Review: Euphoria

Euphoria by Lily King
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I fell into this book at 8 pm and could not climb out until the sky grew grey-pink with the light of a new day. Finished, I stood but remained rooted to the floor. I just could not move. Euphoria is that kind of book. It seized me.

Lily King makes a deep slice into the lives of three anthropologists working together along New Guinea’s Sepik River. It is fiction but meticulously researched and firmly based on Margaret Mead’s work among the Arapesh, Mundugumor and Tchambuli peoples. She was studying male/female relationships and gender roles in these New Guinea communities.  Below is an image of some of Mead's notes from the time:

Lily King’s book is raw and dark with sinister shadowing throughout. (Think: Conrad’s Heart of Darkness with less bureaucracy and politics but more human turmoil and spectacle.) I could smell the sweat of the Amo people and feel the malarial weakness and chill of the three ethnographers. Most brilliant was the juxtaposition of the drama within the tribal communities they encountered and studied, and the drama unfolding among the themselves -- three professionals, each handicapped by his own scarred soul.

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to live among people who cannot conceive of schedules (as in minutes/hours) or a people who will fling (living) twin newborn babies into a river without a thought, because twins can only mean two fathers/lovers and this is bad luck.

The story is packed with brutal, feral and even alien imagery; the reader must utterly deactivate her own moral compass and arrest all sense of right and wrong -- just to take it in. As you experience this parallel universe of sensibilities, you must also wonder how to weave it into your ideas about life on Earth. What to file this under? Beats me. It is fiction, yes, but based on very similar events, which makes it alarming and disruptive …yet wildly beautiful.

Lily King’s writing is breath-taking.

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