The Lacuna: A Novel

The Lacuna: A Novel (Hardcover)






Authors Barbara Kingsolver

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Product Description
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by by Ron Charles Barbara Kingsolver's new novel, "The Lacuna," is the most mature and ambitious one she's written during her celebrated 20-year career, but it's also her most demanding. Spanning three decades, the story comes to us as a collection of diary entries and memoir, punctuated by archivist's notes, newspaper articles, letters, book reviews and congressional transcripts involving some of the 20th century's most radical figures. The sweetness that leavened "The Bean Trees" and "Animal Dreams" has been burned away, and the lurid melodrama that enlivened "The Poisonwood Bible" has been replaced by the cool realism of a narrator who feels permanently alienated from the world. That central, though oddly faint, character is Harrison Shepherd, a popular writer of romantic adventure novels. Kingsolver neatly weaves this quiet, watchful man through tumultuous events that rocked two countries, and one of the most impressive feats of "The Lacuna" is how convincingly she tracks his developing voice, from when he's a sensitive teenager in 1929 until he becomes a national celebrity in the early 1950s. The story begins in Mexico when Shepherd is 13, but we gradually learn that he was born in Washington, D.C., the product of a doomed marriage between a dull federal bureaucrat and a saucy Mexican beauty. His mother has abandoned America and taken up with a brutal right-wing businessman in tropical Isla Pixol, hoping to land a better husband. Alone and without any formal education, Shepherd begins reading moldy adventure novels and Mexican history, and he also takes up the lifelong practice of journal writing -- "the beginning of hope: a prisoner's plan for escape." Those journals, carefully transcribed and surreptitiously preserved years later, become the bulk of this complicated novel. A "permanent foreigner," not at home in the United States or Mexico and aware that his budding homosexuality must not be expressed, young Shepherd quickly develops an outsider's detached perspective, tinged with loneliness. He has a sharp eye for the beauty of Mexico, its lush tropics and its colorful towns, and Kingsolver convincingly positions him near some of the era's larger-than-life figures. A handy cook, he gets a job making plaster for the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera and eventually becomes a part of his household. Rivera and his wife, the painter Frida Kahlo, leap off these pages in all their flamboyant passion and brilliance, repeatedly cheating on and punishing each other, even while their international reputation blossoms. As Kahlo's closeted gay confidant, Shepherd offers this gifted female artist a rare chance to share her frustrations about her husband and the shadow he casts over her work. Shepherd's connection with Rivera and Kahlo, both committed communists, quickly brings him into contact with their contentious friend Leon Trotsky, and this fascinating section shows the Russian Revolution from the perspective of one of its reviled and isolated engineers.

Product Details
# Hardcover: 528 pages
# Publisher: Harper; 1 edition (November 3, 2009)
# Language: English

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Reviews The Lacuna: A Novel


Summary: In a story told entirely through diary entries and letters, we meet Harrison William Shepherd, a half-Mexican, half-American boy who grows up with his mother in Mexico. He has no education, but his love of reading and writing nurtures his own inner dialog that leads to his success as a writer. But that's getting ahead of the story. First he passes his adolescence working for some of Mexico's most infamous residents in the 1930s - Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, and Lev Trotsky. His break with Mexico is abrupt, and Shepherd moves to America where he embarks on a writing career with the assistance of his invaluable stenographer, Mrs. Violet Brown.

When a novel covers a person's life, from the beginning to the end, it takes on an epic flavor by default. Harrison Shepherd's life could be considered epic even if it was condensed down to a three paragraph obituary. It's an extraordinary tale told during haunting times in both Mexico and the U.S.

The story opens in 1929 and ends in 1951. Harrison William Shepherd (a fictional character) born in the US to a US father and a Mexican mother, is a child in Mexico. Since his parents are both disinterested in parenting, he makes his own way in life. First he is a cook/secretary in the household of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, then for Bolshevik/Marxist Revolutionary Leon Trotsky during his exile in Mexico. After Trotsky is assassinated, Shepherd is encouraged by Kahlo to move to the US where he finally becomes what he was meant to be; an author of historical fiction.