Euphoria

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The setting is the exotic jungles of New Guinea. The descriptions of the tribes and customs were intriguing. It’s that moment about two months in, when you think you’ve finally got a handle on the place. Suddenly it feels within your grasp. It’s a delusion – you’ve only been there eight weeks – and it’s followed by the complete despair of ever understanding anything. But at the moment the place feels entirely yours. It’s the briefest, purest euphoria. John Donne was an English poet, preacher and a major representative of the metaphysical poets of the period. His works are notable for their realistic and sensual style and include sonnets, love poetry, religious poems, Latin translations, epigrams, elegies, songs, satires and sermons.” On Love and Barley: Haiku of Bashoby Basho (1644–1694), Translated by Lucien Stryk

Enter Andrew Bankson, an Englishman who has been in New Guinea for years, studying the Kiona tribe. Bankson, escaping the shadow of an overbearing mother and the ghosts of two dead brothers, is on the brink of suicide. He invites the Stones to return to New Guinea, but they are aware of the competitive nature of anthropologists and fear that there’s no more room in the territory for them to set up camp. Bankson, loneliness seeping from his pores, introduces the Stones to the Tam tribe and the three become a triangle of intellect and intrigue. Based on the life of Margaret Mead, King conducts a three narrative voice canon with expert hand. Set in the 30s in the exotic setting of New Guinea, and deliberately slow paced at the beginning, King introduces the three voices that will define the ultimate tone of the novel. Let it be said, quite a heartbreaking, painful tone.This novel was inspired by the life of anthropologist Margaret Mead, Reo Fortune and Gregory Bateson The threesome did research of tribes in New Guinea in 1933. Superimposed on all this wonder you have the most inane, cloying and annoying love triange ever written about. Adolescent, saccharine and insipid ! Infuse this with a modern feminist sensibility, quasi bisexuality and three main characters where I just didn't buy into their personalities, ways of being in the world or motivations and you have ....

Alternating narrators and using a fragmented style with flashforwards to the future, King introduces controversial topics such as varied views on colonialism, the effects that anthropological studies will have on the impending WWII, gender violence and the role of women in professions driven mainly by men. Okay, and just a shout out to yesterday's news of legalized gay marriage, the story has a subtile reference to how she was in love with a woman before she married, one who she continued to write to often throughout the book.

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This is a compelling story loosely based on Margaret Mead, with a twist to the story. I loved the characters of Nell and Bankson. The poem asks a number of questions: “Why is pain so much better than nothing?”“Why is saying nothing so much better?” These occur right in the middle of the poem; are they pivotal? Are they rhetorical questions? Wystan Hugh Auden was an Anglo-American poet, best known for love poems such as Funeral Blues, poems on political and social themes such as September 1, 1939and The Shield of Achilles, poems on cultural and psychological themes such as The Age of Anxiety, and poems on religious themes such as For the Time Beingand Horae Canonicae.” New and Collected Poems: 1931–2001 by Czeslaw Milosz (1911–2004) Here in one volume is a selection of the extraordinary poems of Rita Dove, who, as the nation’s Poet Laureate from 1993 to 1995, brought poetry into the lives of millions of people.Precisely yet intensely felt, resonant with the voices of ordinary people, Rita Dove’s Selected Poemsis marked by lyric intensity and compassionate storytelling.” Given Sugar, Given Salt by Jane Hirshfield (1953–) There’s also a lovely repeated image, drawn I think from the poet Amy Lowell, about two kinds of love: the intoxicating flush that comes with wine and the comforting sustenance provided by bread.

Basho, one of the greatest of Japanese poets and the master of haiku, was also a Buddhist monk and a life-long traveller. Each poem evokes the natural world – the cherry blossom, the leaping frog, the summer moon or the winter snow – suggesting the smallness of human life in comparison to the vastness and drama of nature.” Songs of Innocence and Experienceby William Blake (1757–1827) This threesome has a difficult dynamic. It is obvious from the outset that Bankson is smitten with Nell despite her having malaria, a broken ankle and sores all over her body. Fen does not show the least bit of jealousy and it is interesting to find out what occurs between Nel and Bankson. Not only in the title poem, which the critic John Russell called ‘one of the finest long poems of our period,’ but throughout the entire volume, Ashbery reaffirms the poetic power that made him an outstanding figure in contemporary literature. These are poems ‘of breathtaking freshness and adventure in which dazzling orchestrations of language open up whole areas of consciousness no other American poet as ever begun to explore.'” The Complete Poetryby Maya Angelou (1928–2014) Euphoria tell the story about Nell Stone, her husband Fen, and Andrew Bankson. They are studying native tribes in 1933 New Guinea. It's the loose story/bit imagining of Margaret Mead, who studied tribes and their customs. The three live primitive lives, studying the tribes, living in the jungle. And then, they all come together and a love triangle begins. Nell really dives into her work, writing books about her research, and has become famous. She seems to have much more in common with Bankson, who is doing is research on another tribe up river. But Bankson just tried to commit suicide and has his own demons. Then we have Fen, who is quite jealous of his wife and her fame, and seems to be willing to do anything to achieve greater success. But what happens after a fateful decision by Fen, begins a chain of events that affects all of their lives In poems complex in meaning yet clear in statement and depiction, Hirshfield explores questions of identity, aging, death, and of time and the variegated gifts brought by its relentless passage. Whether meditating upon a button, the role of habit in our lives, or the elusive nature of our relationship to sleep, Hirshfield brings each subject into a surprising and magnified existence.” Urban Tumbleweed: Notes From a Tanka Diaryby Harryette Mullen (1953–)

I think King's constantly heightening interest only to then almost immediately deflate it by dillydallying. I'm not loving the construction of this book. There is much that's interesting but I just don't feel she's making it all run together very well. Then, at a Christmas party run by colonials – a fine opportunity for King to provide some sharp, efficient portraits of that society – the couple run into fellow anthropologist Andrew Bankson (modeled on Bateson). Lonely, despairing and suicidal, Bankson agrees to show the two some tribes up the Sepik River. Little does he know that studying the Tam, a group run by powerful women, will irrevocably alter all of their lives.

I think observing without sharing the observations creates an atmosphere of extreme artificiality. They don’t understand why you’re there. If you are open with them, everybody becomes more relaxed and honest.” also like the people in the trees, it's my second book by this author, when i five starred the first and felt totally blah about the second. Lily King emphasizes what was required to be listened to as a female anthropologist in early times. Despite the difficulties, Maed kept on advancing in her professional practice. Among others, she was a leading figure in "The Salzburg Seminar in American Civilization" after the WWII, a post conflict initiative that focused on bringing young leaders together (not mentioned in the book). Although narrated in the first person by Andrew, the journal entries by Nell provide the potent drama, often in a subtle manner of extemporaneous observation. I felt like I was living with the Tam people, and exploring their behaviors and customs.

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More than half way through now and I'm still waiting for the euphoria moment when everything falls into place. At times I wonder if my disappointment isn't perhaps due to a lazy reading of the book on my part because I'm not really getting it while others are clearly getting a much richer reading experience. The research rarely feels rooted into the soil of the novel. For me the Tam still don't have a vivid identity. I'm not seeing how they spend a typical day. King is more interested in the sensational than the everyday and this, for me, is caricaturing the culture a bit. And i often feel she doesn't quite have command of her material. This might be due to the obvious problems posed by fictionalising real people. I still have the feeling she wanted to write the English Patient but was beaten to it.