Product Description

In her most accomplished novel, Barbara Kingsolver takes us on an epic journey from the Mexico City of artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo to the America of Pearl Harbor, FDR, and J. Edgar Hoover. The Lacuna is a poignant story of a man pulled between two nations as they invent their modern identities.

Born in the United States, reared in a series of provisional households in Mexico—from a coastal island jungle to 1930s Mexico City—Harrison Shepherd finds precarious shelter but no sense of home on his thrilling odyssey. Life is whatever he learns from housekeepers who put him to work in the kitchen, 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 meets 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. He finds support from an unlikely kindred soul, his stenographer, Mrs. Brown, who will be far more valuable to her employer than he could ever know. 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, Barbara Kingsolver has created an unforgettable portrait of the artist—and of art itself. The Lacuna is a rich and daring work of literature, establishing its author as one of the most provocative and important of her time.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #69 in Books
• Published on: 2009-11-01
• Released on: 2009-11-03
• Format: Deckle Edge
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 528 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780060852573
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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From Publishers Weekly
Starred 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.)
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From The Washington Post
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. Constantly at risk of assassination by Stalin's death squads, Trotsky and his frightened wife remain awkwardly holed up in Rivera's house, trying to carry on the workers' battle without money, without an army, without anything but his prodigious writings, which Shepherd neatly types up for him each day. In this touching portrayal of a doomed idealist, the out-maneuvered leader can hardly ignore his irrelevancy. "In 1917 I commanded an army of five million men," he tells Shepherd. "Now I command eleven hens." It's a loser's game trying to estimate the peculiar boundaries of my own ignorance, but I'm willing to go out on a limb and suggest that most readers could use more background than we get here on Trotsky, Rivera and Kahlo. Kingsolver has made Shepherd's diary so realistic that it shows little sense of the needs of some future, public readership. But for the truly interested, background information is newly available: Bertrand M. Patenaude recently published "Trotsky: Downfall of a Revolutionary," a biography of the man's final years in exile. And this month, Robert Service completes his trilogy on the founders of the Soviet Union with "Trotsky." Both books offer a lively and finely detailed description of the bizarre household that Kingsolver dramatizes. The second half of "The Lacuna" shifts, like "The Poisonwood Bible," from an exotic foreign land to the United States. Shepherd moves to a small town in North Carolina in the 1940s and eventually finds himself in the odd position of being an agoraphobic, homosexual heartthrob to millions of female readers. "Nearly every day," he confesses, "I wake up shocked at how little in this world I comprehend." Though this section is much less dramatic than his adventures in Mexico, it offers an absorbing portrayal of American life at a time when the country moved swiftly from Depression, to World War, to consumerism spun through with political paranoia. The other considerable pleasure of this second half is the subtle depiction of Shepherd's relationship with his discreet secretary, Violet Brown, a 46-year-old widow, "sensible as pancake flour," who speaks in the antiquated English of Shakespeare's day. Theirs is an intense but formal affiliation, cemented by her devotion and his respect. In the notes she supplies to Shepherd's journals, she remarks on his "secretive temperament" and suggests that he suffered from "some kind of dread that went past the bashfulness." But she's determined to preserve his memory, even if he exists in these voluminous clippings and diary entries only as a kind of lacuna, or missing space, whose life is suggested by the shape of everything he describes around him. It's a lovely portrait of an intensely private writer, a man who suffered both the benefits of fame and the horrible costs. From beginning to end, though, this is also a novel of capital-L Liberal ideas -- workers' rights, sexual equality, artistic freedom -- the kind of progressive causes that Kingsolver tries to encourage with her Bellwether Prize for socially responsible fiction. More often than not, that's a recipe for Literature for the Betterment of the People, in which all the precious brown-skinned characters and the requisite Mystical Negro line up against a battalion of wicked white landowners. Kingsolver is far too good a writer for that (though not all the Bellwether winners are), but the concluding section of "The Lacuna," in which Shepherd is harassed by J. Edgar Hoover's cronies, recites a predictable Red Scare story we've heard many times before: the just-the-facts FBI agent who asks incriminating questions, the mysterious collapse of the blacklisted writer's career, the outrageous behavior of the House Un-American Activities Committee. Considering the audience for literary fiction -- Kingsolver's in particular -- it's unlikely that "The Lacuna" will shock or change a single right-thinking mind. Nevertheless, this rich novel is certainly bigger than its politics. It resurrects several dramatic events of the early 20th century that have fallen out of public consciousness, brings alive the forgotten details of everyday life in the 1940s, and illustrates how attitudes and prejudices are shaped by political opportunism and the rapacious media. But despite this large, colorful canvas, ultimately "The Lacuna" is a tender story about a thoughtful man who just wanted to enjoy that basic American right: the right to be left alone. As he was fond of saying, "The most important part of the story is the piece of it you don't know." charlesr@washpost.com
Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine
The Lacuna contains two very distinct parts. One features a vibrant Mexican landscape with the equally colorful personalities of Rivera, Kahlo, and Trotsky. The other centers more on Harrison's reclusive existence in small-town America and his battle with the House Un-American Activities Committee. Despite the prodigious research that both parts exhibit, critics clearly preferred the former, marveling at Kingsolver's lyrical passages and her expert recreation of 1930s Mexico. A few reviewers also noted instances of sermonizing and inaccurate history. However, the novel's compelling, engrossing story certainly outweighed these minor complaints, and in the end, Kingsolver has created a convincing "tableau vivant of epochs and people that time has transformed almost past recognition" (New York Times Book Review).

Customer Reviews

This is Literature with a capital L
Plot 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.

I've spent the past two days in close communion with this novel, and it has moved me deeply. It's not often that I abandon popular literature for the big fish, but Barbara Kingsolver is one of the few authors whose writing entertains me in all forms - novels, essays and non-fiction. I suppose I'm like a book groupie, following her whether she's spinning yarns in the Southwest, or matter of factly walking me through slaughter day when her chicken's days are numbered. Make no mistake, her latest effort is Literature with a capital L, and the story is so poignant it could make a stone weep in sympathy. And weep I did. Frequently.

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. I regret that I don't know as much as I should about the history before, during, and after World War II, but I will use this novel as a crutch for my shoddy memory. This is history refracted through a miniscule lens; a tiny dot that represents the life of a boy who becomes a man.

It's a scary proposition trying to populate a work of fiction with famous dead people. I don't know if Ms. Kingsolver got it all right, although I don't doubt that her research was extensive, however it doesn't matter. She brought everyone back to life in full color, so bright and blinding it almost hurt my eyes. I will always carry around these portraits of Frida and Trotsky, along with Shepherd and Violet Brown. They are permanently inked onto my imagination.

The Crucial Missing Piece -" The Lacuna"
Barbara Kingsolver has written a book of historical fiction that reads like a Frida Kahlo painting: allegory, poetry, beauty & pain. Kingsolver writes likes a great artist paints.

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.

The backbone of the story is the Communist/Worker's Movement in Mexico & the US and Rivera, Kahlo & Trotsky's part in it. They provide the political dialogue. Kingsolver imagines what it would have been like living in these households during this turbulent period. The story culminates with Shepherd being called before the US Committee on Un-American Activities. But the story is about so much more than politics and history.

If you are an admirer of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, reading this book will be like contemplating their art. The story mirrors the politics and history portrayed in Rivera's murals and the pain and beauty of Kahlo's paintings.

If you enjoy reading historical fiction, this is a beautifully written example.

Is it really just me? So disappointed.
I adore Barbara Kingsolver; Poisonwood Bible was one of the great reading experiences of my life. I even read her book about vegetables, and I hate vegetables! Yes, she's always had a political agenda, but in the past, this agenda was complemented by a great sense of story and a sly humor. In this book, both are absent, and you're just left with all the worst parts of her writing: the politics, the tendency to lecture, and the show-offy "I know more than anyone else" kind of aesthetic. Here, she appears to be more concerned with using literary tricks to prove her thesis than she is in telling a story. She says she wanted to write about a loss of identity, so she creates a narrator who is so disconnected from himself that he cannot even acknowledge his own existence in his journal. It plays like a gimmick: "watch me spend 280 pages writing the journal of a character who will never say "I"! It made the story so frustrating to read. She repeats the "lacuna" idea throughout - that the most important part of any story is the part you don't know - but there is no narrative payoff. The "missing part" is easy to guess and not that interesting. Obviously others disagree with me, and I respect that. But for what it's worth, here is one opposing view.