prize Kingsolver

This interview got me interested in looking at Kingsolver again.  I positively detested The Poisonwood Bible, so I’ve not given her any other chance.

“I had no idea that I had stepped in a hornet’s nest,” she says, “but a significant proportion of people felt that the very notion of asking who we [as Americans] want to be, suggested that we might be something other than perfect.” This was apparently a problem.  “There was a monstrously angry response,” she continues. “A lot of people were frightened, and when people are frightened, they want to burn witches. They want to run somebody up the flagpole…Kingsolver says that she started the book [The Lacuna] with “a series of questions. I was very interested in national character and why art and politics have such an uneasy relationship in my country, and why we’re so nervous about self-criticism.”

 

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