A lacuna is "a blank space or a missing part", a "deficiency". or "a small cavity, pit, or discontinuity in an anatomical part". Kingsolver also uses it to describe the small missing piece, that once found, makes a different whole.
Which is a purpose of Barbara Kingsolver's novel: to describe a missing bit of North American history that once added back makes Fox News, and "birthers", and the Tea Party ..... if not make sense, at least fit into a larger pattern of pathological American behaviour.
I was attracted to this book by my recent trip to Mexico. The book begins there, with the early life of (the fictional) Harrison Shepard, a half American/half Mexican boy who becomes a cook and secretary first for Frida Kahlo and her husband Diego Rivera, and later for their friend and colleague Lev Trotsky. The book ends with Harrison's "death" by persecution by a McCarthyist witchhunt.
The description of McCarthyism is superb. Kingsolver describes how "anti-communist" hysteria at first appears risible, then dangerous, and then inexorable in its immunity to proportion, logic, or even facts. The hysteria rolls over American culture, and although it now calls itself something different and has different bogeymen, rolls over it still.
I also very much enjoyed the first, Mexican half of the book. Today Frida is far more famous in popular American culture than either her husband or even Trotsky. The book gives much more context. Frida was an acclaimed artist in her own lifetime, but her husband was a Mexican superstar. Rivera helped create what is now a founding myth of Mexican culture: the triumphant vision of the Mexican people as the heroic merger of Spanish and Indigenous cultures. A friend commented on facebook that she found the ubiquity of that message in Mexico creepy and kind of totalitarian (think Aryan "master race" talk). But consider the Canadian alternative: indigenous invisibility. And Trotsky emerges as a surprisingly sympathetic character, while Stalin appears malevolent beyond description.
Started: Feb. 9, 2012
Finished: Feb. 20, 2012
Pages: 507
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