DIFFICULT LIGHT, blindness is more than physical, more than emotional...existential

DIFFICULT LIGHT
TOMÁS GONZÁLEZ (tr. Andrea Rosenberg)
Archipelago Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$6.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Grappling with his son’s death, the painter David explores his grief through art and writing, etching out the rippled landscape of his loss.

Over twenty years after his son’s death, nearly blind and unable to paint, David turns to writing to examine the deep shades of his loss. Despite his acute pain, or perhaps because of it, David observes beauty in the ordinary: in the resemblance of a woman to Egyptian portraits, in the horseshoe crabs that wash up on Coney Island, in the foam gathering behind a ferry propeller; in these moments, González reveals the world through a painter’s eyes. From one of Colombia’s greatest contemporary novelists, Difficult Light is a daring meditation on grief, written in candid, arresting prose.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Waiting to die. Needing to die. Suffering that no one in a god-run universe should be required to bear. Taking one's power back from an uncaring (or cruel) Providence and giving the order to extinguish suffering and life both. It is what David is doing; it is what Jacobo, his son, did.

In summer at a certain point you have the illusion that the days last forever. I didn't want night to come, because then I'd have to acknowledge that time was passing; that life was passing us over, crushing us with its wheels and gears. But only light, ever elusive, is eternal. And the light on the water beside the churning propeller of the boat, however much I studied it and reworked it, I was unable to find a way to capture it completely – that light that contains shadows, that contains death, and is so contained within them."

David, a painter now going blind, is in his last days, revisiting in his mind the horrifying moment his severely injured, agonized son's assisted suicide is finally released from his torment.

It was a horrible thing to read; it is there from literal page-one introduction to the story. The amount of torment in reading a book about the death of your young-adult child, one capable of making this decision for himself legally (in Colombia, anyway), was terrible. After five years I can come tell you I think the writing as translated by Andrea Rosenberg is lovely, spare and evocative; the story involving; but in the end, what I felt was the overwhelming grief and outrage at the cruelty of life.

Catharsis? Yes, but in a curious way, no...how cathartic is death on a storybook's page, really? For me it's more the intensity of a father looking at blindness, death, and the awful unanswered question "why?" directly for the last time. There are moments of squick, as David is a bog-standard boomer man misogyny and all; his wife tells some jokes that clang in twenty-first century ears; there are unpleasant ethnic humor moments.

Granting those facts their weight, your decision about reading the book is better guided by your ability to be in the headspace of a man who can't quite ever feel at peace with a world so vicious as to take his child and leave him behind to mourn.

Right there with you, my dude.