In 1937, the household welcomes the former Soviet leader – and now a dissident hunted by Stalin – Leon Trotsky, after Kahlo and Rivera successfully petition the Mexican government to grant him asylum. As he and Kahlo grow closer and their friendship deepens, Harrison finds himself drawn to the history, culture, and art of the Aztecs. One day turns into a job, and Harrison now spends his days both as a plasterer and as a cook for the Kahlo-Rivera household. There, the skills he learned from the cooks who taught him to knead and roll dough come in handy when he helps Rivera mix plaster. Kahlo takes to Harrison, and he ends up going to her house. She is already famous at this point in history, married to the equally famous mural artist Diego Rivera. One day, Harrison has a stroke of incredible luck when he is sent on a series of errands and ends up running into the artist Frida Kahlo in a Mexico City marketplace. He passes his time swimming in the ocean and befriending the cooks in the estate kitchen, where the staff teaches him to prepare food and to bake as a way of keeping him occupied and out of trouble. Harrison leads an almost completely directionless life his mother pays him barely any attention. Taking her son with her, she moves to Mexico to live on her boyfriend’s estate. In 1929, when Harrison is twelve, his mother has an affair with a wealthy Mexican businessman.

to a somewhat ineffectual and intellectually stunted father and a Mexican mother who doesn’t view her marriage as permanent and is, instead, constantly on the make for a better and more affluent partner. The first part of the narrative is told in the third person, even though what we are ostensibly reading are Harrison’s own journals kept during his childhood.

In keeping with this split, the book’s narrative technique changes from the third person to the first person. Our protagonist is Harrison William Shepherd, a man whose life is divided between a period spent in Mexico and, later, life in the U.S. By focusing on the way a completely unexceptional human perceives the large forces unfolding around him, Kingsolver dives into the difference between personal memories and publically significant events, asking who owns the story that is lived by both the famous and the ordinary. Published in 2009, The Lacuna offers readers a glimpse into the mid-twentieth century from the perspective of a bit player – a bystander – whose ordinary experiences serendipitously intersect with the lives of major historical figures. American author Barbara Kingsolver’s sixth novel, The Lacuna, offers a version of historical fiction that combines fictional found primary sources with real historical events.

Kingsolver the lacuna