Barbara Kingsolver - Unsheltered

20-26-863
Vydáno: 
Obsah:

Willa Knox has always prided herself on being the embodiment of responsibility for her family. Which is why it’s so unnerving that she’s arrived at middle age with nothing to show for her hard work and dedication but a stack of unpaid bills and an inherited brick home in Vineland, New Jersey, that is literally falling apart. The magazine where she worked has folded, and the college where her husband had tenure has closed. The dilapidated house is also home to her ailing and cantankerous Greek father-in-law and her two grown children: her stubborn, free-spirited daughter, Tig, and her dutiful debt-ridden, ivy educated son, Zeke, who has arrived with his unplanned baby in the wake of a life-shattering development.
In an act of desperation, Willa begins to investigate the history of her home, hoping that the local historical preservation society might take an interest and provide funding for its direly needed repairs. Through her research into Vineland’s past and its creation as a Utopian community, she discovers a kindred spirit from the 1880s, Thatcher Greenwood.
A science teacher with a lifelong passion for honest investigation, Thatcher finds himself under siege in his community for telling the truth: his employer forbids him to speak of the exciting new theory recently published by Charles Darwin. Thatcher’s friendships with a brilliant woman scientist and a renegade newspaper editor draw him into a vendetta with the town’s most powerful men. At home, his new wife and status-conscious mother-in-law bristle at the risk of scandal, and dismiss his financial worries and the news that their elegant house is structurally unsound.
Unsheltered is the story of two families, in two centuries, who live at the corner of Sixth and Plum, as they navigate the challenges of surviving a world in the throes of major cultural shifts. In this mesmerizing story told in alternating chapters, Willa and Thatcher come to realize that though the future is uncertain, even unnerving, shelter can be found in the bonds of kindred—whether family or friends—and in the strength of the human spirit.

Skóre: 7/10 
 

Brabara Kingsolver - Animal Dreams

16-05-685
Vydáno: 1990
Obsah:

"Animals dream about the things they do in the day time just like people do. If you want sweet dreams, you've got to live a sweet life." So says Loyd Peregrina, a handsome Apache trainman and latter-day philosopher. But when Codi Noline returns to her hometown, Loyd's advice is painfully out of her reach. Dreamless and at the end of her rope, Codi comes back to Grace, Arizona to confront her past and face her ailing, distant father. What the finds is a town threatened by a silent environmental catastrophe, some startling clues to her own identity, and a man whose view of the world could change the course of her life. Blending flashbacks, dreams, and Native American legends, Animal Dreams is a suspenseful love story and a moving exploration of life's largest commitments. With this work, the acclaimed author of The Bean Trees and Homeland and Other Stories sustains her familiar voice while giving readers her most remarkable book yet.

Skóre: 7/10
 

Barbara Kingsolver - The Flight Behavior

13-16-604
Vydáno: 2012
Obsah:

With her powerful new novel, Kingsolver (The Lacuna) delivers literary fiction that conveys an urgent social message. Set in a rural Tennessee that has endured unseasonal rain, the plot explores the effects of a bizarre biological event on a Bible Belt community. The sight that young wife and mother Dellarobia Turnbow comes upon—millions of monarch butterflies glowing like a “lake of fire” in a sheep pasture owned by her in-laws—is immediately branded a miracle, and promises a lucrative tourist season for the financially beleaguered Turnbows. But the arrival of a research team led by sexy scientist Ovid Byron reveals the troubling truth behind the butterflies’ presence: they’ve been driven by pollution from their usual Mexican winter grounds and now face extinction due to northern hemisphere temperatures. Equally threatening is the fact that her father-in-law, Bear, has sold the land to loggers. Already restless in her marriage to the passive Cub, for whom she gave up college when she became pregnant at 17, unsophisticated, cigarette-addicted Dellarobia takes a mammoth leap when she starts working with the research team. As her horizons expand, she faces a choice between the status quo and, perhaps, personal fulfillment. Spunky Dellarobia is immensely appealing; the caustic view she holds of her husband, in-laws, and neighbors, the self-deprecating repartee she has with her best friend Dovey, and her views about the tedium of motherhood combined with a loving but clear-eyed appraisal of her own children invest the narrative with authenticity and sparkling humor. Kingsolver also animates and never judges the uneducated, superstitious, religiously devout residents of Feathertown. As Dellarobia flees into a belated coming-of-age, which becomes the ironic outcome of the Monarchs’ flight path to possible catastrophe in the collapse of a continental ecosystem, the dramatic saga becomes a clarion call about climate change, too lucid and vivid for even skeptics to ignore.

Skóre: 9/10

 

Barbara Kingsolver - The Lacuna

10-21-537
Vydáno: 2009
Obsah:
From Publishers Weekly:
Starred Review. Kingsolver's ambitious new novel, her first in nine years (after the The Poisonwood Bible), focuses on Harrison William Shepherd, the product of a divorced American father and a Mexican mother. After getting kicked out of his American military academy, Harrison spends his formative years in Mexico in the 1930s in the household of Diego Rivera; his wife, Frida Kahlo; and their houseguest, Leon Trotsky, who is hiding from Soviet assassins. After Trotsky is assassinated, Harrison returns to the U.S., settling down in Asheville, N.C., where he becomes an author of historical potboilers (e.g., Vassals of Majesty) and is later investigated as a possible subversive. Narrated in the form of letters, diary entries and newspaper clippings, the novel takes a while to get going, but once it does, it achieves a rare dramatic power that reaches its emotional peak when Harrison wittily and eloquently defends himself before the House Un-American Activities Committee (on the panel is a young Dick Nixon). Employed by the American imagination, is how one character describes Harrison, a term that could apply equally to Kingsolver as she masterfully resurrects a dark period in American history with the assured hand of a true literary artist. (Nov.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Bookmarks Magazine
The Lacuna contains two very distinct parts. One features a vibrant Mexican landscape with the equally colorful personalities of Rivera, Kahlo, and Trotsky. The other centers more on Harrison's reclusive existence in small-town America and his battle with the House Un-American Activities Committee. Despite the prodigious research that both parts exhibit, critics clearly preferred the former, marveling at Kingsolver's lyrical passages and her expert recreation of 1930s Mexico. A few reviewers also noted instances of sermonizing and inaccurate history. However, the novel's compelling, engrossing story certainly outweighed these minor complaints, and in the end, Kingsolver has created a convincing "tableau vivant of epochs and people that time has transformed almost past recognition" (New York Times Book Review).

Skóre: 7/10

Barbara Kingsolver - Pigs in Heaven

07-14-479
Vydáno: 1993
Taylor Greer and her adopted Cherokee daughter Turtle, first met in The Bean Trees , will captivate readers anew in Kingsolver's assured and eloquent sequel, which mixes wit, wisdom and the expert skills of a born raconteur into a powerfully affecting narrative. Now six years old and still bearing psychological marks of the abuse that occured before she was rescued by Taylor, Turtle is discovered by formidable Indian lawyer Annawake Fourkiller, who insists that the child be returned to the Cherokee Nation. Taylor reacts by fleeing her Tucson home with Turtle to begin a precarious existence on the road; skirting the edge of poverty and despair, she eventually realizes that Turtle has become emotionally unmoored. In taking a fresh look at the Solomonic dilemma of choosing between two equally valid claims on a child's life, Kingsolver achieves the admirable feat of making the reader understand and sympathize with both sides of the controversy, as she contrasts Taylor's inalterable mother's love with Annawake's determination to save Turtle from the stigmatization she can expect from white society. The chronicle acquires depth and humor when Kingsolver integrates the story of Taylor's mother Alice, a woman who believes that the Greers are "doomed to be a family with no men in it" (that she is proven wrong adds a delicious element of romance to the story). Alice's resolve to help her daughter takes her into the heart of the Cherokee Nation and results in an astonishing but credible meshing of lives. In the end, both justice and compassion are served. Kingsolver's intelligent consideration of issues of family and culture--both in her evocation of Native American society and in her depiction of the plight of a single mother--brims with insight and empathy. Every page of this beautifully controlled narrative offers prose shimmering with imagery and honed to simple lyric intensity.

American indians, so often the "bad guys", and despite terrible treatment in the past are shown to have a culture which still has a lot going for it compared with modern day "American" life. Kingsolver, with a wonderful lightness of touch teaches us a lot about tolerance and seeking out the best in competing cultures while giving us a novel which is impossible to put down...a stoy of love, motherhood, family and compassion in unconventional setting way outside the traditional western nuclear family. One of the few American writers whose writing does not jar for an English reader.

Skóre: 8/10

Barbara Kingsolver - The Bean Trees

07-13-478
Vydáno: 1988
Obsah:
Stories of women overcoming adversity are increasingly common. There's more than a little justice achieved by these tales. Many of them, particularly this work, show how women use their power of community to manage their lives successfully. These stories need to be told, and Kingsolver has given us a fine example. The community theme is superbly demonstrated in Estevan's metaphor of heaven and hell - hell is peopled with those who cannot reach out to others, starving in a kitchen full of food.
Lou Ann and "Taylor" are fellow Kentuckian exiles living in Tucson. The relocation has bought unexpected challenges to their lives. Not the least of these is the additional burden of infants: Lou Ann's by an unwanted pregnancy and Taylor's by an abandonment. What does it say about women that Taylor makes no attempt to off-load Turtle to a state agency, but keeps her to raise. Kingsolver evokes the reader's sympathy for both Taylor and Lou Ann, although both are in situations of their own making. Mattie, too, might have been given greater role, particularly since she provides so many fundamental changes in Taylor's life.
Kingsolver's character development makes wonderful reading. Occasionally, her descriptive powers overcome her characterization and Taylor waxes rather more eloquent than her background and education [which is almost entirely self-taught] would warrant. It's easy to forgive these lapses in light of how well she relates the story. Throughout the book i wondered why only Taylor speaks in the first person. A dual viewpoint of characters and events might have given this story more depth.
Estevan and his wife, Esperanza, are Guatemalan refugees. Kingsolver's use of these characters to point up America's support of the oppressive regime is depicted with skill. Taylor's growing awareness of conditions there represents that of the average American -it's visible only by direct confrontation. Unfortunately, Taylor lives where sympathy for refugees from oppressive regimes is minimal. The place is called the United States, symbolized, interestingly enough, by a woman standing in a harbour offering sanctuary to the oppressed.
There is a disturbing element in this and similar stories by and of today's women. Men here are universally portrayed without a redeeming feature. There are no "neutral" males who provide any form of support or reinforcement. Angel Ruiz could just as easily have lost more than a leg in his rodeo accident. Instead, he must be portrayed as a deserting husband. Kingsolver, however, has him appearing in cameos which only reinforce his role as the uncaring male. We are returned here to the early days of feminism in declaring males superfluous to the community of women. It's not a healthy indication for the future. If the atmosphere of "us versus them" intensifies, there will be greater backlash than is currently the case. If men have truly failed women over all these millennia, then it's reconciliation that's required, not intensifying of resentments. That only builds mutually reinforcing resentment.

Skóre: 7/10