learned, as Walker put it “that women did not have to speak when men thought they should, that they would choose when and where they wish to speak because while many women had found their own voices, they also knew when it was better not to use it.” Mary Helen Washington calls Walker’s defense the “earliest feminist reading of voice in Their Eyes.” In this way, Janie’s speech and silence become a means of learning who she is and becoming empowered as a person after having been suppressed for most of her life.

I was troubled that Hurston chose to put such an emphasis on romantic love as a means of personal realization. After all, I thought, if Janie is “finding her voice,” why does she need Tea Cake to show it to her? Actually, after thinking about it, one realizes that for most people, relationships are a necessary component of fulfillment. And sometimes, someone believing in you and encouraging you is what it takes. I believe that Janie’s dream of marriage (the bee and the flowers) was achieved with Tea Cake. When Janie is alone at the end, while you know she misses Tea Cake, she also seems at peace with being alone. By the end of the novel, she isn’t worried about those old gossips on the porch:

“Now, Pheoby, don’t feel too mean wid de rest of ’em ’cause dey’s parched up from not knowin’ things. Dem meatskins is got tuh rattle tuh make out they’s alive. Let ’em consolate theyselves wid talk. ‘Course, talkin’ don’t amount tuh uh hill uh beans when yuh can’t do nothin’ else. And listenin’ tuh dat kind uh talk is jus’ lak openin’ yo’ mouth and lettin’ de moon shine down yo’ throat. It’s uh known fact, Pheoby, you got tuh go there tuh know there. Yo’ papa and yo’ mama and nobody else can’t tell yuh and show yuh. Two things everybody’s got tuh do fuh theyselves. They got tuh go tuh God, and they got tuh find out about livin’ fuh theyselves.”

Can you tell yet that I am teaching this book next year?

Anyway, I won’t delve into the symbolism, etc. I am trying to figure out why this novel didn’t speak to me as it did Walker. I asked myself if it was because I’m not black. While that’s possible, one also has to consider the fact that racism is not really a theme of the novel. Of course Janie encounters it, but it’s not the focus. This isn’t a story about a “black quest” so much as “human quest.” I really did enjoy it, but it didn’t affect me the way I expected it to. Still, I have to recommend it highly. I very much enjoyed the contrast between the literary prose of the narrator and the dialect of the characters. It was very well written that way.

I ordered Tracy Chevalier’s book The Lady and the Unicorn from Amazon after traveling down a winding path of searches for historical research/detective fiction similar to The Da Vinci Code or The Rule of Four, but better because all the pieces of great writing would be tied in together. I still haven’t read The Lady and the Unicorn, but it is my next project.

Where am I going with this? I was at Kroger the other day, and a book display caught my eye. I saw a book by Tracy Chevalier that caught my eye. I thought to myself, didn’t she write that book I ordered? This book was called The Virgin Blue. I picked it up and looked at the synopsis on the back cover:

Meet Ella Turner and Isabelle du Moulin — two women born centuries apart, yet tied together by a haunting family legacy. When Ella and her husband move to a small town in France, Ella hopes to brush up on her French, qualify to practice as a midwife, and start working on a family of her own. Village life turns out to be less idyllic than she expected, however, and a strange series of events propels her on a quest to uncover her family’s French ancestry. As the novel unfolds — alternating between Ella’s story and that of Isabelle du Moulin four hundred years earlier — a common thread emerges that pulls the lives of the two women together in a most mysterious way.

Okay, that sounded like something I’d like. And it was on sale for several dollars off the suggested retail price. So I put it in my cart and went in search of the milk. I didn’t know it then, but I think that might have been a key moment in my life — my decision to buy that book. After absorbing myself in the book for a few days, looking at the author’s website, and thinking about the ways stories come to us, I realize that I really do want to write more. I do have more stories in me. I just need to sit down, think, and make time to get them out.

The Virgin Blue is Chevalier’s first book. After the success of Girl with a Pearl Earring, I think it was republished in the UK and published for the first time in America. I keep thinking of the threads that tie families together. It has to be more than sharing a similar hair color or nose shape. I think memories are passed down, too. I think I have some of them. I think that might be why some people believe in reincarnation. They don’t know how to explain these flashes of memories or visions about life in another time that seem so clear that it might be confused with their own memories.

The characters in this movie were well-drawn. I liked them all, except for the ones Chevalier didn’t mean for us to like (Etienne Tournier, the awful husband of Isabelle du Moulin). I really liked the storyline, too. Despite shifting between time periods, it was never hard to follow or jerky, and there were often parallels in the two stories. Some people who reviewed Chevalier’s books don’t like the coincidences. I do. I think it speaks to the serendipity of our lives. The twists and turns that take us in unexpected directions. You can play this what-if game. Each person we meet and place we go is like a tapestry we weave into our lives. Pull out a thread and it falls apart. If the color was different, our lives would look totally different. That, to me, is what this book is about. The way we construct ourselves, built on the foundation of our family history. As Faulkner so astutely noted, “The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.”

I finished Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood by Rebecca Wells this evening. It was a good read, if not a fantastic one. I felt that the narrative had some holes in it. Threads were taken up, dropped, and not mentioned again. The writer hinted, but not strongly enough, that Connor looked like Jack Whitman. I suppose by extension that means that Sidda will have the life-long love her mother missed? I wasn’t always happy with the poetic way the characters thought. It didn’t seem natural to me. An example: “Okay,” Vivi said, and sank down into the massage table. This table, she told herself, is held up by the floor, which is held up by the building, which is sunk deep into the earth, which is my home” (Chapter 22, p. 242). Maybe I’m too prosaic, but I don’t think like that. Sure, use poetry in description, but in the way characters think? It struck me as false. This seemed to be Wells’ favorite way of ending a chapter, by the way. I didn’t feel fulfilled by the ending, and I can’t put my finger on why.

I loved the Ya-Yas. After reading the book, I wished desperately for friends like that. I don’t have any close friends. I did as a child, but I moved. Moving makes you lose friends, I think. It’s just too hard to keep up, especially when the other party won’t work at it, too. I’ve been on both sides of that fence. My moving around so much cost me a great deal. My life would be so different. But then, who is to say that would mean it would be better?

I can remember having girlfriends. I can remember sleeping in Rebecca’s bed, so high off the floor that I had to climb into it. I can remember looking up into the eyes of James Dean on the wall behind her bed. Then she dropped me right before my wedding, and I had to scramble to find a bridesmaid at the last minute who could wear the dress my grandmother made to fit Rebecca.

Darcy and I were sisters. We stayed at each other’s houses. We shared things. I thought we’d always be best friends. I have not had another friendship like the one I shared with her. We loved each other. I moved, and she wrote me back only a handful of times over the 18 years that has passed since then.

Cheryl and I were friends my senior year in high school. We just decided we’d be best friends, and that was that. We rode around in cars with other friends, like Stephanie and Mary Jo, and we laughed.

Jenni has perhaps been the best correspondent of all of my friends. We have become closer in our absence from each other than we were when we lived in the same neighborhood and went to school together. Jenni is my anchor to my home.

But I don’t have friends like the Ya-Yas. And it makes me sad to realize, truthfully, that I never will. Maybe most people don’t, which is why this book resonates with people so strongly. It was one of the things that people liked about Friends, I think. There is this group of people, and they all love each other and would do anything for each other. They’re like family. But they’re not blood relations. They’re just friends. Reading this book and watching the Friends finale repeat last night (I didn’t catch it last week) made me realize I have friend-shaped holes in my heart. You can live with friend-shaped holes. You can even be happy. But the holes are still there, and you aren’t quite complete.

I will be releasing this book, but I am trying to see if anyone who has it on their BookCrossing Wish List wants my copy before I just cut it loose in the wild.