Lacuna Review

Tws: rape aftermath, mental health, and a character that is, in turn, pointing out sexism and racism, and part of the problem, even if between the lines and thoughts only

Lucy Lurie is deeply sunk in PTSD following a gang rape at her father’s farmhouse in the Western Cape.

She becomes obsessed with the author John Coetzee, who has made a name for himself by writing

Disgrace, a celebrated novel that revolves around the attack on her. Lucy lives the life of a celibate hermit, making periodic forays into the outside world in her attempts to find and confront Coetzee.

The Lucy of Coetzee’s fictional imaginings is a passive, peaceful creature, almost entirely lacking in agency. She is the lacuna in Coetzee’s novel – the missing piece of the puzzle.

Lucy Lurie is no one’s lacuna. Her attempts to claw back her life, her voice and her agency may be messy and misguided, but she won’t be silenced. Her rape is not a metaphor. This is her story.

General Impressions

I picked up"Lacuna" to clean the palate between bigger fantasies series, without knowing anything about it other than I liked how provocative and different the synopsis was after a glance.

This review took me almost a month to write and it was because I needed some distance to heal from the trauma and awesomeness of this book. Seriously, I finished it and had to find someone to talk about it with and they just looked at me and asked "but why would you even read something like that?" And the answer to it was and still is because I had never read something that touched on these themes, not with a character as anything less than either convinced/to be convinced of her innocence. Lucy knows that what happened to her was a horrendous crime, that it was not her fault, but that doesn't change that it happened and became most of what she was as a person: that woman that was gang-raped.

In fact, the biggest trauma in the book is not the action and aftermath itself, but the fact that she had her story stolen from her. A man with which she had barely interacted at work and that had treated her with little respect at every turn, read about her rape and wrote an award-winning novel about it, stealing her name, her mannerisms and her story, creating a fictional Lucy to which the real Lucy was compared to by the public, by her friends, by her family and found lacking. The real Lucy did not get over her rape, the real Lucy was not the perfect white woman, able to forgive and get over what happened and move on with her privileged life.

Lucy is both the main character and narrator, a white middle-class woman from South Africa, so while the reader spends most of the book sympathising with her trauma, and forgiving some of her most private thoughts and beliefs, because how could we not, "she was gang-raped and had her story stolen!", as the book nears its end, she is called to task for her own privilege - the little justice that she got and other women were denied by being poor or black, the chance to afford therapy, the chance to remove herself from the world until she was ready to come back. Called to task, but not obligated to make any reparations. In fact, while she started on the path to becoming her own person, there is always a doubt, at least for me, that she will still continue lying to herself about the people that she was taught to not see as villains unless they directly impacted her, including herself.

Conclusions

I devoured this book in two days, and that was only because I forced myself to stop reading it for a few hours for the sake of my mental health.

I went into it blindly, it was only during the introduction that I learnt that this book is a kind of answer to another published a few decades ago in which a secondary character named Lucy is similarly mistreated and silenced by its male author.

I enjoyed this book, I'm going to be haunted by this book and I can barely wait to read more works by this author.

Thank you to Europa Editions for gifting me this copy.

Rating: 5/5