Early in this exciting novel about cultural anthropologists in 1930s New Guinea, we get a gloss on the title's meaning. Euphoria, Nell Stone tells a friend, is 'when you think you've finally got a handle on the place that moment the place feels entirely yours.'
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Nell, the novel's focal center, modeled somewhat after Margaret Mead, is savvy enough to know this feeling is a delusion: She understands that she will never truly understand. Although she is something of a superstar as the novel opens, her approach to her discipline is full of humility: 'The truth you find will always be replaced with someone else's.' The 1920s and 1930s were the Golden Age of anthropological field study. Prompted by scientific curiosity, by war weariness, by 'the belief that somewhere on earth there was a better way to live' (Nell's thought), adventurous scholars from Western nations embedded themselves in the societies of native peoples to document how they lived. 'Euphoria,' in a wonderfully vivid and perceptive tale, allows us a close look at a group of such anthropologists — and the cultural assumptions that drive them. King shows us that just as the New Guinean tribes differ dramatically in their customs, so, too, do the anthropologists seem to belong to different tribes.
Where Nell, an American, wants to study the natives, her Australian husband, Fen, wants to be one. He is excited by the manly rituals of the Tam tribe and tired of working in the shadow of his illustrious wife. The largest part of the novel is narrated by a third anthropologist, a despairing Englishman, Andrew Bankston, who is overcome by his grief at surviving his brothers and by his general sense of his uselessness in the jungle.
Bankston is attracted to Nell and Fen and, in particular, to Nell's empathetic manner of interacting with the native women and children. Bankston's own approach has been more clinical and remote, fearing that he would be studying 'natives toadying to the white man.' Although the anthropological discoveries that the three make are at best murky, King's prose sparkles. Whether writing about the ultraviolent Mumbanyo tribe 'beating a death gong' for Nell and Fen and throwing dead babies at them, or describing the Tam tribe's local hero, who has escaped his enslavement in the mines, she captures the reader's imagination and holds on to it. King has done her research. (The Acknowledgements Page lists 34 works.) The upriver experiences of her characters feel thoroughly authentic — fascinating, uncomfortable, always dangerous, sometimes even euphoric.
Margaret Mead at the American Museum of Natural History in 1930. Credit Getty Images (This book was selected as one of The New York Times Book Review’s 10 Best Books of 2014. For the rest of the list, click.) As a public icon, Margaret Mead has grown fusty — more respected than read, scarred by potshots (remember the critic who tried to prove that she’d been duped by her Samoan informants?) and sidelined in anthropology by a new dispensation, fluent in evolutionary biology, that makes Mead’s “culture and personality” approach look quaint. It’s hard to conceive of the shock caused in 1928 by her depiction, in “Coming of Age in Samoa,” of sexual freedom as key to a happy adolescence, or of the scope of her influence, decades later, as an unflagging champion of progressive causes, from women’s rights to the legalization of marijuana. For most of us, Mead’s name no longer automatically conjures what one biographer termed “steamy things that happened in torrid, languid jungles.” But her life was rich with incident and, on one occasion at least, may have conformed to this description. In “Euphoria,” the novelist Lily King has taken the known details of that occasion — a 1933 field trip to the Sepik River, in New Guinea, during which Mead and her second husband, Reo Fortune, briefly collaborated with the man who would become her third husband, the English anthropologist Gregory Bateson — and blended them into a story of her own devising.
The result is as uncanny as it is transporting. “Euphoria” is a meticulously researched homage to Mead’s restless mind and a considered portrait of Western anthropology in its primitivist heyday.
It’s also a taut, witty, fiercely intelligent tale of competing egos and desires in a landscape of exotic menace — a love triangle in extremis. Complete guide building your home brewery pdf files. For King, whose three previous novels, all expertly crafted, rarely strayed far from late-20th-century, New England WASP culture, “Euphoria” represents a departure and arguably a breakthrough.
The steam the book emits is as much intellectual as erotic (for Mead there seems hardly to have been a distinction), and King’s signal achievement may be to have created satisfying drama out of a quest for interpretive insight. The threat of violence and death looms from Page 1, as a disgruntled Mumbanyo tribe member lobs what may or may not be a dead baby at Nell Stone, the controversial American author of the best-selling ethnography “The Children of Kirakira,” and her envious Australian husband, Fen, who are fleeing the tribe in a canoe. Nell’s glasses are broken (by Fen, in what, it’s implied, was a deliberate act), as is one of her ankles. Both husband and wife are filthy, dispirited and sick with malaria. Nell, who longs to be pregnant, has recently miscarried. “Maybe you noticed — there’s sort of a stench of failure about us,” she tells Andrew Bankson, the English anthropologist they run into upon arriving at the local government station, where a drunken Christmas party is underway. Bankson, the novel’s narrator, isn’t doing too well himself.
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Like Bateson, his real-life inspiration, he’s tormented by the deaths of his older brothers, one blown up over Belgium in World War I, the other a suicide in Piccadilly Circus, and for two years has been living with a tribe on the Sepik River, less out of a passion for analyzing human social systems than to escape his overbearing mother. Stymied in his work and deeply depressed, he’s fresh from his own suicide attempt — in the river, his pockets full of stones, like Virginia Woolf. On seeing Nell and Fen, it’s all he can do not to fling himself at them: “My heart whapped in my throat and all I could think was how to keep them, how to keep them.
I felt my loneliness bulge out of me like a goiter.”. The book is rife with such visceral imagery and pungent with the stink of disease, foul breath and unwashed bodies. Bankson, who falls hard for Nell, describes her — much as Bateson did Mead — in a letter to his mother, as “a sickly, pocket-sized creature with a face like a female Darwin”; in the bush, sentimentality is a luxury, like iodine and Band-Aids. Anyway, it’s Nell’s brain that excites him, her drive and discipline, her easy way with the natives, her scandalously impressionistic field notes, her poetry-laden talk, her naked curiosity, her freedom. “For so long I’d felt that what I’d been trained to do in academic writing was to press my nose to the ground, and here was Nell Stone with her head raised and swiveling in all directions. It was exhilarating and infuriating and I needed to see her again.” “Euphoria” takes the form of unflinching retrospection, interspersed with entries from Nell’s journal, as Bankson recounts, decades later, his helpless love for her. King deploys this frame with admirable delicacy, casting a shadow of impending tragedy over the narrative and administering the occasional strategic dose of irony or nostalgia.
Apart from an early chapter in which Bankson chronicles his painful family history — her only misstep, it comes off a bit pat — she wisely allows the proceedings to unfold mostly as they happen.
One would seldom think of anthropology as being the career where passionate love triangles would arise; they generally concentrate on their studies in seclusion. However, in Euphoria by, an anthropological study becomes the catalyst which sets off a series of events, plunging three young anthropologists in their thirties into a deep and passionate love triangle which begins to threaten not only their careers, but also their personal well-being. Just to give a brief overview of the story, it begins by introducing us to Andrew Bankson, a lonely and isolated anthropologist who is just about ready to take his own life, in no small part thanks to his brother's death. Just as he is about to leave this world, he makes the encounter of Nell Stone, and her husband Fen. They had both just escaped the bloodthirsty Mumbanyo and are yearning for new discoveries.
Kirkus Prize For Fiction
Bankson obliges them when he finds a new, female-dominated tribe nearby, called the Tam. And so the research of this tribe sets the three unwitting protagonists on a course they could never have predicted, one that perhaps took them beyond the limits of their profession. To begin with, one of the first things I've noticed about the novel is just how well the characters are depicted, how deeply their thoughts and natures are examined. Naturally, the fact that there are so few characters to follow gives King plenty of space to develop them as she sees fit, and she takes fully advantage of that; by the end of it, the characters feel all to real. As the story goes on, we truly to begin to care for each one of them, seeing that they were just unwitting people who were at the right place at the wrong time. If there is a gripe to be had with this book, I'd say it is the pace itself. There are long and, dare I say, laborious stretches of text to read through at times; it's not that King talks about nothing during them, it's just that they often appear when it feels like the time has come to advance the story in one way or another.
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There are times when the pace starts to pick up, but it always ends up dropping relatively soon. If you do not mind the kind of reading where you are asked to stop and smell the roses, then you aren't going to find this to be a problem.
All things considered, if you are searching for a different kind of romance novel, one that explores all aspects of it through extremely well-developed characters, then I can do nothing but recommend you this solid piece of literature.
King adds it all. She breaks down your ideas of cultural norms to the point where you believe there are no norms. Anthropologist Nell is a true heroine-courageous and dedicated to her field work as she studies primitive tribes. Umax ditto usc 5800 scanner driver for windows 7. She is not bothered by observations that would have most Westerners blushing. Mosquitos and malaria don't phase her. King adds a beautiful touch with Nell's love interests.
Her Aussie husband we learn is rather egotistic and possessive, while another anthropologist with whom they become close is kind and gentle and greatly appreciates Nell's work. Their interest in each other grows.
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The point of the story is summed up by yet another love interest in a letter to Nell. Among other things, she states that it is impossible to learn about one's own culture by studying another culture. I've thought about this sentence a lot.
Nell spent her life trying to learn the secrets to a peaceful life, a better way of living-it seems there are just different ways of living and there are no norms. This book will test your ideas of what is socially 'correct' behavior or 'moral' and whether those norms exist at all. It is a beautiful book. From New England Book Award winner Lily King comes a breathtaking novel about three young anthropologists of the 30’s caught in a passionate love triangle that threatens their bonds, their careers, and, ultimately, their lives. English anthropologist Andrew Banson has been alone in the field for several years, studying the Kiona river tribe in the Territory of New Guinea. Haunted by the memory of his brothers’ deaths and increasingly frustrated and isolated by his research, Bankson is on the verge of suicide when a chance encounter with colleagues, the controversial Nell Stone and her wry and mercurial Australian husband Fen, pulls him back from the brink. Nell and Fen have just fled the bloodthirsty Mumbanyo and, in spite of Nell’s poor health, are hungry for a new discovery.
When Bankson finds them a new tribe nearby, the artistic, female-dominated Tam, he ignites an intellectual and romantic firestorm between the three of them that burns out of anyone’s control. Set between two World Wars and inspired by events in the life of revolutionary anthropologist Margaret Mead, Euphoria is an enthralling story of passion, possession, exploration, and sacrifice from accomplished author Lily King. (retrieved from Amazon Thu, 12 Mar 2015 18:23:50 -0400). English anthropologist Andrew Banson has been alone in the field for several years, studying the Kiona river tribe in 1930s New Guinea. Haunted by the memory of his brothers' deaths and increasingly frustrated and isolated by his research, Bankson is on the verge of suicide.
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Then he encounters the famous and controversial American anthropologist Nell Stone and her wry and mercurial Australian husband, Fen, who have just fled the bloodthirsty Mumbanyo. Nell and Fen and, in spite of Nell's poor health, are hungry for a new discovery.
When Bankson finds them a new tribe nearby, the artistic, female-dominated Tam, he ignites an intellectual and romantic firestorm between the three of them that burns out of anyone's control.
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