The Lacuna isn't Laguna misspelled.
Keep your eyes open because you'll be seeing The Lacuna around a lot in the next year.
The Lacuna is novelist Barbara Kingsolver's most recent book, and it's poised to knock your socks off!
We folks in Asheville tonight filled a high school auditorium, paying $28 plus tax to pay for her book before we were admitted to the school auditorium.
Malaprop's Book Store, Asheville's social place for book lovers, put on the book reading. But gosh, I never saw a Malaprop's book reading that attracted some 500 persons, all waving The Lacuna high above their heads as they sat on the edge of their seats to hear what Kingsolver had to say about Asheville in her novel, which is also set in a Mexican coastal island jungle with a Lacuna.
Merriam Webster defines Lacuna as:
"......a blank space or a missing part : gap also deficiency, a small cavity, pit, or discontinuity in an anatomical structure."
Kingsolver uses this word in her new novel as she describes a cavity on the tropical island as one "that goes down to the middle of the earth, down as far as the devil himself."
Her novel also features a search for a gap, such as a missing part of a manuscript. On the book jacket, with a hole smack in the middle of it, Kingsolver writes of the lacuna as "between truth and public presumption."
I can't tell you much more about the novel because I just got my book tonight. It won't be officially released until tomorrow, November 3rd. So we beat 'em to it by being honored as the first on Kingsolver's book tour. She demanded that Asheville be first because half of the book is set in 1940s Asheville, with its downtown hardware store, its Tunnel Road, Biltmore Mansion, Grove Park Inn and Grove Arcade.
In her research for the book Kingsolver discovered that during World War II the Japanese attacked the refineries in Los Angeles while the Nazis sank our tankers off the Carolina coast. She asked how many of us were aware of this information? I personally was doubtful because no one had ever told me that.
This was just one point she was trying to get across in her book: American's insistance that we are invincible. We are the best! After all we are Americans!
In Kingsolver's book we get another look at Diego Rivera, Lev Trotsky and Joe McCarthy's Committee on Un-American Activities.
The big question that drew Kingsolver to write this book, she claimed during Q & A, was why we Americans have such a hard time bringing art and politics together, unlike most of the other countries she has visited around the world, which frequently honor their artists with leadership positions in their governments.
What do Americans do to its artists? We censor them. We label them as Communists, as Un-American. Even in the years following the great Communist scare of the McCarthy era, note how we Americans have continued to put down our artists when they enter the political realm.Watch out liberal Democrats like Jane Fonda or Brad Pitt or Sean Penn!(Exceptions to this, however, include Ronald Reagan and Arnold Schwarzenegger, both California Republicans, and Democratic Sen. Al Franken of Minnesota.)
How fitting that Kingsolver would choose Asheville as the setting for half of this novel, since this small city's art community is often found to be politically active. In my opinion, Asheville is a fine example of an activist artist community which believes that art and politics can be wedded, that politics is enriched when it brings the voices of our artists into its life.
Kingsolver's protagonist Harrison Shepherd, born in the USA but reared in Mexico, "casts his lot with art and revolution, newspaper headlines and howling gossip, and a risk of terrible violence."
The jacket of The Lacuna tells us:
"In her most accomplished novel, Barbara Kingsolver takes us on an epic journey from the Mexico City of Artist's Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo to the America of Pearl Harbor, FDR and J. Edgar Hoover. The Lucuna is a poignant story of a man pulled between two nations as they invent their modern identities."
So go out to your locally owned independent book store tomorrow and be the first, along with me, to read the sure to be controversial new novel by the lady who gave us The Poisonwood Bible, Prodigal Summer, The Bean Trees and most recently Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life.
The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver.
One last note: Kingsolver noted that she majored in biology in college. Whereas an in-depth research paper on an important biological and ecological issue might get her 12-14 readers, she can now get readers in the millions to read her novels, in which she brings to life much of what she learned as a scientist.