My last book circle read - The Lacuna

I didn’t really enjoy this book, to start with. There was so much concentration on the writing and not enough on the main character. I recognised that this was a literary book, but each time I put it down, I couldn’t remember anything about it. For me people are more important than lyrical writing. I can’t say that I will enjoy something that’s badly written, but I can be tempted in to almost any good story and good characters.

Initially, the hero, Harrison Shepherd, doesn’t seem to have an identity. Each person that he works for seems to give him a different name. I started to get interested about page 70. Whether before or after that, I enjoyed it when Harrison is first employed to make plaster by sculptor, Diego Rivera, and liked the idea of him becoming expert at it because it was like making dough for sweet buns. I liked the beginning of the relationship that had developed, there.

I began to see the humour in the Harrison’s words and descriptions. Gradually the book took off, and I enjoyed all the latter part, as he progressed to manhood (and became an influential writer) and particularly the important relationships in his life – that with Lev Trotsky, with the Mexican artists, Rivera and Frida Kahlo, and most of all, with his secretary and protector – Violet Brown. I was also extremely interested in the period of the ‘Un-American activities’, the witch-hunts, which Harrison falls victim to, and moved by his increasing sense of aloneness and desertion by many. I appreciated and applauded the ending.

I would give the book 3.5 if I could, not, 4, because it took too long to get to the point, but better than 3, because in the end, I enjoyed most of it. Just as I would have chopped a chunk off the end of Poisonwood, so I would contract the beginning, and get to Violet Brown much, much faster, in The Lacuna.