The Quotidian, October 5, 2010 ~ Truth

“Pain reaches the heart with electrical speed, but truth moves to the heart as slowly as a glacier.” ~ Barbara Kingsolver (born April 8, 1955)

Barbara Kingsolver is an American novelist, essayist, and poet. Her novels include The Bean Trees (1988), The Poisonwood Bible (1998), and The Lacuna (2009).

I enjoyed The Bean Trees, and it’s on one of my bookshelves of favorites. An interesting article in Poets and Writers Magazine (Sept / Oct 2010) titled “First Readers: The Crucial Critics” by Kevin Nance includes a section on Kingsolver and her husband and her work on The Lacuna.

[Initial quote from front matter of A Certain Justice, by John Lescroart (1995). Date and biographcial information from Wikipedia, accessed October 4, 2010. Some of the biographical information already known to me. Subsequent quotes of Kingsolver from Wikipedia].

Barbara Kingsolver is vitally concerned with social change and transformation. In 2000, she established the Bellwether Prize to support a “literature of social change.” According to Wikipedia, “she stated that she wanted to create a literary prize to ‘encourage writers, publishers, and readers to consider how fiction engages visions of social change and human justice.”

http://www.bellwetherprize.org/

One winner of the Bellwether Prize is The Book of Dead Birds, by Gayle Brandeis (2003). A fine novel. A difficult read due to the subject matter, but I recommend it highly.