My New Listen

• Prodigal Summer
• UNABRIDGED
• by Barbara Kingsolver
• Narrated by Barbara Kingsolver
• Publisher: Harper Audio
• Length 15 hours 50 minutes
• 
  

There is no one in contemporary literature quite like Barbara Kingsolver. Her dialogue sparkles with sassy wit and earthy poetry; her descriptions are rooted in daily life but are also on familiar terms with the eternal. With Prodigal Summer, she returns from the Congo to a "wrinkle on the map that lies between farms and wildness." And there, in an isolated pocket of southern Appalachia, she recounts not one but three intricate stories.

Exuberant, lush, riotous--the summer of the novel is "the season of extravagant procreation" in which bullfrogs carelessly lay their jellied masses of eggs in the grass, "apparently confident that their tadpoles would be able to swim through the lawn like little sperms," and in which a woman may learn to "tell time with her skin." It is also the summer in which a family of coyotes moves into the mountains above Zebulon Valley:

The ghost of a creature long extinct was coming in on silent footprints, returning to the place it had once held in the complex anatomy of this forest like a beating heart returned to its body. This is what she believed she would see, if she watched, at this magical juncture: a restoration.

The "she" is Deanna Wolfe, a wildlife biologist observing the coyotes from her isolated aerie--isolated, that is, until the arrival of a young hunter who makes her even more aware of the truth that humans are only an infinitesimal portion in the ecological balance. This truth forms the axis around which the other two narratives revolve: the story of a city girl, entomologist, and new widow and her efforts to find a place for herself; and the story of Garnett Walker and Nannie Rawley, who seem bent on thrashing out the countless intimate lessons of biology as only an irascible traditional farmer and a devotee of organic agriculture can. As Nannie lectures Garnett, "Everything alive is connected to every other by fine, invisible threads. Things you don't see can help you plenty, and things you try to control will often rear back and bite you, and that's the moral of the story."

Structurally, that gossamer web is the story: images, phrases, and events link the narratives, and these echoes are rarely obvious, always serendipitous. Kingsolver is one of those authors for whom the terrifying elegance of nature is both aesthetic wonder and source of a fierce and abiding moral vision. She may have inherited Thoreau's mantle, but she piles up riches of her own making, blending her extravagant narrative gift with benevolent concise humor. She treads the line between the sentimental and the glorious like nobody else in American literature. --Kelly Flynn

Booking It--Posterity

Do you think any current author is of the same caliber as Dickens, Austen, Bronte, or any of the classic authors? If so, who, and why do you think so? If not, why not? What books from this era might be read 100 years from now?

The first book that came to mind for me was Barbara Kingsolver's tour de force, The Poisonwood Bible. I definitely believe that book will go down as a classic, but I've sung her praises so much on the blog I'm beginning to sound like a broken record. To be honest though, I've been stuck in the 18th century for the last few years, at least in most of my reading life. I'm not as up on current authors as I'd like to be. However, I'm trying to remedy that now. So, as far as the best of current literature/authors goes, I'm certainly not the expert. Any ideas out there? Who or what should I be reading now that you believe will be read 100 years from now?

Barbara's Back!

Barbara Kingsolver's one of my favorite authors. Her The Poisonwood Bible is on my all-time favorite list. She's finally coming out with a new novel, and I'm so excited. Maybe I'll have time to read it over Christmas break:

The Lacuna, described by London's Bookseller as "the first novel by The Poisonwood Bible author Barbara Kingsolver in nearly 10 years," is set for a November 2009 worldwide release. The book will be published in the United States by HarperCollins and via Faber in the U.K. Kingsolver is a 1977 graduate of DePauw University.

"Set in Mexico and the U.S. during the 1930s, '40s and '50s, the novel tells the story of fictional Harrison Shepherd, who works for Mexican painter Diego Rivera," notes Bookseller. "Shepherd becomes the confidante of Rivera's artist wife, Frida Kahlo, and then secretary to her one-time lover, Trotsky, until his assassination. Shepherd later flees Mexico for the U.S., where he becomes a bestselling author before coming under a McCarthy-style investigation. The Lacuna is told through Shepherd's diaries and letters, as well as newspaper cuttings," notes the publication.

Faber's Hannah Griffiths says the upcoming book is "without doubt the most extraordinary novel I have read for years. The interesting thing is the way she interweaves real documents and real lives into the story. The word ‘lacuna' itself has many different meanings and she manages to encompass most of them in the book: a cave, a missing text, a gap -- all these things are really relevant to the story."

Barbara Kingsolver's twelve books of fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction include the novels The Bean Trees and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, which was listed among the ten best nonfiction books of 2007 by TIME magazine. Translated into nineteen languages, Kingsolver's work has won a devoted worldwide readership and many awards, including the National Humanities Medal.