TypePad is back with its features, and I'm not ready! Or I am, but right at this moment I can't do anything substantial. All I am going to do is tell you that The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver is a book you really, really ought to read for many reasons.
Perhaps the first reason is that the first half of the book, set mostly in Mexico City will blow you away. It is possibly the best non-Mexican-written portrayal of Mexico I have ever read. And for you who don't read Spanish, of course it's in English. It is rich in description of the stuff that at least some of us Americans who love living here love about Mexico: stuff I can't really pinpoint in a list, but which permeates me.
The second reason is that the characters are fully brought to life, very sympathetic, captivating, heart-breaking. Kingsolver merges historical people with fictional flawlessly. Her hero, the fictional Harrison Shepherd, will live on in your soul after you finish. Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and especially Leon Trotsky will, too. I have no idea if her versions of these people are accurate, but I don't really care, so interesting and rich are they in the novel, so flawlessly mixed into the story.
When the novel moves to Asheville, North Carolina, I feared that it wouldn't be so interesting. In Poisonwood Bible, Kingsolver lost vibrance when the story moved to the US. The US just isn't, at least at first glance, as luminous, as rich in life as Mexico or parts of Africa that she writes about and that I know. But here, she rises to the challenge. The mood, the setting, are completely different from Mexico. Asheville is more sturdy greens when it is vibrant, and browns and grays. But persist, and you will be drawn in as much as you were into her Mexico. The story turns political, and it also turns tragic, enraging and into a most remarkable love story.
Kingsolver describes the growth of anticommunist witch hunts stirred up by the House UnAmerican Activities Committee and carried out eagerly and sometimes with a bit of shame throughout the US by describing the effects on Harrison Shepherd. It is eerie, frightening and all too contemporary. It is hard to imagine this happening again in large parts of the country, yet it isn't really, not when you read this book. Kingsolver captures beautifully our country's tendancy to fall into mindless, hateful, harmful extremes of behavior. I found myself so upset that at first I skipped sections so I wouldn't have to deal with them.
This isn't a traditional novel. The story is told, the characters described first through the diaries of Harrison Shepherd, then and increasingly through newspaper articles and book reviews, all giving a sense of immediacy and a sense of foreboding.
The last book I liked this much was Gilead by Marilynne Robinson. Both books are alive, characters in both so much of flesh and blood that it's hard to remember they never really lived.