#flight behavior

[quotespile]

Some of life's greatest calls were answered not by the head but by the body.

Barbara Kingsolver, Flight Behavior

[litsnaps]

[quotespile]

Some things they got right... And for all the rest they wept, a merged keening that felt bottomless. For the years and years of things that didn’t exist, fantasies of flight where there was no flight. Nothing, really, but walking away on your own two feet.

Barbara Kingsolver, Flight Behavior

[quotespile]

Man against Nature. Of all the possible conflicts, that was the one that was hopeless. Even a slim education had taught her this much: Man loses.

Barbara Kingsolver, Flight Behavior

[analydime]

Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver

There’s rarely a bad book by a female author that shows you just how much you can ruin your life by marrying the wrong person. Or in the case of Dellarobia, by marrying at all.

It was a wild ride. From hating the story at the beginning and despising the main character to the core, I came to care for her, worry for her, and hope for her as if she were a real person. Barbara Kingsolver made me empathize with Dellarobia and love her, rather than hate her - all within the course of 600 pages. And at first glance, it would be my first and only problem with this book: it is simply too big for the content it gives. The plot is thick with Dellarobia shopping, and walking, and talking, and thinking, and one can argue that it adds very little to our understanding of her as a person. But I learnt to think that perhaps it is intentional: as the novel drags itself to its climactic ending, we share those moments of boredom and misunderstandings and angst with Dellarobia.

It is eco-fiction combined with the “belated” coming of age story where the main protagonist of 28-years-old still hasn’t figured out what her life could be like, and it covers so many themes from division in class, poverty, and the lack of resources of an individual to larger issues of the migration of monarch butterflies broadening to the discussion of climate change, and media representation that comes with it.

[wholesomeobsessive]

Somewhere in the room behind her Pete was up on a ladder, loudly stapling plastic sheeting to the walls. They were making their laboratory in the sheep barn. Contrary to her expectations, a butterfly lab looked something like a kitchen with outlandishly expensive appliances. For two days she’d been helping them unpack the crates they’d brought from New Mexico, and she knew it was bad manners but couldn’t stop herself from asking about the costs of things.

Flight Behaviour by Barbara Kingsolver

[a-ramblinrose]

“A certain feeling comes from throwing your good life away, and it is one part rapture. Or so it seemed for now, to a woman with flame-colored hair who marched uphill to meet her demise. Innocence was no part of this. She knew her own recklessness and marveled, really, at how one hard little flint of thrill could outweigh the pillowy, suffocating aftermath of a long disgrace.”

― Barbara Kingsolver, Flight Behavior

[rhetoricandlogic]

Flight Behaviour by Barbara Kingsolver – review

Climate change fears are given wings in Barbara Kingsolver's well observed Appalachian tale.

Attempting to escape her empty marriage and the drudgery of life on a rundown Appalachian farm, Dellarobia Turnbow heads for an assignation that accidentally transforms her life. En route to a tryst with a lover, she stumbles on a hillside covered with swathes of orange monarch butterflies that appear like fire on the landscape.

"The flames now appeared to lift from individual treetops in showers of orange sparks, exploding the way a pine log does in a campfire when it is poked. The sparks spiralled upward in swirls like funnel clouds. Twisters of brightness against grey sky."

The monarchs' majestic, and mysterious, appearance distracts Dellarobia from her illicit assignation and in the process, the would-be "Tennessee temptress" achieves internet fame as the discoverer of a phenomenon that confounds human understanding of butterfly migration. For monarchs to attempt to overwinter far from the heat of the south is unprecedented. Locals view their arrival as a message from God. Entomologist Ovid Byron, a gifted African-American researcher who comes to investigate, puts the blame on a very different agent: climate change.

Byron hires Dellarobia to help him to make sense of the strange apparition on her land and in the process of learning how to help him, she acquires a self-confidence she had been denied by her lack of education and by her poverty. It is a story steeped in biblical metaphor: the monarch butterflies transform the land as if "trees have turned to fire, a burning bush"; lambs are raised for slaughter, the Turnbows' principal business as farmers; and ultimately the onset of spring soaks the land in a flood of Old Testament proportions. Yet the forces set loose in this way will be nothing to those that will be sweep the world as it gets warmer and warmer, Kingsolver is telling us.

In general, Flight Behaviour is an impressive work. It is complex, elliptical and well-observed. Dellarobia and her kin come over as solid but believable individuals, outlined with respect and balance. Even Cub, her much put-upon simpleton of a husband, and his dreadful, manipulative mother Hester, are ultimately accorded sympathy.

Much is also made of the Turnbows' poverty, almost to the point of overkill. Two lengthy scenes are devoted to shopping visits to low-rent supermarkets in which the family's financial tribulations are outlined in unflinching detail. Later, Dellarobia is quizzed by a self-righteous eco-campaigner about her lifestyle, only to discover that her poverty makes her just about the lowest possible emitter of carbon in the United States. I don't have enough money to buy a computer that I might then leave on overnight and waste power, she snarls at her chagrined inquisitor. Only the last of these encounters works satisfactorily.

However, it is the issue of climate change that hangs, unspoken, over proceedings and it is left to Ovid Byron to give it resonance. Pestered by a hardened TV journalist to explain the monarchs' strange appearance in the Appalachians, he is outraged when she doubts that global warming is real and suggests that climate change deniers might be right. "What you are doing is unconscionable," he screams at her. "You are allowing the public to be duped by a bunch of liars." The diatribe becomes a viral hit on the internet. Thus Kingsolver makes her message clear. If only a few more scientists started screaming on TV and radio then we might have a chance to avoid the worst of the calamities that lie ahead.