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The Lacuna  By  cover art

The Lacuna

By: Barbara Kingsolver
Narrated by: Barbara Kingsolver
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Editorial reviews

Barbara Kingsolver's new novel of Mexico and the Cold War is centered on “accidents of history”: how things turn out, and how easily they could have turned out otherwise. Both Kingsolver and her narrator Harrison Shepherd, who is a writer himself, are interested in history not for the marquee names but for the ordinary people swept up in the momentum of events. The Lacuna is made up of Harrison's notes and correspondence, beginning with his arrival at age 12 to the hacienda of a Mexican oil magnate and continuing through a youth spent as a cook in the employ of a radical painter couple in Mexico City. It's the 1930s, and the couple is, of course, Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, soon to be joined in their contentious household by Trotsky and his retinue.

Harrison watches these luminaries from the safety of the kitchen while they work, fight, and try to keep the most famous political exile in the world safe from Stalinist assassins. Kingsolver is an excellent narrator of her own story, differentiating the voices with artful touches that never seem cartoonish. Harrison is quiet and sharp, with a retiring diction nearly drowned out by strident Frida. Lev Trotsky is serious but avuncular, taking the time, despite his heavy intellectual labors, to encourage the literary aspirations of the young cook.

But this tense little world-in-exile can't last. As Frida tells Harrison again and again, the most important thing about a person is the thing you don't know. The Cold War is starting. Spies do a lot of damage, and fear of spies does more. By the time Harrison returns to the United States, an agoraphobic bundle of nerves, McCarthy is rising. No former cook for a Communist can escape the notice of Hoover's FBI. The Lacuna is an examination of history, both what of happened and of how we reconstruct it. Too often, Harrison muses, we take the scraps that come down to us for the whole, “like looking at a skeleton and saying 'how quiet this man was, and how thin.'” Harrison Shepherd, as a writer and obsessive keeper of diaries, does his best to keep flesh on the bones of the past. Kingsolver shows how impossible this undertaking is, and how important it is to try. Rosalie Knecht

Publisher's summary

From the Mexico City of Frida Kahlo to the America of J. Edgar Hoover, The Lacuna tells the poignant story of a man pulled between two nations.

Born in the United States, but reared in Mexico, Harrison Shepherd finds precarious shelter but no sense of home on his thrilling odyssey. Life is whatever he learns from housekeepers and, one fateful day, by mixing plaster for famed muralist Diego Rivera. When he goes to work for Rivera, his wife, exotic artist Kahlo, and exiled leader Lev Trotsky, Shepherd inadvertently casts his lot with art and revolution.

Meanwhile, the United States has embraced the internationalist goodwill of World War II. Back in the land of his birth, Shepherd seeks to remake himself in America's hopeful image and claim a voice of his own. But 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.

©2009 Barbara Kingsolver (P)2009 HarperCollins Publishers

What listeners say about The Lacuna

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  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars

Yet anotheer great Kingsolver novel

Barbara Kingsolver's stories explore the important but little known, often misunderstood or intentionally hidden aspects of history and of living in human society. I think that I have bought most of her books and I have liked them all. When I realized the difficult main subject that she was taking on this time, I saw no way she could pull it off without being too depressing. But, as always, her extrordinary characters along with extra tidbits of history and underlying culture kept me listening. By the end, as the story came together, I was really impressed. She managed to turn it into a hopeful story without detracting from the seriousness of the subject.
While we may not be able to change what is wrong in greater society, we can recognize it for what it is and rejoice in indiividual triumphs, ...of a sort anyway.
I can't stop thinking about the book and what Ms. Kingsolver meant to say. I'm busy investigating the historical tidbits. The wrap-up of the story was brilliantly appropriate and satisfying. I can't wait for the next Barbara Kingsolver book. We need more people and authors this thoughtful. I worry about the effort such a work must involve.
Thanks,

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3 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    1 out of 5 stars

Author reading

I couldn't get past 10 minutes of this audio book. Kingsolver is a wonderful writer but a distracting reader. This was a waste of my monthly credit--probably not because of the book's content, but because of the narrative.

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3 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

My favorite novel

I relisten every year. Every sentence is a masterpiece. I cry in several places, out of sheer beauty. I’m so grateful this book exists.

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2 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    2 out of 5 stars

Please tell the author to write not read

I'd really like my money back. I usually adore Barbara Kingsolver but I can't make my way through this book. I started this book over 5 times because Ms. Kingsolver insists on over-pronouncing each consanent and separating each word from the next so distinctly that it's ponderous. It's as if she's reading to 4th graders. She also emphasizes words that are unimportant and that is confusing.
Kingsolver usually chooses topics that are important and makes them intensely interesting by drawing you into the characters but somehow this book comes across as if she was personally interested in this historical era and wanted to preach to us about it to us for another agenda. I've given up. Perhaps if a skilled performer had read it, I would have been involved enough to followed it through.


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  • Overall
    1 out of 5 stars

Also disappointed.

Barbara Kingsolver is one of my favorite authors, but I agree with the others on this one, buy the book, not the audio book! She does read as if reading to a young child. Despite putting it down and picking the story up 3 times, I could not get through it because I couldn't get past the choppy cadences and over-enunciated reading. To try to keep my own attention, I kept picturing how the text I heard would look in a book. Her reading of it was completely distracting.

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2 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars

part of our history

This gentle narrative of a good woman who witnesses, first hand,the Kafkaesque period in our history , the Mccarthy Era, and conveys its dangerous absurdity through her story of Harrison Shepherd, I assume, a fictional author of modest note, is read with a dreamlike voice by the author, Barbara Kingsolver. The frightening reality that unique thought is often met with a lack of understanding......and when people don't understand, they rarely react with innocent inquiry...but rather with ignorance....and that igonance is the fertile bed for hate and is vulnerable to manipulation.....was the essence of this era. Harrison Shepherd "chose" to write historical fiction so that he captured the absurdity of his times in a framework that would not be branded as dangerous.....ironically? this is what Ms. kingsolver may be doing providing us with an allegory of our own times.

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2 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars

Fabulous!

I loved this book. I think Kingsolver may be the most gifted writer of our time, and I was enchanted to hear her reading this wonderful new novel herself. Her gift for protraying different voices, most evident in Poisonwood Bible, is evident here, and carries through into her terrific speaking for this panoply of characters. I find Ms Kingsolver to be every bit as much a force of nature as the wonderful Frida Kahlo she portrays so richly in this beautiful new book.

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2 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    2 out of 5 stars

Disappointed

I really enjoy Barbara Kingsolver's writing - especially The Poisonwood Bible, but I just couldn't get into this book. I found it very slow moving. Maybe it was the narration - great author though.

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  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars

The Lacuna

I liked the story but the authors narration was distracting to me. I thought it might have been better to have more than one person narrating. There was not enough difference between the voices of the characters Either male or female, they sounded the same. I think I would have enjoyed the book more if I had read it rather than listen to it.

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  • Overall
    2 out of 5 stars

What happened to my favorite writer?

After her other great stories, all page turners this historical fiction just went so flat. The voice is just not correct for the character. To high pitched and childlike. I wanted emotion and deep passion that just did not play out. I do have a better grasp of that moment of history and art. I forgive you Barbara, but please give us another "Poisonwood Bible".

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