Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} A Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver The Lacuna. Barbara Kingsolver magnificently re-creates 1930s Mexico City in her first novel in nine years. October 30, 2009. Everyone has plot holes in his life story. The gap in Harrison William Shepherd’s personal narrative is big enough for a grown man to swim through. “The most important part of the story is the piece you don’t know,” he is fond of saying. That piece, as author Barbara Kingsolver helpfully explains, is known as a lacuna. Kingsolver (“The Poisonwood Bible”), a recipient of the National Humanities Medal, explores those gaps and the way they can alter people’s lives in The Lacuna , her first novel in nine years. (In between, she also published a bestselling memoir, “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle” about her family’s efforts to eat locally for one year. You will never look at rhubarb the same way again.) “The Lacuna” may be her most ambitious novel to date. The national identities of Mexico and America are forged as Shepherd’s life is narrated through a compilation of journal entries, excerpts from memoirs, newspaper clippings – both real and fake – congressional testimony, and notes from Shepherd’s archivist. Shepherd is a perpetual outsider who essentially raised himself with some help from a kind cook. His mother, a flapper who lived convinced that the next romance was going to be her ticket to riches, brought him to Mexico in the 1920s, but couldn’t be bothered to send him to school for years at a time. While living on an island with his mother and her current lover, Shepherd finds his first lacuna – an underwater tunnel “like a mouth, that swallows things.” Like Alice, he finds that dropping through a hole in the world leads to wonder. “At the end of the tunnel the cave opens up to light, a small salt-water pool in the jungle. Almost perfectly, as big across as this bedchamber, with sky straight up, dappled and bright through the branches. Piles of stone blocks lay in a jumble around the edges of the pool, a broken-down something made of coral rock. Vines scrambled all over the ruin, their roots curling down through it like fingers in sand. It was a temple or something very ancient.” His American father, a government employee, seems indifferent to missing the childhood of his only son, but does pony up for military school when Shepherd is a teen. He prefers that the boy not come home for summer vacation. (Shepherd doesn’t even have an official first name: His mother calls him Will; his dad, Harrison.) During his childhood, Shepherd learns a few useful skills: how to hold his breath underwater for almost two minutes, how to bake, and how to pass through life virtually unnoticed. They all come in handy during the course of the novel, but the second brings him employment after he’s kicked out of military school for unstated reasons and returns to Mexico. (The journal from his last year in high school has been burned, his archivist informs us, but it’s pretty clear to a reader that his expulsion relates to his homosexuality. This would be “the missing piece of the manuscript.”) His skill with flour makes him an excellent mixer of plaster, and he’s hired by famed Mexican muralist Diego Rivera. Rivera soon installs him in his tempestuous household as a cook/secretary. There, Shepherd meets the imperious genius Frida Kahlo, Rivera’s wife and fellow artist. Kahlo, unable and unwilling to pronounce “Harrison,” promptly christens him Insolíto – Soli, for short – and remains a lifelong, if capricious, benefactor. As if the house weren’t filled with enough outsized personalities, the Riveras take in Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky and his wife and shelter them from Stalin’s assassins. And Rivera loans Trotsky his bilingual cook as a typist – a switch that eventually becomes permanent. In between his secretarial duties and making tamales for 100, Shepherd records everything in his diaries. This section is the heart of “The Lacuna,” and it’s among the most compelling writing of Kingsolver’s career. She does a wonderful job of re- creating the vibrancy and drama of life in 1930s Mexico. After Trotsky’s assassination in 1940, Kahlo, fearful of Shepherd’s safety, spirits him back to America, where the heartbroken young man settles in Asheville, N.C., and becomes a writer of historical bestsellers. Kingsolver’s writing doesn’t lose any of its skill in the last section of the novel. But Shepherd himself is, of emotional necessity, so tightly buttoned down that some of the color drains away when his memoirs focus more directly on himself. The loss of Kahlo’s presence is keenly felt. Shepherd’s quietly insightful secretary, Violet Brown, is one of the few genuine friends the lonely man has, but is hardly a substitute for the fiery artist Shepherd called “an Azteca queen.” This is also the most overtly political section of the novel, as Kingsolver sets up a showdown between Shepherd and the House Un-American Activities committee. It’s witty and intelligent but also a tad preachy, and it lacks the emotional resonance that came before. Shepherd himself is ambivalent about his journals. Writing is a compulsion, but at times he’s convinced that “accumulating words is a charlatan’s game.” He’s fond of quoting a Mexican saying that God speaks for the silent man. During the “red scare” in America, though, it’s entirely unclear whether Joseph McCarthy or J. Edgar Hoover would have listened, even to the Almighty. A mere Harrison Shepherd wouldn’t stand a chance. The Lacuna | 2009. 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. Critics' Praise. “Every few years, you read a book that makes everything else in life seem unimportant. The Lacuna is the first book in a long time that made me swap my bike for public transport, just so I could keep reading.” — THE INDEPENDENT (UK) “Breathtaking. dazzling. 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. Kingsolver gives voice to truths whose teller could express them only in silence.” — NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW. “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.” — PUBLISHERS WEEKLY. “Kingsolver's exploration (through all five senses) of Mexican and American geographies, weather, people, food, cultures, politics, languages and era-bound events—Hoover through World War II, Truman, Nagasaki—is masterful, and a reader receives the great gift of entering not one but several worlds.” — THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE. “The novel is a brilliant mix of truth and fiction, history and imagination … [making] for a compelling and utterly believable read.” —BOOKPAGE. “As in The Poisonwood Bible , Kingsolver perfects the use of multiple points of view . This is her most ambitious, timely, and powerful novel yet.” — LIBRARY JOURNAL. “Before reading [ The Lacuna ], I would have sworn that 1998's The Poisonwood Bible was her masterpiece, not to be surpassed; it was as close to a truly perfect book as I've ever read. This one's even closer to that lofty goal.” — DALLAS MORNING NEWS. “Kingsolver's seventh work of fiction is hopeful, political and artistic. The Lacuna fills a lacuna with powerfully imagined social history.” — CHICAGO TRIBUNE. Flight Behavior: A Novel | 2012. Barbara Kingsolver returns to native ground in her fourteenth book, FLIGHT BEHAVIOR (Harper; On Sale November 6, 2012; $28.99). The novel is a heady exploration of climate change, along with media exploitation and political opportunism that lie at the root of what may be our most urgent modern dilemma. Set in Appalachia, a region to which Kingsolver has returned often in both her acclaimed fiction and nonfiction, its suspenseful narrative traces the unforeseen impact of global concerns on the ordinary citizens of a rural community. As environmental, economic, and political issues converge, the residents of Feathertown, Tennessee, are forced to come to terms with their changing place in the larger world. Dellarobia Turnbow, the engaging central character who sets things in motion, is ready for a change of any kind. A mother of young children, trapped in claustrophobic rural poverty, Dellarobia long ago repressed any ambitions or promise of her own. Her husband, Cub — whom she married as a pregnant teenager — is a kind but passive man who cedes all decisions to his domineering parents who own the sheep farm where they all live and work. Dellarobia submits to the mind-numbing duties of her life, but for the whole of her marriage has been bedeviled by fantasies of illicit affairs. At the end of a gloomy, relentlessly rainy summer and autumn she finds herself at the limits of her endurance. In the novel's opening pages she strikes out recklessly, thrilled and terrified, having agreed for the first time to an actual tryst with another man. Dellarobia is on her way up the mountain to a secluded hunting shed when she is stopped in her tracks by what she believes to be a miracle: an entire forested valley alight with cold orange flame. She flees back to her life, keeping her strange secret, but soon learns her father-in-law plans to clear-cut the forest for urgently- needed cash. In an impossible bind, Dellarobia finds a way to convince her husband and father-in-law to survey the forest before it is logged, without revealing her secret or why she discovered it. When the family treks up the mountain the truth is revealed, and the revelation is less miraculous — and more disturbingly unnatural — than she could have guessed. The spectacular and freakish eruption of nature summons Dr. Ovid Byron, a charismatic scientist who arrives at the farm intent on investigation. Dellarobia and her five-year-old son Preston are enthralled by the exotic entomologist and his work. But others in the community, including farmers who have lost crops to the weather's new extremes, are less receptive to his talk of global climate change and its repercussions for natural systems and human affairs. Everyone in the neighborhood and beyond, from religious fundamentalists to environmentalists and the ratings-conscious media, brings a point of view and a penchant for shaping the evidence to suit an agenda. The ordeal quickly grows beyond the boundaries of family, community and nation, carving its lasting effects on Dellarobia, forcing her to examine everything she has ever trusted as truth. Critics' Praise. “Every few years, you read a book that makes everything else in life seem unimportant. The Lacuna is the first book in a long time that made me swap my bike for public transport, just so I could keep reading.” — THE INDEPENDENT (UK) “Breathtaking. dazzling. 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. Kingsolver gives voice to truths whose teller could express them only in silence.” — NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW. “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.” — PUBLISHERS WEEKLY. “Kingsolver's exploration (through all five senses) of Mexican and American geographies, weather, people, food, cultures, politics, languages and era-bound events—Hoover through World War II, Truman, Nagasaki—is masterful, and a reader receives the great gift of entering not one but several worlds.” — THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE. “The novel is a brilliant mix of truth and fiction, history and imagination … [making] for a compelling and utterly believable read.” —BOOKPAGE. “As in The Poisonwood Bible , Kingsolver perfects the use of multiple points of view . This is her most ambitious, timely, and powerful novel yet.” — LIBRARY JOURNAL. “Before reading [ The Lacuna ], I would have sworn that 1998's The Poisonwood Bible was her masterpiece, not to be surpassed; it was as close to a truly perfect book as I've ever read. This one's even closer to that lofty goal.” — DALLAS MORNING NEWS. “Kingsolver's seventh work of fiction is hopeful, political and artistic. The Lacuna fills a lacuna with powerfully imagined social history.” — CHICAGO TRIBUNE. Unsheltered | 2018. How could two hardworking people do everything right in life, a woman asks, and end up destitute? Willa Knox and her husband followed all the rules as responsible parents and professionals, and have nothing to show for it but debts and an inherited brick house that is falling apart. The magazine where Willa worked has folded; the college where her husband had tenure has closed. Their dubious shelter is also the only option for a disabled father-in-law and an exasperating, free-spirited daughter. When the family’s one success story, an Ivy-educated son, is uprooted by tragedy he seems likely to join them, with dark complications of his own. In another time, a troubled husband and public servant asks, How can a man tell the truth, and be reviled for it? A science teacher with a passion for honest investigation, Thatcher Greenwood finds himself under siege: his employer forbids him to speak of the exciting work just published by Charles Darwin. His young bride and social-climbing mother-in-law bristle at the risk of scandal, and dismiss his worries that their elegant house is unsound. In a village ostensibly founded as a benevolent Utopia, Thatcher wants only to honor his duties, but his friendships with a woman scientist and a renegade newspaper editor threaten to draw him into a vendetta with the town’s powerful men. Unsheltered is the compulsively readable story of two families, in two centuries, who live at the corner of Sixth and Plum in Vineland, New Jersey, navigating what seems to be the end of the world as they know it. With history as their tantalizing canvas, these characters paint a startlingly relevant portrait of life in precarious times when the foundations of the past have failed to prepare us for the future. Critics' Praise. “Every few years, you read a book that makes everything else in life seem unimportant. The Lacuna is the first book in a long time that made me swap my bike for public transport, just so I could keep reading.” — THE INDEPENDENT (UK) “Breathtaking. dazzling. 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. Kingsolver gives voice to truths whose teller could express them only in silence.” — NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW. “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.” — PUBLISHERS WEEKLY. “Kingsolver's exploration (through all five senses) of Mexican and American geographies, weather, people, food, cultures, politics, languages and era-bound events—Hoover through World War II, Truman, Nagasaki—is masterful, and a reader receives the great gift of entering not one but several worlds.” — THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE. “The novel is a brilliant mix of truth and fiction, history and imagination … [making] for a compelling and utterly believable read.” —BOOKPAGE. “As in The Poisonwood Bible , Kingsolver perfects the use of multiple points of view . This is her most ambitious, timely, and powerful novel yet.” — LIBRARY JOURNAL. “Before reading [ The Lacuna ], I would have sworn that 1998's The Poisonwood Bible was her masterpiece, not to be surpassed; it was as close to a truly perfect book as I've ever read. This one's even closer to that lofty goal.” — DALLAS MORNING NEWS. “Kingsolver's seventh work of fiction is hopeful, political and artistic. The Lacuna fills a lacuna with powerfully imagined social history.” — CHICAGO TRIBUNE. The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver: review. All novels are necessarily about writing, whatever else their professed themes, but Barbara Kingsolver’s The Lacuna, her first novel for nine years, is more than usually preoccupied with the act of recording experience in words. It is a story about a Mexican-American author, Harrison Shepherd, who worked as secretary to Leon Trotsky before becoming a writer of best-selling novels. When his work catches the attention of the McCarthyite witch hunts, Shepherd tries to outwit his accusers by destroying his journals – a lifetime’s record of friendship and artistic endeavour. But he, too, has a loyal secretary, a pithy widow, Violet Brown. When Shepherd entrusts to her the task of burning his journals, she takes the notebooks home and hides them. Years later she transcribes them, intending them as his monument. If this multilayered confection of words and wordsmiths sounds dauntingly self-referential, there is no need for alarm. Kingsolver’s narrative is a conventional account of a colourful life. Its only other excursion into stylistic tricksiness is the inclusion of a quantity of imaginary newspaper reports and book reviews, apparently intended to emphasise that journalists and politicians are no match for proper writers when it comes to using words as instruments of truth and beauty. Shepherd is the neglected son of a feckless Mexican beauty and a chilly American government employee. Left to amuse himself, the lonely child attaches himself first to his mother’s cook and later to the household of the artists Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, with whom the Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky found refuge after his expulsion from the Soviet Union. After Trotsky’s assassination, Shepherd moves to the United States, where his novels about the Aztec empire meet with success so wild that it threatens the modest retirement in which he prefers to live. When his early association with Trotsky returns to haunt him, Shepherd decides to return to the scenes of his childhood, to a place where he knows he can vanish. Kingsolver is a vivid, engaging writer with an evocative turn of phrase. Her publisher boasts that her previous novel, The Poisonwood Bible, was 'Britain’s favourite reading group book’, and no doubt The Lacuna will prove just as popular, thanks to a certain sweetness that makes the complicated Kahlo/Rivera ménage sound quite jolly and renders even the assassination of Trotsky picturesque. Only a critic would complain that a book isn’t ugly enough. Readers will love it.