Book of the Week

Euphoria by Lily King
Recommended by Mrs Holmes

Euphoria is the 2014 Kirkus Prize winning novel by Lily King. It is essentially a curious love affair of the 1930’s, largely based on the period the American anthropologist and feminist icon Margaret Mead spent researching traditional cultures in the Sepik Valley in Papua New Guinea.

The tale of the ménage à trois sweeps one onwards to an unsettling dénouement but the most interesting aspect of the novel is the description of the diverse, rich and strange social structures of the region which in the remoter areas of the country are little changed today.
A personal visit to the Karawari River, which can be reached only by boat or small aircraft, this last summer testifies to this.

The challenging climate and encounters with non-western ways of thinking experienced were exactly conveyed in the novel. As a foreigner, even though female, I was allowed into a spirit house and a men’s house where I was shown a sacred magic flute, one of which was at the heart of a conflict depicted in the novel. A wonderfully informative but weighty tome, The World Until Yesterday, by Jared Diamond, the scholar variously described as bio-geographer, evolutionary biologist, and physiologist, verifies much of the anthropological detail in the novel.

The value of both books is summed up by Wade Davis writing in the Guardian: 'the voices of traditional societies ultimately matter because they can still remind us that there are indeed alternatives, other ways of orienting human beings in social, spiritual and ecological space.'