Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver (2009)

Had to read/listen to Barbara Kingsolver's latest book. Will buy it when it comes out in paperback. Though she get's too preachy or quotes doctrine too much at times, this is another good one.

Harrison Shepherd is born in America with an American father and Mexican mother. She leaves his father and takes him to Mexico when he is 12, where he is raised mostly by his mother's lover's staff. He learns to cook, which becomes a useful skill. Since he is bilingual, he can also read and write in both languages. He becomes a part of the Diego Rivera household, befriends Frida Kahlo, and ends up working for Leon Trotsky as a secretary. He is highly affected by Trotsky's assassination. When Frida asks him to bring some of her paintings to New York, he does so and stays in the US. He finds out his father has died and left him a car, which he drives until the highway runs out in Asheville, NC. He has been writing a novel about ancient Mexico, which gets published and he becomes famous.

Two things I really enjoyed about this book. One is again, learning about history through fiction. I hate to admit I didn't know Trotsky ended up in Mexico and was killed there. Actually, Trotsky was a pretty murky figure in my mind already. I liked learning how he differed from Stalin and how he failed to take Lenin's place. I already knew quite a bit about Rivera and Kahlo, but this filled in more gaps. Then in the US, it was interesting to get a small town look at the hardships Americans suffered during WWII, and then horrifying to watch how the anti-communistic wave washed over sweeping up so many innocent people in the process. This is where Kingsolver gets too preachy and too detailed for my taste, but it did give me a clear sense of the hearings for the House Un-American Activities Committee.

The other thing I liked was the construction of the novel, though at times a bit hard to follow in an audio book. Slowly you find out that this is a compilation of diaries, letters, newspaper articles, and other notes, supposedly by and about Harrison Shepherd. In the beginning you hear the initials VB, but have no clue who that is. When he gets to Asheville, he ends up getting a secretary - Violet Brown, who works with him to the end and is the one who is supposedly compiling all these papers for this book. I enjoyed her as a character.

I did not get the title - Lacuna - supposedly the "missing piece" or the most important part of any story is the part you don't know. Now that I've written my piece, I read some reviews and not everyone liked this last Kingsolver book.