A Lot of Crosses to Bear
Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible, 1998
Kingsolver's novels are like symphonies that keep playing in your head long after they are finished. Say whatever you want about her style (which can be overly poetic sometimes), there's no denying the rigorous research she puts behind her stories and the life she blows so easily into her characters. She has an axe to grind with the way politics and religion (specially the ones originated in the U.S.) smash human life, and she's not afraid to put her characters through hell and brimstone for the sake of exposing the 20th Century's forgotten crimes in Africa. (If she's not careful though, Glenn Beck will be calling her a commie bastard very soon.)
A family of white American missionaries descend on the Congo in 1960 for a year of Bible thumping, ignorant of the culture they are entering and the dangerous politics that's shifting power from Belgium's colonialist rule to a chaotic independence. The narrative moves between the four daughters, who range between 16 and 6 years of age, and the mother years later, back in Georgia, U.S. They struggle to adapt to this new culture as well as bear the ignorance and fanatism of the family's father, who believes he can bring salvation to all those African heathens. We know early on from the mother's narrative that one of the daughters eventually dies, but we don't know which and for what reason, and it's partly this suspense that drives the story forward. Village life slowly gets harder and the mysteries of the Congo swallow the family whole, and the reader.
Some of this novel's pleasures: Kingsolver's ironies, ranging from the book's title down to the way the sections are divided; the way this Southern family's differing points of views build an image of the Congo and the 60s (like Faulkner transposed to Africa, actually); the rich Bible symbolism turned on its head; and the beautiful and redeeming love story at its core.