Peggot, who had delivered Damon all those years ago.ĭemon Copperhead has some of the same preoccupations as Dickens’ original-what widespread, institutional poverty does to children, how the system fails these kids, the effect that lingering trauma can have upon the juvenile consciousness. Murdstone) and the Peggot family next door, led by the redoubtable Mrs. Damon (who soon acquires the moniker ‘Demon’ and has an absentee father with the last name ‘Copperhead’) is pretty much brought up by his abusive stepfather Murrell Stone (known as ‘Stoner’, a stand-in for the Dickensian Mr. Kingsolver’s protagonist Damon Field is born, in the 1980s, to a trailer-dwelling, substance-abusing mother who’s high on gin, amphetamines and painkilling pills at the time of his birth. Kingsolver lives with her family on a farm in Southwestern Virginia, which is part of America’s Appalachia region (Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, North and South Carolina and so on).ĭemon Copperhead is set in the Appalachia region, and is a reworking of perhaps the most nakedly sentimental (and personal favourite of the author) of all Charles Dickens novels David Copperfield.
The 68-year-old Kingsolver’s works (including and especially her bestselling novel The Poisonwood Bible, about a family of missionaries in Congo) have been praised by critics around the world for their emphasis on social justice, inequality and ecological issues.
Earlier this week, Barbara Kingsolver’s novel Demon Copperhead was announced the joint winner of the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, alongside Hernan Diaz’s novel Trust.
0 kommentar(er)
