Readalong Part 1 – Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver

I discovered Barbara Kingsolver through a book club friend. Then many other friends of mine recommended her works, especially because of the way she depicts nature in her works. I was thinking that I will read ‘The Poisonwood Bible’ first because it seemed to be her most famous work. Then during one of my browsing sessions at the bookstore, I discovered ‘Prodigal Summer’. I read the blurb on the back cover and the first page of the book and I loved it and got it. When Delia from Postcards from Asia suggested that we do a readalong of ‘Prodigal Summer’, I thought that was a wonderful idea. We decided to read the first eight chapters of the book and post on it this weekend and take it from there. Here is what I think of the first eight chapters.

 

‘Prodigal Summer’ has three story strands. One is about Deanna, a forest officer, who lives in a cabin in the forest and who likes solitude and tracking animals which are rare or unusual to that geography. Her present interest is in following the trail of what looks like a family of coyotes. One of the days she is on the trail, she meets a stranger who seems to have followed her silently. They have a brief conversation and she waves him off and he disappears. He comes back a few days later. This time it is difficult for her to resist having a longer talk with him. Deanna is attracted towards him and they spend time together. Then the stranger disappears again and Deanna starts missing him. After a while he comes back again and Deanna is torn on what to do. She loves her solitude but she is also intensely attracted towards this stranger who has shattered her solitary, tranquil existence. The second strand of the story is about Lusa, who has recently lost her husband Cole in an accident. Both of them had been married for just a year. Lusa was a researcher at the university in the nearby town, before she got married. Cole is a farmer. Lusa is from a multicultural background, while Cole is from a traditional farming family. So, when they get married, Cole’s sisters and in-laws and other people around find it difficult to accept Lusa as part of their community. Or atleast she feels that way. Now Cole is gone and Lusa struggles to cope with her grief. Cole’s farm comes to her, but Lusa doesn’t have the knowledge and the experience to handle it. There is one particular scene where her in-laws want to help her plant tobacco and Lusa resists it. She wants to plant something useful in the farm – like tomatoes or potatoes. Because she is idealistic in her thinking – she thinks that tobacco is harmful while vegetables are useful. But then she discovers that it is difficult to make money, even for survival, by planting tomatoes or potatoes, while if she planted tobacco, she can manage the expenses for the next year. It is a struggle between doing the good thing and being practical. While she is torn between what to do while simultaneously coping with her grief, Lusa discovers an unlikely ally and friend in her sister-in-law Jewel. During her conversations with Jewel, Lusa discovers an unknown, romantic side of her husband Cole. The third strand of the story is about an old man Garnett who has frequent fights with his neighbour Nannie Rawley, an old lady who is smart and clever, loves nature and frequently foils Garnett’s plans.

 

Two things that I really love about ‘Prodigal Summer’ till now are Barbara Kingsolver’s beautiful prose and her descriptions of nature. Her love for nature and wildlife comes through in every page and every sentence. The book starts with this paragraph :

 

Her body moved with the frankness that comes from solitary habits. But solitude is only a human presumption. Every quiet step is thunder to beetle life underfoot; every choice is a world made new for the chosen. All secrets are witnessed.

 

How can one not fall in love with a book, with a first paragraph like that? I love the way Kingsolver shifts perspective in the second sentence itself and shows the world from a totally new angle.

 

Barbara Kingsolver also talks a lot about nature in the book. Some of them are factoids. Others are beautiful descriptions in poetic prose. Some readers might find the factoids a bit digressing. Not me. I loved them. Two of the things she talks about are the coyote and the luna moth. It was fascinating for me to read about both of them. I didn’t know that coyotes were matriarchal, and there was an alpha female which gave birth to cubs while other females in the family helped in raising the cubs. Coyotes seem to be fascinating animals. It was also interesting to read about the luna moth – that it doesn’t have a mouth and so cannot eat, has only a lifespan of a week and has to find a mate before that time and procreate. It felt both romantic and tragic – romantic because a luna moth’s only purpose in life was to find love and tragic because it cannot eat and live like the rest of us.

 

Some of my favourite passages in the book, till now, are these :

 

It seemed unbelievable that his disturbance of the branch could release a burst of scent that would reach her here at the house, but the breeze was gentle and coming from exactly the right direction. People in Appalachia insisted that the mountains breathed, and it was true : the steep hollow behind the farmhouse took up one long, slow inhalation every morning and let it back down through their open windows and across the fields throughout evening – just one full, deep breath each day. When Lusa first visited Cole here she’d listened to talk of mountains breathing with a tolerant smile. She had some respect for the poetry of country people’s language, if not for the veracity of their perceptions : mountains breathe, and a snake won’t die till the sun goes down, even if you chop off its head. If a snapping turtle gets hold of you, he won’t let go till it thunders. But when she married Cole and moved her life into this house, the inhalations of Zebulon Mountain touched her face all morning, and finally she understood. She learned to tell time with her skin, as morning turned to afternoon and the mountain’s breath began to bear gently on the back of her neck. By early evening it was insistent as a lover’s sigh, sweetened by the damp woods, cooling her nape and shoulders whenever she paused her work in the kitchen to lift her sweat-damp curls off her neck. She had come to think of Zebulon as another man in her life, larger and steadier than any other companion she had known.

 

Arguments could fill a marriage like water, running through everything, always, with no taste or color but lots of noise.

 

The dawn chorus was a whistling roar by now, the sound of a thousand males calling out love to a thousand silent females ready to choose and make the world new. It was nothing but heady cacophony unless you paid attention to the individual entries: a rode-breasted grosbeak with his sweet complicated little sonnet; a vireo with his repetitious bursts of eighth notes and triplets. And then came the wood thrush, with his tone poem of a birdsong. The wood thrush defined these woods for Deanna, providing background music for her thoughts and naming her place in the forest. The dawn chorus would subside in another hour, but the wood thrush would persist for a long time into the morning, then pick up again in early evening or even at midday if it was cloudy. Nannie had asked her once in a letter how she could live up here alone with all the quiet, and that was Deanna’s answer: when human conversation stopped, the world was anything but quiet. She lived with wood thrushes for company.

 

You can find Delia’s first post on ‘Prodigal Summer’ here.

Have you read ‘Prodigal Summer’ by Barbara Kingsolver?