THE LACUNA
By Barbara Kingsolver
Faber and Faber. 670 pages. £7.99
ISBN 978-0-57125-267-1
This is quite a tome of a book; doorstopper size and with the weight of the Orange Prize for Fiction behind it as well. It comes from an author of impeccable literary qualifications (more of which later), so I was really looking forward to reading it on what I anticipated would be a rather wet week in Scotland.
Well, we had sun, and conversation on the beach proved more interesting than the beginning of the book. It is made up of the notebooks of Harrison Shepherd, a fatherless boy who grows up in 1920s Mexico. A writer and observer, whose early life makes him cautious and reserved, he drifts into the left-wing coterie of artists Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, eventually becoming secretary for Leon Trotsky. All of this was interesting historically, but, when Harrison flees Mexico for the States after Trotsky’s assassination, I suddenly became interested in him as a character. From that point on I was gripped and began to relish Kingsolver’s very fine writing.
Misogyny, rights & Rowling
It might have seemed as if the isolation of lockdown was making people mad last month when the stars of …