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Summary
Summary
New York Times best-selling author Barbara Kingsolver's first work of fiction in over 10 years, The Lacuna blends historical documents with fictional characters to create a breathtaking story. It's the 1930s, and while Harrison Shepherd works for Mexican painter Diego Rivera, he's also becoming the confidante of Diego's wife, Frida Kahlo. Later forced to flee to the U.S., Shepherd retells his remarkable story through a series of letters and diary entries.
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 (2)
Guardian Review
Barbara Kingsolver's first novel in nine years takes a huge risk in venturing into copiously charted territory. It moves from the muralists and surrealists of the 1930s in the aftermath of the Mexican revolution to the McCarthyite witch-hunt of artists in the late 40s and 50s. Yet in crossing and recrossing the US-Mexican border, as novelists such as Carlos Fuentes have done before her, this novel reveals a singular ambition. It probes, with only partial success, the source of the vexed historical relationship between art and politics in the United States, as well as the gap between a life lived and a life reported. The life in question is that of Harrison William Shepherd, variously dubbed Will, Harry and Insolito. Born in Virginia of an American "bean counter" and a Mexican flapper, he is raised in both countries, eventually becoming the celebrated author of American potboilers about the Aztecs. Shepherd's story opens engagingly with his boyhood in Isla Pixol, an island south of Veracruz, in a Mexico scented with "jasmine, dog piss, cilantro, lime". But the story comes to us in the elusive form of diaries and memoirs, letters and press cuttings. Locked for 50 years in a bank vault until all parties are dead, these fragments were saved by the novelist's stenographer, Violet Brown, from his despairing wish that they be burned. Kingsolver meticulously inserts the fictional Shepherd into pivotal moments of recorded history, using both fictional and actual newspaper reports. As a youth in Mexico City, he sees a tiny woman of regal bearing, her hair "braided in a heavy crown", buying parrots in the street, and becomes a plaster-mixer and cook to her husband, Diego Rivera. Present as Frida Kahlo despairs of Rivera's infidelities and as Lev Trotsky seeks refuge with the revolutionary artist from Stalin's assassins, Shepherd becomes Kahlo's sometime spy and Trotsky's cook and secretary. As a naive and humble typist he plays a bit part in the rift between Trotsky and Rivera, and in Trotsky's murder. Back in the US, as the cold war hots up, these associations draw the scrutiny of the House Un-American Activities Committee. Shepherd's fate seems sealed by the view of a character in one of his novels that "Our leader is an empty sack . . ." - words that the novelist cannot truthfully deny are his own. According to Violet, Shepherd was "averse to making himself known. Even when greatly misunderstood". The novel is at its best in the oblique revelation of this man, with his lacunae of privacy and passion. The young writer is an acute observer whose watchfulness derives partly from his itinerant upbringing - as a "double person made of two different boxes" - and his discreet sexuality. Guilt-ridden for failing to avert his boss's death, and disqualified from US military service for "sexual indifference to the female of the species" ("blue slip"), he spends the second world war couriering paintings to safety for the US state department. In a spiky satire on press presumption, the novel points up the disparity between this man and the persona later ascribed to him as a treacherous "art smuggler, womaniser". A research trip to Merida with his stenographer, an older woman, is written up in the papers as a "January-May romance". Even his sometime lover, Tom Cuddy, deserts him for his reported lack of patriotism. Yet while "lies are infinite in number and the truth so small and singular", the novel also witnesses the advent of celebrities who control and manipulate their own image. Kahlo, garbed as Mexican peasant or Aztec queen, says: "If I don't choose, they choose for me . . . The newspapers would wrap me in gauze and make me a martyred angel, or else a boring jealous wife." Shepherd's interest as a novelist is in "how civilisations fall, and what leads up to that. How we're connected to everything in the past". His lawyer, Arthur Gold, sees anti-communist persecution, not least of artists, as putting poison on the lawn. "It kills your crabgrass all right, and then you have a lot of dead stuff out there for a very long time. Maybe for ever." Kingsolver, who has spoken in a recent US interview of a post-9/11 backlash "against my identity as a political artist", offers a timely re-reminder - for those who need it - of an era when surrealist art could be condemned as "un-American", and foreigners deported for "working for Negro rights". Nor might an undead red spectre from the 50s be lost on an Obama administration mooting healthcare reform: "If Truman calls for any change, education improvements, or Social Security, a chorus shouts him down - welfare state, collectivism, conspiracy." Yet the novel's later sections are marred by overstated irony, the dialogue too often staged between characters who agree, making for an authorial soapbox. More satisfying is an unexpectedly touching coda, in which the quietly besotted Violet keeps faith with the condemned man ("they'll go to the ends of the earth to haul back people they've declared unfit to be Americans," she notes), and a surprise lacuna holds out hope of escape. To order The Lacuna for pounds 17.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop Self- image . . . Frida Kahlo with her husband Diego Rivera and a pet monkey Caption: article-kingsolver.1 In a spiky satire on press presumption, the novel points up the disparity between this man and the persona later ascribed to him as a treacherous "art smuggler, womaniser". A research trip to Merida with his stenographer, an older woman, is written up in the papers as a "January-May romance". Even his sometime lover, Tom Cuddy, deserts him for his reported lack of patriotism. Yet while "lies are infinite in number and the truth so small and singular", the novel also witnesses the advent of celebrities who control and manipulate their own image. [Frida Kahlo], garbed as Mexican peasant or Aztec queen, says: "If I don't choose, they choose for me . . . The newspapers would wrap me in gauze and make me a martyred angel, or else a boring jealous wife." [William Shepherd]'s interest as a novelist is in "how civilisations fall, and what leads up to that. How we're connected to everything in the past". His lawyer, Arthur Gold, sees anti-communist persecution, not least of artists, as putting poison on the lawn. "It kills your crabgrass all right, and then you have a lot of dead stuff out there for a very long time. Maybe for ever." [Barbara Kingsolver], who has spoken in a recent US interview of a post-9/11 backlash "against my identity as a political artist", offers a timely re-reminder - for those who need it - of an era when surrealist art could be condemned as "un-American", and foreigners deported for "working for Negro rights". Nor might an undead red spectre from the 50s be lost on an Obama administration mooting healthcare reform: "If Truman calls for any change, education improvements, or Social Security, a chorus shouts him down - welfare state, collectivism, conspiracy." - Maya Jaggi.
Library Journal Review
Kingsolver's sixth novel, following Prodigal Summer (2000), also available from Recorded Books and Harper Audio, opens in 1930s Mexico. The outsider's view that American expat Harrison Shepherd's perspective affords of this key era in Mexico's artistic and political history should drive the book, but there is too slow a build to the intriguing characters-e.g., Leon Trotsky-he later meets. Though ambitious, this title lacks Kingsolver's usual vitality. Perhaps the audio would have been better served by a professional narrator, or maybe the problem is the blandness of her central character. Whatever the case, Kingsolver's popularity recommends this audio for larger collections. ["Her most timely and powerful novel yet," read the review of the New York Times best-selling HarperCollins hc, LJ 10/15/09.-Ed.]-Joyce Kessel, Villa Maria Coll., Buffalo (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
