Audiobook Sample
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- Title: Poisonwood Bible
- Author: Barbara Kingsolver
- Narrator: Dean Robertson
- Length: 15:33:00
- Version: Abridged
- Release Date: 16/05/2017
- Publisher: Brilliance Audio
- Genre: Fiction & Literature, Literary Fiction
- ISBN13: 9.78E+12
The Poisonwood Bible audiobook unfolds like a hand-woven basket carrying both sacred and profane offerings – each narrative strand dyed with the rich pigments of postcolonial guilt, feminine resilience, and the terrible beauty of cultural collision. As someone who’s spent years documenting how places transform people (and vice versa), I found Kingsolver’s Congo to be one of those rare fictional landscapes that lingers in your bones like the red dust of the Kalahari still stains my favorite boots.
Dean Robertson’s narration transported me back to 2017, when I found myself stranded for three days in a Congolese border town during rainy season. Like the Price women, I learned how Western assumptions dissolve in equatorial downpours. Robertson captures this cultural vertigo masterfully – her shifts between the five female voices create a choral effect reminiscent of the evening storytelling circles I’ve encountered from Oaxaca to Zanzibar. When Adah speaks in her brilliant palindromes, you can hear the clicking precision of a mind turning colonialism’s language against itself, while Rachel’s vain interjections carry the flat vowels of American privilege like a scent she can’t wash off.
The audio production shines brightest in its handling of time – that slippery concept that operates so differently in Central Africa than in Bethlehem, Georgia. Robertson’s pacing during the Independence Day massacre scene had me frozen on a Brooklyn park bench, my morning coffee gone cold, as the horror unfolded with terrible inevitability. Yet she equally conveys the languid stretches where months pass like the Congo River’s slow curves, allowing Kingsolver’s ecological metaphors to root deeply in the listener’s imagination.
Some may find the political exposition heavy-handed in audio format, particularly the later sections covering Lumumba’s assassination and CIA involvement. While reading the print version allows for skimming, the audiobook forces confrontation with these historical realities – much like my uncomfortable week interviewing Belgian expats in Kinshasa who still referred to ‘our colony.’ The audio format amplifies Kingsolver’s central question: How do we sit with uncomfortable legacies?
For listeners seeking comparable experiences, I’d recommend pairing this with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun (also brilliant in audio) or the lesser-known but equally powerful The Cathedral of Clay by Pepetela. Both explore similar terrain of personal lives caught in geopolitical currents, though neither matches Kingsolver’s multi-generational scope.
The audiobook’s greatest triumph lies in making palpable what Ruth May calls ‘the terrible magic’ of Africa. When Robertson voices Orleanna’s confession – ‘Africa swallowed the light’ – I heard echoes of a Mozambican fisherman who once told me, ‘This land eats foreign gods for breakfast.’ The production captures how the Price women’s voices gradually shed American cadences, absorbing something of the Congo’s tonal languages until even their silences speak volumes.
May your literary journeys always lead you to uncomfortable truths,
Marcus Rivera
