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Keynote Speaker, Barbara Kingsolver will speak to a full house
at the Hotel Real de Minas, San Miguel de Allende,
on Friday, February 19, 2010 at 6:00pm.
San Miguel Writers' Conference Keynote Address
SOLD OUT
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"Finding My Way Into The Lacuna"
Kingsolver will speak about her new novel The Lacuna (available November 3, 2009).
With THE LACUNA, Barbara Kingolver’s first novel in nine years, the New York Times bestselling author is at the peak of her powers as a writer. As she did in her acknowledged masterwork, The Poisonwood Bible, Kingsolver again expands the scope and ambition of her art. The Lacuna is a powerful and probing work that spans two decades and two worlds. Its protagonist, Harrison William Shepherd, is born in the U. S., but raised in Mexico by a socially striving mother who is defined by the succession of men in her life. It is the Mexico of the 1930s, and Harrison becomes an unofficial member of the household of Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, and the exiled Leon Trotsky, where he inevitably casts his lot with art and revolution.
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| | Back in the U.S. as the Second World War rages, he finds an extraordinary use for his talents of observation. But shifting political winds continue to throw him between north and south, in a plot that turns many times on the unspeakable breach – the lacuna – between truth and public perception.
The Lacuna grew out of Kingsolver’s interest in how the American psyche took its modern shape, and it examines questions that were acutely present in the 1940s and are no less important today: What does it mean to be an American? What is gained or lost when we refuse to embrace our own history? How do the media shape public opinion to tolerate or condemn a person or idea, or even to go to war? How did the “talkers” rise above the “thinkers”? Should the rules of human civility extend to celebrated persons? What are the real costs, when privacy is denied? Do artists have any obligation to inform or shape public opinion? How does language create or destroy identity?
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| | Barbara Kingsolver’s thirteen published books include six acclaimed novels as well as short fiction, creative nonfiction and poetry. Her first novel, The Bean Trees, has been adapted into the core English literature curriculum in many high schools. In 1998 her highly praised The Poisonwood Bible placed her squarely on the literary map as it won awards at home and abroad. Since then she has written the novels Prodigal Summer and The Lacuna, and three nonfiction volumes including Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, a narrative on local food that took the nation’s practical imagination by storm. Kingsolver’s books have been translated and published throughout the world in more than twenty languages. Her fiction is widely anthologized, and her reviews, essays and journalism appear regularly in newspapers and major magazines. | |  |
| | In 2000, she was awarded the National Humanities Medal.
Kingsolver grew up in rural Kentucky and studied biology at DePauw University in Indiana. At age 23, she moved to southern Arizona and spent most of the next two decades writing from the cultural and political territory of the U.S-Mexican border. She has also lived in Europe and Africa and followed writing assignments across five continents. With her husband Steven Hopp, a professor of environmental studies, she has raised two adventurous daughters and now resides on a farm in southern Appalachia.
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| | Here's what Publisher's Weekly says about
The Lacuna:
"Kingsolver’s ambitious new novel, her first in nine years (after The Poisonwood Bible), focuses on Harrison William Shepherd, the product of a divorced American father and a Mexican mother. After getting kicked out of his American military academy, Harrison spends his formative years in Mexico in the 1930s in the household of Diego Rivera; his wife, Frida Kahlo; and their house guest, Leon Trotsky, who is hiding from Soviet assassins.
After Trotsky is assassinated, Harrison returns to the U.S., settling down in Asheville, N.C. where he becomes an author of historical potboilers (e.g. Vassals of Magesty) and is later investigated as a possible subversive.
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| | Narrated in the form of letters, diary entries and newspaper clippings, the novel takes a while to get going, but once it does, it achieves a rare dramatic power that reaches its emotional peak when Harrison wittily and eloquently defends himself before the House Un-American Activities Committee (on the panel is a young Dick Nixon).
“Employed by the American imagination,”
is how one character describes Harrison, a term that could apply equally to Kingsolver as she masterfully resurrects a dark period in American history with the assured hand of a true literary artist."
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