![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() So wry and wise we wish it would never end.The chatty, down-home audacity of Barbara Kingsolver's remarkable first novel hooks us on the first page. The Bean Trees is the work of a visionary. It is the Southern novel taken west, its colors as translucent and polished as one of those slices of rose agate from a desert rock shop. A bestseller that has come to be regarded as an American classic, The Bean Trees is the novel that launched Barbara Kingsolver’s remarkable literary career. Its author is a poet, a Kentuckian who, like her main character, Taylor Greer, has transplanted herself to Tucson, and her book is a strange new combination: branchy and dense, each of its stories packed with microstories, and yet the whole as clear as air. The Bean Trees is as richly connected as a fine poem, but reads like realism. From the title of her novel to its ending, every little scrap of event or observation is used, reused, revivified with sympathetic vibrations. How can I say it? Barbara Kingsolver doesn't waste a single overtone. And it is extremely rare to find the two gifts in one writer. The bean trees, another name for the wisteria vine that Turtle spots in Dog Doo Park, symbolize transformation, a spot of life in the midst of barrenness. ![]() Barbara Kingsolver can is one thing to create a vivid and realistic scene, and it is quite another to handle the harmonics of many such scenes, to cause all the images and implications to work together. ![]()
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