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 Bankson 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.
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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. 1 As they were leaving the Mumbanyo, someone threw something at them. It bobbed a few yards from the stern of the canoe.
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A pale brown thing. 'Another dead baby,' Fen said. He had broken her glasses by then, so she didn't know if he was joking.
Ahead lay the bright break in the curve of dark green land where the boat would go. She concentrated on that. She did not turn around again.
The few Mumbanyo on the beach were singing and beating the death gong for them, but she did not look at them a last time. Every now and then when the four rowersall standing, calling back to their people or out to other canoespulled at the same time, a small gust of wind struck her damp skin. Her lesions prickled and tightened, as if hurrying to heal in the brief dry air.
The wind stopped and started, stopped and started. She could feel the gap between sensation and recognition of it, and knew the fever was coming on again. The rowers ceased rowing to stab a snake. Oddworld the oddboxx pcgs. Please be aware that this discussion guide may contain spoilers!. Set against the lush tropical landscape of 1930s New Guinea, this novel charts British anthropologist Andrew Bankson's fascination for colleagues Nell Stone and her husband, Fen, a fascination that turns deadly. How far does the setting play a role in shaping events?
Is there a sense that the three have created their own small universe on the banks of the Sepik River, far removed from the Western world? If so, by whose rules are they playing?. 'She tried not to think about the villages they were passing the tribes she would never know and words she would never hear, the worry that they might right now be passing the one people she was meant to study, a people whose genius she would unlock, and who would unlock hers, a people. This is a damn good book. It's a compelling story with fascinating characters.
Cover to cover, it is just a really great read. Now that we've got that out of the way I want to suggest you ignore other professional reviews of Lily King's Euphoria, at least until after you've read the book yourself. Don't get me wrong. There are no spoilers. But, had I read the reviews, I might have been turned off of this terrific novel about three scientists studying indigenous New Guinea tribes at the height of anthropology's golden age, the early 1930s.
Here's the thing. Most of the reviews I've read (post book) wax on and on about famed anthropologist Margaret Mead and how much research King did in order to write the novel. This book is too fine to place so much emphasis on research, and for me, it is even misleading. (Reviewed by ). This review is available to non-members for a limited time.
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This three-way relationship is complex and involving, but even more fascinating is the depiction of three anthropologists with three entirely diverse ways of studying another culture. Andre Dubus III It is simply one of the finest novels I've read in years, and it puts Lily King firmly in the top rank of our most accomplished novelists. Paula McLain, author of The Paris Wife With Euphoria, Lily King gives us a searing and absolutely mesmerizing glimpse into 1930's New Guinea, a world as savage and fascinating as Conrad's Heart of Darkness, where obsessions rise to a feverish pitch, and three dangerously entangled anthropologists will never be the same again. Jaw-droppingly, heart-stoppingly beautiful. I loved this book. Karl Marlantes I have come to expect Lily King's nuanced explorations of the human heart, but in this novel she pulled me in to the exotic world of a woman anthropologist working with undiscovered tribes in 1930s New Guinea and I was totally captivated. Nell Stone, anthropologist in Lily King's Euphoria, notices the Hawthorne Effect in her work.
What is this? Where did it originate?
In the 1920s and 1930s, the Western Electric Company's management wanted to improve production at their Hawthorne Plant on the outskirts of Chicago, Illinois. So they hired Elton Mayo, a consultant or 'efficiency expert,' to conduct some experiments, record his observations and then recommend a course of action that would boost output on the company's telephone parts assembly line. Mayo concluded that using brighter lights might work. If the employees could see better, their productivity might improve. So new, brighter lights were installed over the line.
Indeed, productivity improved. However, some time.
Lily's new novel is the story of three young, gifted anthropologists in 1933 caught in a passionate love triangle that threatens theirs bonds, their careers, and ultimately their lives. English Anthropologist Andrew Bankson has been alone in the field for several years, studying a tribe on the Sepik River in the Territory of New Guinea with little success. Increasingly frustrated and isolated by his research, Bankson is on the verge of suicide when he encounters the famous and controversial Nell Stone and her wry, mercurial husband Fen. Bankson is enthralled by the magnetic couple whose eager attentions pull him back from the brink of despair.
Set between World War I and II and inspired by events in the life of revolutionary anthropologist Margaret Mead, Euphoria is an enthralling story of passion, possession, exploration and sacrifice from award-winning novelist Lily King. Watch the trailer. Reviews ' Euphoria is an adventure-filled novel written with authority and lyrical grace—a book that transports the reader through sheer narrative drive even as it offers an insightful look at a formative era in anthropological research. This is an unforgettable book that enriches Mead’s biography.'
(Read the full review.) —Julie Hale, BookPage 'King immerses us so fully in the lives of her characters that they remain excellent company beyond the pages of this book. Her research is so well digested that she is able to drop us into the complexities of their work without being didactic.' (Read the full review.) —Camilla Gibb, The Guardian 'My two favorite things about Euphoria: its great feminist heroine and its beautiful writing.' (Read the full review.) —ratherbereading.com 'It’s as if you’re taking the most fascinating anthropology course ever taught—and, after class, over drinks, the rule-breaker of a professor tells you what she’s been up to with her colleagues. Hot stuff. In every way.' (Read the full review.) —Jesse Kornbluth, headbutler.com 'This novel is as concentrated as orchid food, packing as much narrative power and intellectual energy into its 250 pages as novels triple its size.' (Read the full review.) —Marion Winik, Newsday 'A great novelist is like an anthropologist, examining what humans do by habit and custom.
King excels in creating vignettes from Nell’s fieldwork as well as from the bitter conversation of the three love-torn collaborators, making the familiar strange and the strange acceptable. This is a riveting and provocative novel, absolutely first-rate.' (Read the full review.) —Wingate Packard, The Seattle Times 'With her influence on the sexual revolution, Mead was a globe-spanning iconoclast, alarming some and cheering others, becoming finally something of a totem upon which various groups cast their hopes and fears. So it’s refreshing to see the world’s most famous anthropologist brought down to human scale and placed at the center of this svelte new book by Lily King.' (Read the full review.) —Ron Charles, The Washington Post “ Euphoria is a meticulously researched homage to Mead’s restless mind and a considered portrait of Western anthropology in its primitivist heyday. Margaret Mead The characters in my novel Euphoria were initially inspired by the anthropologists Margaret Mead, Reo Fortune and Gregory Bateson. While I have borrowed from the lives and writings of these three, I have told a very different story. Here's what really happened: In late December, 1932, Mead and Fortune, a husband-and-wife team who had been studying two tribes in what was then called the Territory of New Guinea, took a pinnace further up the Sepik River to pay a visit to Gregory Bateson, another anthropologist they had heard was studying in the area.
“Nothing that I had heard or read prepared me for him,” Margaret Mead wrote her colleague, friend, mentor, and lover Ruth Benedict a few days later. “He’s six feet four and yet has all the slender unplaced grace of the most complete fragility.
You’ve no idea how moving six feet four of vulnerable beauty is. He gets all the points, is extraordinarily sensitive to people. For all his utter at sea-ness, he has the kind of authority which people have who are absolutely faithful to their own temperament—I’m more moved than I have been since I met Reo—” Mead and Fortune had been avoiding Bateson for a year and half. He was studying the Iatmul in the Middle Sepik, whose tribes were known for their artistic skill and complex social structures. The Middle Sepik was where they wanted to be, but as they hadn’t wanted to encroach on Bateson’s territory they headed up the Torricceli mountain range for a year to study a gentle highland tribe they named the Arapesh, then down a tributary of the Sepik for five months, where they lived with the hostile Munugumor. When they climbed up into Bateson’s house, he said to her, “You’re tired,” and pulled out a chair.
Lily King Euphoria Review
She sank into that chair, she writes in her memoir, “feeling that these were the first cherishing words I heard from anyone in all the Mundugumor months.' She was tired. She was exhausted.
She had a bad ankle, her “old Samoan neuritis” in her arms, ringworm, malaria, tropical ulcers, and a husband who had stopped acknowledging any physical weakness in himself or his wife. Bateson at that moment, was equally if not more despairing. By some accounts, he had made a suicide attempt prior to their arrival. Desperate for their company, Bateson urged them to stay near him on the Sepik and promised to find them their next tribe. The three spend the next five wild months together locked in a emotional and intellectual love triangle. It was that dynamic between these three academics, these three people who had devoted their lives to piecing together the great spectrum of human behavior but were now wrestling mightily with their own, that drew me to this story. But I did not stick to the facts.
Wikipedia Euphoria Lily King Summary
As I wrote the novel, my characters quickly separated from their real-life inspirations, with desires and impulses all their own, and the tale I tell is very much a work of fiction. A Reading List If you're interested in reading further about Mead, Bateson, anthropology, and Papua New Guinea, the following books helped me immeasurably in my research: Naven by Gregory Bateson; With a Daughter’s Eye: A Memoir of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson by Mary Catherine Bateson; Patterns of Culture by Ruth Benedict; The Last Cannibals by Jens Bjerre; Return to Laughter by Elenore Smith Bowen; One Hundred Years of Anthropology edited by J.O. Brew; The Way of All Flesh by Samuel Butler; T o Cherish the World: Selected Letters of Margaret Mead edited by Margaret M. Caffrey and Patricia A.
Lily King Euphoria Review
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By By June 17, 2014 Blandly scrolling through salacious tweets from nubile pop stars, we can hardly imagine the thrill of revelations in 1928. More than 80 years ago, at a time when contraceptives couldn’t be sent through the mail and movies could only show the “tragic” consequences of premarital sex, Mead published Her study of the psychosexual development of adolescents on the island of Ta’u confronted a self-satisfied United States, where it was still possible to speak of one’s parochial mores as natural and, of course, superior.
With her influence on the sexual revolution, Mead was a globe-spanning iconoclast, alarming some and cheering others, becoming finally something of a totem upon which various groups cast their hopes and fears. So it’s refreshing to see the world’s most famous anthropologist brought down to human scale and placed at the center of this svelte new book. Is King’s first work of historical fiction. For this dramatic new venture, she retains all the fine qualities that made her three previous novels insightful and absorbing, but now she’s working on top of a vast body of scholarly work and public knowledge. And yet “Euphoria” is also clearly the result of ferocious restraint; King has resisted the temptation to lard her book with the fruits of her research.
Poetic in its compression and efficiency, “Euphoria” presumes some familiarity with Mead’s biography for context and background, and yet it also deviates from that history in promiscuous ways. The story reimagines a brief collaboration in New Guinea in the early 1930s involving Mead; her husband, Reo Fortune; and her future husband, Gregory Bateson. King names her characters Nell, Fen and Bankson and presents an episode soaked with romantic despair, tinged with mourning. Bankson begins his narration by announcing, “Three days earlier, I’d gone to the river to drown myself.” Pulled from the water by natives who advise him not to swim with rocks in his pockets, he might have tried again if he hadn’t run into the best- selling anthropologist Nell Stone and her “chippy, tightly wound suck-arse” of a husband, Schuyler Fenwick.
Bankson slides immediately from Thanatos to Eros. “I felt my loneliness bulge out of me like a goiter,” he confesses, “and I wasn’t sure how to hide it from them. Nell and Fen had chased away my thoughts of suicide. But what had they left me with? Fierce desires, a great tide of feeling.” Determined to keep them from heading home, he promises to find Nell and her husband an interesting new tribe to study along the Sepik River — an appropriately “oddball culture” that’s not too violent, not too primitive, and with good art.
“Euphoria” by Lily King. (Handout/Atlantic Monthly) King keeps us mostly in the mind of this gentleman determined not to betray his romantic attraction, and the story that develops reflects Bankson’s brooding but tightly self-controlled personality. (Privately, Nell describes him as a man who “would have a hard time asking for a light in a pub.”) Unwilling to declare his affection, yet unable to stay away from her, Bankson finds himself serving as an embarrassed referee in his new friends’ marriage: Fen wants him around to distract his wife; Nell wants him around to dampen her husband’s violent moods. So Bankson lingers, insisting that he really, really must be going now, while thinking, “The impulse to touch her and all the life in her was something I had to check regularly.” It’s a situation shot through with irony: For all their eagerness to toss out the norms of Western marital relations, Nell and Fen are still struggling to play the traditional roles of husband and wife. Even in the jungle, it’s not easy for Nell to lean in. “All the downplaying I must do starts to rub off on me,” she thinks, “so that I don’t even allow myself a few minutes of private pleasure before the squelching kicks in.” Thousands of miles from “civilization,” she’s still receiving lucrative grants and royalties and hundreds of letters from fans, all of which aggravate her bitterly competitive husband. But some of the novel’s most insightful passages concern the principles of their profession, which they uphold no matter how thwarted by desire and petty jealousy.
At their most ambitious, these scientists felt they might “rip the stars from the sky and write the world anew.” Nell craves that fleeting moment of euphoria when she first feels she truly understands a place. “We’re always, in everything we do in this world, limited by subjectivity,” she says. “But our perspective can have an enormous wingspan, if we give it the freedom to unfurl. The key is to disengage yourself from all your ideas about what is ‘natural.’ ” Bankson’s narration is periodically interrupted by excerpts from Nell’s journal, a mixture of anthropological observations and reflections. It’s here, in these private moments, that we hear her frustrations with Fen, her growing attraction to Bankson and her unbridled aspirations: “I think above all else it is freedom I search for in my work,” she writes, “in these far-flung places, to find a group of people who give each other the room to be in whatever way they need to be.
And maybe I will never find it all in one culture but maybe I can find parts of it in several cultures, maybe I can piece it together like a mosaic and unveil it to the world. But the world is deaf.” Without lending any credence to Derek Freeman’s claim in the early 1980s that Mead misinterpreted Samoan culture, King dramatizes the anthropologist’s challenges in fascinating ways. Beyond the considerable language barrier, there’s the difficulty of encouraging strangers to describe their most intimate feelings and behavior. And how might hiring a sizable percentage of the villagers as servants alter their society? In his most cynical moments, Fen accuses his wife of “discovering” the matriarchal cultures she wishes existed.
Even Bankson, so sympathetic to her cause, wonders, “When only one person is the expert on a particular people, do we learn more about the people or the anthropologist when we read the analysis?” King keeps the novel focused tightly on her three scientists, which makes the glimpses we catch of their New Guinea subjects all the more arresting. We learn about the natives who cut off a finger every time a loved one dies, and in the novel’s eeriest scene, Nell attends a lesbian orgy that corresponds with nothing these scientists have witnessed before. But in general, King seems determined to avoid exoticizing these people, no matter how they may have been regarded in the 1930s. The New Guinea tribespeople remain largely unknown and separate, until the enlightened anthropologists — who fancy that they’re treading so lightly — end up trampling their hosts just as effectively as any other emissaries of Western greed.
Although King has always written coolly about intense emotions, here she captures the amber of one man’s exquisite longing for a woman who changed the way we look at ourselves.