I loved the Lacuna. Like a big fat hug of tragic and lonely humanity it envelopes and holds onto you, leaving you wistful at its ending. Yet, if I can push the metaphor a bit far, it’s meaning is contained within its own time. After it has gone you may be left wondering what it was all about.
The story follows the life, from childhood, of a lonely and under brought up man called Harrison Shepherd, sometime cook to Frida Kahlo, scribe for Lev Trotsky and eventual author in his own write. The unifying theme of his life is that God will speak for the silent man and in the fulsome words of Shepherd we find that it’s not until he has come and gone that someone, somehow, speaks for him. The events in the novel are so sweeping that I can’t begin, in a short review like this, to cover the sweep of Kingsolver’s story. If anything, I would venture that Kingsolver’s maxim is her way of telling us she is concerned with truth in the public realm and how ordinary people get chewed up and crushed by people they’ve never met because they chose to be good and compassionate. Harrison Shepherd is a silent man and takes every chance to remain quiet when others may have shouted loud.
While the events depicted are world changing, Kingsolver delivers them with a glorious banality, highlighting how small actions and tiny decisions turn the course of history. What becomes a giant story on the front page is, more often than not, something meek and understated in reality and full of the drama of the everyday. Kingsolver made me care about the everyday of the people she writes about, whether it’s Diego Revera, Harrison’s stenographer or someone who’s written a fan letter.
Harrison’s life doesn’t add up but there’s a larger story here about freedom of choice, about connectedness and about compassion and what happens in its absence. Kingsolver uses the lens of history to bring these themes into focus but don’t be tricked by the historical detail – Kingsolver loves the people she writes about.
Recommended.
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