My friend recommended Euphoria to me – and I blindly followed her advice. Perhaps that’s a favour the digital medium in the reading realm has done for us we judge a book less by its cover and more by its online reviews.Located in New Guinea in the 1930’s, the famous and passionate anthropologist Nell Stone, her husband, Fen, and colleague, Bankson, are living among the local tribes, studying and documenting their way of life and culture. Immersing themselves in the primitive ways of tribe, negotiating their way into the inner-circles and maintaining who they are as individuals is a complex challenge with distinct highs, or euphoria, as well as lows.Based on a true life storySoon, an intense love triangle develops and contaminates every aspect of their lives and research for which they all pay a hefty price. The story is a re-imagining and loosely based on the life of iconic anthropologist Margaret Mead. The anthropological research and insight into ‘life in the field’ was as compelling as the protagonists’ past.

• Euphoria Lily King Summary

Book Reviews In Euphoria, the novelist Lily King has taken the known details of that occasion—a 1933 field trip to the Sepik River, in New Guinea, during which Mead and her second husband, Reo Fortune, briefly collaborated with the man who would become her third husband, the English anthropologist Gregory Bateson—and blended them into a story of her own devising. Euphoria Cream Review – Final Verdict This definitely seems like a product that you could take advantage of if you are looking for something powerful which would improve the condition of your skin. If you are having issues with fine lines and wrinkles, this is a product that you might be able to try out.

After three fine works of fiction focused on contemporary families, Lily King broadens her horizons, geographically as well as emotionally, in a novel inspired by a real-life trio of anthropologists in New Guinea during a few fraught months in 1933.She gives them different names, but it’s quite clear that Nell Stone is modeled on Margaret Mead; Fenwick Schuyler on Mead’s second husband, Reo Fortune; and Andrew Bankson on her third, Gregory Bateson. Initially sticking closely to the known facts, King imagines a dramatically different outcome for the trio’s charged interactions. It’s a bold move with mixed results.An atmosphere of foreboding darkens “Euphoria” from its first page. As Nell and Fen leave a tribe called the Mumbanyo (the tribal names are all invented), someone throws something at their canoe: “‘Another dead baby,’ Fen said. He had broken her glasses by then, so she didn’t know if he was joking.”Dead babies don’t seem like great material for a joke, and we wonder exactly how Nell’s husband broke her glasses. We soon learn that the couple “had not agreed on one thing about the Mumbanyo.” Fen was enamored of their war-like ways; Nell was repulsed by their cruelty. They left the tribe seven months ahead of schedule.

“She calls the shots,” Fen bitterly tells Bankson. “We’re on her grant money.” Nell is famous, thanks to her controversial bestseller, “Children of the Kirakira” (i.e., Mead’s “Coming of Age in Samoa”), and her husband seethes with envy.Nell and Fen are en route to Australia when Bankson persuades them to stay in New Guinea and observe another tribe near the Kiona people he is studying. He’s desperate for company and comfort, so lonely that he recently attempted to drown himself, only to be fished out by locals. He’s haunted by the memory of his older brothers’ deaths (one in the World War, one a suicide) and thinks his work with the Kiona is a failure.Whereas Nell exults in the “euphoria” she feels in the field when “you’ve finally got a handle on the place,” Bankson expresses doubts that anthropologists can ever truly understand other cultures. Nell responds by declaring her faith in the scientific process, and we see in their intellectual engagement the first spark of an attraction that will shake her rocky marriage.King sensitively traces the evolving dynamic of their three-cornered relationship. Nell has lost her respect for her husband as an anthropologist. “Fen didn’t want to study the natives; he wanted to be a native,” she muses.

Euphoria Lily King Summary

Yet Nell’s work is driven by “the belief that somewhere on earth there was a better way to live, and that she would find it.” She’s looking for a society that honors strong women; he seeks affirmation that male aggression is the natural order. They both think their friendship with Bankson will help them find a better balance in their marriage.This is all nicely rendered, as is King’s poignant portrait of Nell’s longing for a working partner who doesn’t feel threatened by her success. Also well drawn and increasingly alarming are the indications of Fen’s penchant for physical violence.

What doesn’t ring true is the suggestion made by Nell that “we’re both a little in love with Andrew Bankson.” When a drunk Fen kisses Bankson on the mouth, it comes out of the blue and has no basis in any feelings either character has previously displayed. It’s a jarring anomaly in an otherwise impeccably plotted and motivated narrative.Far more persuasive and evocative is a wonderful scene some weeks later showing the three anthropologists reading the manuscript of Helen Benjamin’s “Arc of Culture” (i.e., Ruth Benedict’s “Patterns of Culture”).