When Harrison returns to the States, however, the novel wilts. 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. 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. 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.
As his mother moves from man to man, Harrison learns to fend for himself. There Harrison discovers his first lacuna, an underwater cave that leads to a secret pool. 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. 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. A violent upheaval sends him back to America but political winds continue to throw him between north and south, in a plot that turns many times on the unspeakable breach - the lacuna - between truth and public presumption.Unapologetically political metafiction from Kingsolver ( Prodigal Summer, 2000, etc.) about the small mistakes or gaps (lacunas) that change history. A compulsive diarist, he records and relates his colourful experiences of life with Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo and Trotsky in the midst of the Mexican revolution. When he starts work in the household of Mexican artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo - where the Bolshevik leader, Lev Trotsky, is also being harboured as a political exile - he inadvertently casts his lot with art, communism and revolution.
WINNER OF THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2010įrom Pulitzer Prize nominee and award winning author of Homeland, The Poisonwood Bible and Flight Behaviour, The Lacuna is the heartbreaking story of a man torn between the warm heart of Mexico and the cold embrace of 1950s America in the shadow of Senator McCarthy.īorn in America and raised in Mexico, Harrison Shepherd is a liability to his social-climbing flapper mother, Salome. **DEMON COPPERHEAD: THE NEW BARBARA KINGSOLVER NOVEL IS AVAILABLE FOR PRE-ORDER NOW**
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