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anacristinapb 's review for:
The Lacuna
by Barbara Kingsolver
A well thought-out plot that takes us through serious historical events in twentieth-century Mexico and the United States. We follow the fictional protagonist, Harrison Shepherd, from the time he is a boy of eight or nine in Mexico, to his early 30s in the post-WWII US. Shepherd gets to work for, and then becomes very close to, some of the most interesting and influential artists and thinkers in the first part of that century: Leo Tolstoy, Diego Rivera, and Frida Kahlo. These connections, in part, will cause him to be later persecuted during the Red Scare, in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
The Lacuna teaches or, at least, reminds us of some major political events that seem to have been absent from school history books, such as Tolstoy's exile and assassination in Mexico, his persecution by Stalin, and the US support of the latter at that time; the 1932 Bonus March in Washington DC and the massacre of the marchers by the police and the Army; and the persecution of so many accused of being "Communists" under McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover.
Kingsolver ably depicts the wide-spread fear and the extreme injustices committed by the US government against anyone deemed undesirable: intellectuals, artists, homosexuals, Blacks, immigrants--in sum, anyone who didn't or seemed not to conform. For this reason, *The Lacuna* is shockingly current, given the recent emergence of dictatorial governments across the globe and the threat the extreme right represents in the US today.
The Lacuna teaches or, at least, reminds us of some major political events that seem to have been absent from school history books, such as Tolstoy's exile and assassination in Mexico, his persecution by Stalin, and the US support of the latter at that time; the 1932 Bonus March in Washington DC and the massacre of the marchers by the police and the Army; and the persecution of so many accused of being "Communists" under McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover.
Kingsolver ably depicts the wide-spread fear and the extreme injustices committed by the US government against anyone deemed undesirable: intellectuals, artists, homosexuals, Blacks, immigrants--in sum, anyone who didn't or seemed not to conform. For this reason, *The Lacuna* is shockingly current, given the recent emergence of dictatorial governments across the globe and the threat the extreme right represents in the US today.