#the lacuna

[quotespile]

In the long run, most of us spend about fifteen minutes total in the entanglements of passion, and the rest of our days looking back on it, humming the tune.

Barbara Kingsolver, The Lacuna

[litsnaps]

[anandabrat]

Okay so it is somewhat random that The Lacuna came up on my Libby app this week, in addition to watching Sueños every day. Somewhat because I put it in my queue myself, obviously, but I did it months ago and I didn't know what the book was about, just that Barbara Kingsolver wrote it and I've been on a bit of a kick on her novels.

But man do I have thoughts.

In case you're not familiar with The Lacuna, the story centers around a man born in the late 1920s to a Mexican mother and American father, and follows him as he cooks for Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera AND Trotsky and then goes on to become a writer in Asheville, North Carolina. But the idea of the book keeps coming back to the name - a Lacuna being a gap or a time skip or a type of freshwater but ocean fed lake that the protagonist keeps exploring and ultimately perishes in...

Here's the thing. Kingsolver makes this character queer, and then puts everything about the character's queerness into the 'lacuna' - so we never get any of the story that involves his love life. The closest we get are chapters she names Assignations, but they have little romance and certainly nothing sexual about them. A tenth into this book and I was already bitching about performative allyship to @madronash, hoping it would get better... It did not. It got worse. The protagonist kills himself, and pays child witnesses to watch him sink forever in the Lacuna. It falls to his straight secretary to determine what of his story to tell.

How poetic. How utterly chickenshit of BK. Why even bother with queerness? Oh oh course. So that the character can feel alone all the time, can suffer while others thrive, has a reason to hide and remain anonymous and refuse to stand out or stand up, until he can't avoid it anymore and perishes. Ah yes, that brand of queer storytelling we're all so familiar with...

To go from this book to SDL, where the queer storyline is not performative in the least but breathtakingly heartfelt, lived in, authentic in both its joy and its grief, without sacrificing the real history Marta and Fina are up against...

Well. Come back when you have something worth saying, Kingsolver. Or even anything you're brave enough to say.

Fence-sitters go home. We've got Sueños de Libertad, all others who wish to apply themselves to telling queer history have something to live up to now.

[haleyincarnate]

Barbara Kingsolver, The Lacuna

[abs0luteb4stard]

"I used to wonder if there was something I could do to try to change the world before I understood such thoughts were unskilled. Trying to change the world only leads to suffering. All we can change is ourselves."

[itsagoodlife]

Memories do not always soften with time; some grow edges like knives.

Barbara Kingsolver

[lameglet]

You force people to stop asking questions, and before you know it they have auctioned off the question mark, or sold it for scrap. No boldness. No good ideas for fixing what's broken in the land. Because if you happen to mention it's broken, you are automatically disqualified

Barbara Kingsolver --The Lacuna

[quotespile]

The power of words is awful... Sometimes I want to bury my typewriter in a box of quilts. The radio makes everything worse, because of the knack for amplifying dull sounds. Any two words spoken in haste might become law of the land. But you never know which two. You see why I won't talk to newsmen.

Barbara Kingsolver, The Lacuna