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Summary
Summary
New York Times Bestseller * A Best Book of the Year: New York Times, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, Seattle Times, and Kansas City Star * Winner of the Orange Prize
"Breathtaking. . . dazzling." -- New York Times Book Review
"Her best novel yet. . . both epic and deeply personal. . . . This is thought-provoking, and potentially thought-changing, historical fiction at its best." -- Dallas Morning News
In this powerfully imagined, provocative novel, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Barbara Kingsolver takes us on an epic journey from the Mexico of artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo to the America of Pearl Harbor, FDR, and J. Edgar Hoover. The Lacuna is the poignant story of a man pulled between two nations as well as an unforgettable portrait of the artist--and of art itself.
Born in the United States, raised in Mexico, Harrison Shepherd lacks a sense of home in either. Life is whatever he learns from housekeepers who put him to work in the kitchen; from errands he runs in the streets; and, one fateful day, by mixing plaster for famed Mexican muralist Diego Rivera. He discovers a passion for Aztec history and the exotic, imperious artist Frida Kahlo, who will become his lifelong friend. When he goes to work for Lev Trotsky, an exiled political leader fighting for his life, Shepherd inadvertently casts his lot with art and revolution, newspaper headlines and howling gossip, and a risk of terrible violence.
Meanwhile, to the north, the United States will soon be caught up in the internationalist goodwill of World War II. There, in the land of his birth, Shepherd believes he might remake himself in America's hopeful image and claim a voice of his own. Through darkening years, political winds continue to toss him between north and south in a plot that turns many times on the unspeakable breach--the lacuna--between truth and public presumption.
With deeply compelling characters, a vivid sense of place, and a clear grasp of how history and public opinion can shape a life, Kingsolver has created a rich and daring work of literature, establishing its author as one of the most provocative and important of her time.
Author Notes
Barbara Kingsolver was born on April 8, 1955 in Annapolis, Maryland and grew up in Eastern Kentucky. As a child, Kingsolver used to beg her mother to tell her bedtime stories. She soon started to write stories and essays of her own, and at the age of nine, she began to keep a journal. After graduating with a degree in biology form De Pauw University in Indiana in 1977, Kingsolver pursued graduate studies in biology and ecology at the University of Arizona in Tucson. She earned her Master of Science degree in the early 1980s.
A position as a science writer for the University of Arizona soon led Kingsolver into feature writing for journals and newspapers. Her articles have appeared in a number of publications, including The Nation, The New York Times, and Smithsonian magazines. In 1985, she married a chemist, becoming pregnant the following year. During her pregnancy, Kingsolver suffered from insomnia. To ease her boredom when she couldn't sleep, she began writing fiction
Barbara Kingsolver's first fiction novel, The Bean Trees, published in 1988, is about a young woman who leaves rural Kentucky and finds herself living in urban Tucson. Since then, Kingsolver has written other novels, including Holding the Line, Homeland, and Pigs in Heaven. In 1995, after the publication of her essay collection High Tide in Tucson: Essays from Now or Never, Kingsolver was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from her alma mater, De Pauw University. Her latest works include The Lacuna and Flight Behavior.
Barbara's nonfiction book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle was written with her family. This is the true story of the family's adventures as they move to a farm in rural Virginia and vow to eat locally for one year. They grow their own vegetables, raise their own poultry and buy the rest of their food directly from farmers markets and other local sources.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Kingsolver's ambitious new novel, her first in nine years (after the The Poisonwood Bible), focuses on Harrison William Shepherd, the product of a divorced American father and a Mexican mother. After getting kicked out of his American military academy, Harrison spends his formative years in Mexico in the 1930s in the household of Diego Rivera; his wife, Frida Kahlo; and their houseguest, Leon Trotsky, who is hiding from Soviet assassins. After Trotsky is assassinated, Harrison returns to the U.S., settling down in Asheville, N.C., where he becomes an author of historical potboilers (e.g., Vassals of Majesty) and is later investigated as a possible subversive. Narrated in the form of letters, diary entries and newspaper clippings, the novel takes a while to get going, but once it does, it achieves a rare dramatic power that reaches its emotional peak when Harrison wittily and eloquently defends himself before the House Un-American Activities Committee (on the panel is a young Dick Nixon). "Employed by the American imagination," is how one character describes Harrison, a term that could apply equally to Kingsolver as she masterfully resurrects a dark period in American history with the assured hand of a true literary artist. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
In her first novel in nine years, Kingsolver displays the same ambition she exhibited in her best-selling The Poisonwood Bible (1998). Moving her story between Mexico and the U.S. and covering some 20 years in the life of Harrison William Shepherd, born to a social-climbing Mexican mother and an emotionally distant American father, who eventually divorce, Kingsolver weaves in pointed social commentary on dark moments in the history of both countries. Zelig-like, Shepherd is present at disturbing yet key historical events, including the violent 1933 Bonus March in Washington, D.C. Kicked out of a military academy for a homosexual liaison, Shepherd returns to Mexico; is taken into the household of Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, and the exiled Leon Trotsky; and witnesses Trotsky's assassination. He eventually settles in Asheville, North Carolina, becoming well known as an author of historical fiction and coming to the attention of the House Un-American Activities Committee for his leftist leanings. Kingsolver packs her novel with rich detail on everything from underwater caves to the proper way to mix the plaster Rivera uses in his murals, relaying information through a pastiche of letters, newspaper excerpts, and diary entries. As a result, the novel can be slow going, but the final section, devoted to the loving if platonic relationship between Shepherd and his dedicated stenographer, builds to a stunningly moving coda, conveying the tender emotions between two outsiders who have created their own sanctuary in the face of a hostile mainstream culture.--Wilkinson, Joanne Copyright 2009 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
A SKINNY young boy holds his breath and dives into the mouth of an underwater cave - a lacuna - swimming toward pale blue light as his lungs scream for oxygen. He emerges, gasping, in a ghostly cenote, a sinkhole in the Mexican jungle fringed with broken coral, wedged with human bones: a place of sacrifice and buried remembrance. When the tide rushes out, it will take the boy with it, "dragging a coward explorer back from the secret place, sucking him out through the tunnel and spitting him into the open sea" He'll paddle to shore and walk home, obsessed forever after by hidden passages that contain deeper meanings - meanings that only art may recapture. He'll acquire a notebook and fill it with stories and memories; when it's full, he'll begin another and then another. But were he to consign these notebooks to the scrapheap, how would their mysteries be known? Who dares plunge into the wreckage of a discarded history, not knowing the risks of retrieval? Barbara Kingsolver's breathtaking new novel, "Lacuna," follows this quiet, dreamy boy, Harrison William Shepherd, from 1929 to 1951. When we first meet him, he's 12 years old, living at a hacienda on Isla Pixol with his self-dramatizing mother, Salomé, both of them petrified by the howling monkeys in the trees above, which they believe to be carnivorous demons. "You had better write all this in your notebook," Salomé tells Shepherd, "so when nothing is left of us but bones, someone will know where we went." A year earlier, Salomé, a slang-slinging Mexican beauty, had ditched her drab American husband (Shepherd's father) in Washington, D.C., and chased an oilman back to his Mexican estate. On Isla Pixol, as Salomé sulks over her love life like a bobby-soxer, lonely Shepherd befriends the hacienda's cook, who turns the boy into a sous-chef while innocently cluing the kid into his sexuality (which bobby-soxers will never unleash). Shepherd's other close companions are the volumes in the hacienda library and his notebook, which he regards as "a prisoner's plan for escape." In the short term, though, it's Salomé who escapes Isla Pixol, dragging the boy with her, bolting for Mexico City in pursuit of an American she calls "Mr. Produce the Cash" - and, after him, others. His mother is not a puta, Shepherd reflects, with detached sympathy, even as he overhears her "bedroom jolly-ups" through thin walls. She's just a romantic woman who yearns for "an admirer" as she tries to put a roof over their heads. Nonetheless, while still in his teens the boy embarks upon a different path, toward a life unruled by passion. "People contort themselves around the terror of being alone, making any compromise against that," he observes later in life. "It's a great freedom to give up on love and get on with everything else." But it's a freedom more easily imagined than lived. Leaving his mother to her Mme. Bovary messes, Shepherd parlays his domestic skills into a job mixing plaster for Diego Rivera's murals ("It's like making dough for pan dulce") and joins the Rivera household as cook and typist for Rivera, his artist wife, Frida Kahlo, and later for their guest, the exiled Communist leader Leon Trotsky. In this incendiary, revolutionary household, Shepherd keeps mum and lets louder egos roar, just as he did on Isla Pixol. Baking bread by day, he records the daily dramas of this entourage by night, along with a draft of his first novel, an epic of the Aztec empire. But in 1940, when Trotsky is assassinated, Shepherd leaves Mexico, spooked by the virulent press that denounces his employers and their murdered ward "like the howlers on Isla Pixol." At the age of 24, he returns to the United States and settles in Asheville, N.C. There he becomes a reclusive, gentlemanly author of swashbuckling Mexican historical novels ("Vassals of Majesty," "Pilgrims of Chapultepec") until the ungentlemanly House Un-American Activities Committee drags him into the spotlight, rewriting his character in crude strokes for the public stage. Shepherd had thought discretion would protect him, since his private thoughts were safely interred in his journals. "Dios habla por el que calla," he likes to tell his devoted Asheville secretary, Violet Brown: " God speaks for the silent man." But Brown, who knows that God doesn't always speak as loudly as Senator McCarthy, tells her boss that unlike another local writer, Thomas Wolfe, he was prudent to set his fiction outside Asheville - and America. "People love to read of sins and errors, just not their own," she remarks. "You were wise to put your characters far from here." As it turns out, they weren't far enough. The book we read today, Brown reveals, was assembled by herself in 1959 from Shepherd's junked notebooks and sealed for 50 years, to be opened in 2009 - when she hoped it could inform readers about "those who labored and birthed the times they have inherited." How can the experiences of a fictional loner merge with those of larger-than-life figures who played a pivotal role in world politics? And what can readers learn from their intersection? Those are the questions answered by this dazzling novel, which plunges into Shepherd's notebooks to dredge up not only the perceptions they conceal but also a history larger than his own, touching on everything from Trotskyism, Stalinism and the Red scare to racism, mass hysteria and the media's intrusion into personal and national affairs. More than half a century on, names like Trotsky, Rivera, Kahlo and McCarthy can lose their definition, like coins with the faces rubbed off. Shepherd's reminiscences step in where the historical record can't, restoring human contours. To Shepherd, working as a cook in the Rivera kitchen, Trotsky was more than a defender of the working man; he was a person of flesh and blood - "compact, muscular," with the build of a peasant, who clasped a pen "as if it were an ax handle" and liked to feed chickens when he wasn't unspooling his thoughts on the Fourth International. Trotsky's optimism - while he was in exile and under death threats - leads Shepherd to marvel, "Does a man become a revolutionary out of the belief he's entitled to joy rather than submission?" FRIDA KAHLO tells Shepherd he has a "pierced soul" like her own and respects his artistic commitment, even as she teases him cruelly for his closeted sexual drives. "To be a good artist you have to know something that's true," she tells him; and reputation isn't worth worrying about. "People will always stare at the queer birds like you and me," she says, in a spirit of defiance, not empathy. Coasting on a pleasure boat through the floating gardens of Xochimilco with Trotsky (who was briefly her lover), Shepherd and Trotsky's secretary, Van, whom Shepherd secretly loves, Kahlo buys a woven toy called a trapanovio "for catching boyfriends" and taunts him to try it on Van. Shepherd keeps the toy as a "souvenir of a remarkable humiliation." Yet Shepherd, who learned compassion for others, if not for himself, at his diva mother's knee, soothes Kahlo when Rivera wants a divorce. "Even in her disconsolate state she looked like a peacock," he notices. "Perfectly dressed in a green silk skirt and enough jewelry to sink a boat. Even drowning, Frida would cling to vanity." Such texture doesn't interest the heavies from the House Un-American Activities Committee,for whom the names Trotsky, Rivera and Kahlo set off Communist-menace alarm bells. In 1947, meeting with his lawyer in North Carolina to discuss a letter from J. Edgar Hoover, Shepherd doesn't understand why the F.B.I, would care about his Mexican past. "I was a cook," he explains. "Let me just say," the lawyer replies, "these subtleties are lost." "The Lacuna" can be enjoyed sheerly for the music of its passages on nature, archaeology, food and friendship; or for its portraits of real and invented people; or for its harmonious choir of voices. But the fuller value of Kingsolver's novel lies in its call to conscience and connection. She has mined Shepherd's richly imagined history to create a tableau vivant of epochs and people that time has transformed almost past recognition. Yet it's a tableau vivant whose story line resonates in the present day, albeit with different players. Through Shepherd's resurrected notebooks, Kingsolver gives voice to truths whose teller could express them only in silence. Liesl Schillinger is a regular contributor to the Book Review.
Kirkus Review
Unapologetically political metafiction from Kingsolver (Prodigal Summer, 2000, etc.) about the small mistakes or gaps (lacunas) that change history. Set in leftist Mexico in the 1930s and the United States in the '40s and '50s, the novel is a compilation of diary entries, newspaper clippings (real and fictional), snippets of memoirs, letters and archivist's commentary, all concerning Harrison Shepherd. In 1929, Harrison's Mexican-born mother deserts his American father, a government bureaucrat, and drags 11-year-old Harrison back to Mexico to live with her rich lover on a remote island. There Harrison discovers his first lacuna, an underwater cave that leads to a secret pool. As his mother moves from man to man, Harrison learns to fend for himself. His disastrous two-year stint at boarding school back in America is marked by his awakening homosexuality (left vague thanks to the lacuna of a missing diary) and his witnessing of the Hoover administration's violent reaction to a riot of World War I homeless vets. In 1935, Harrison returns to Mexico, where he becomes first a lowly but beloved member of the Diego Rivera/Frida Kahlo household, then secretary to Leon Trotsky until Trotsky's assassination. Kingsolver is at her best in the pages brimming with the seductive energy of '30s Mexico: its colors, tastes, smells, the high drama of Trotsky and Kahlo, but also the ordinary lives of peasants and the working poor. When Harrison returns to the States, however, the novel wilts. His character never evolves, and the dialogue grows increasingly polemic as his story becomes a case study of the postwar anticommunist witch-hunt. Harrison moves to Asheville, N.C., writes fabulously popular novels about ancient Mexico, hires as his secretary a widow whom the reader knows already as his archivist, and is then hounded out of the country by the House Un-American Activities Committee, with fateful results. A richly satisfying portrait of Mexico gives way to a preachy, padded and predictable chronicle of Red Scare America. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Diego Rivera's mural in Mexico's Palacio Nationale was only half complete the day young Harrison Shepherd stood transfixed before it, but he would be forever captive to the extraordinary power of the imagination. A solitary child, a devourer of books, left to his own devices by a mother chasing unattainable men and a father pencil pushing for the government back in the States, Harrison observes and he writes. When a quirk of fate lands him in the home of Communist sympathizers Rivera and Frida Kahlo, Rivera's wife, Harrison becomes enmeshed in the turbulent history that will inform his life and work. Through the distinctive voices of Harrison and his insightful amanuensis, Violet Brown, Kingsolver paints a verbal panorama spanning three decades and two countries. World War I veterans protesting for benefits denied, the unleashing of the atomic bomb, the McCarthy hearings, censorship of the arts, and abuse by the press corps lend credence to the sentiment that the more things change, the more they remain the same. Verdict As in The Poisonwood Bible, Kingsolver perfects the use of multiple points of view, even reprinting actual newspaper articles to blur the line between fact and fiction. This is her most ambitious, timely, and powerful novel yet. Well worth the wait.-Sally Bissell, Lee Cty. Lib. Syst., Ft. Myers, FL (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
