The More You Read

The past two months have been good reading months for me as a lot of the authors that I love have new(er) books out.  It had been so long since Barbara Kingsolver’s last book that I had stopped looking for one.  I was first introduced to her, as many were, through The Poisonwood Bible.  While The Lacuna is a very different book it does share the way that the narration is told in several different ways.

This is a story of Harrison William Shepherd.  It is told through his own voice in a chapter that he wrote and journals that he kept as a child and young man.  It is also told through letters and news articles.  It starts when he is thirteen and moves to Mexico.  His father is American and his mother Mexican.  When they separate and his mother follows a different man back to Mexico, Shepherd goes.  He befriends the cook and learns both about snorkeling and cooking from him.  Snorkeling becomes a passion to him and cooking a gift.  Through his work cooking he learns skills to help him mix plaster and he becomes an assistant to Diego Rivera, an important artist who expresses many  important and controversial things through his art.

Shepherd is separated from his life in Mexico to do some schooling in America and through this we see how he is torn between two cultures, not completely fitting in anywhere.  He returns to Mexico and works in the home of Diego and his wife Frida, also an important artist, as a cook.  While he is there they become close with Lev Trotsky, a leader of the Russian Revolution, and Shepherd discusses what it is like to be in a household with strict security, surrounded by men doing important things for the world.  After an incident that shakes up the home, Frida, who has become close with Shepherd, finds a way for him to go back to America.  Throughout this time he kept journals, and that is how the story is told.

Shepherd settles in Asheville, NC and upon discovering his journals which he thought he had lost, he finds hope in the written word and writes two books that become widely popular.  As he is gaining his stride as a writer, the Red Scare begins and he becomes a target.  Partly due to his time in Mexico and the people he worked for (Rivera and Trotsky) and partly based on nothing at all.  The love letters that he had been receiving turn into hate mail and his books are banned.  Violet Brown, his assistant and the closest person to him, tries to help him along but he slowly shuts down.

This was an intriguing book.  It actually took me a lot longer to read than most, but I enjoyed it very much.  I wish I had a little more background information on Rivera, Frida Kahlo and Trotsky as I knew that they were real people, but not a whole lot more.  However it was realistic, the way information was portrayed, and I liked the different mediums through which the story was told.

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Barbara Kingsolver, Fiction, Mexico