Difficult Light [Paperback]

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 formally daring meditation on grief, written in candid, arresting prose. Difficult Light is a story of living while waiting for inevitable loss to occur . . . Rosenberg’s translation is . . . notable for the lucid, compassionate tone it strikes in capturing the ordinary moments and conversations that permeate life, whether at its height or at its end. — National Translation Award committee

A quiet and modest novel that struck me with its lovely prose and profound insights. . . Gonzalez focuses on the glimpses of beauty, the shards of light found in the everyday. A thoughtful meditation on art, family and loss; this slim novel reads like an afternoon reverie, hazy, supple, tinged with sadness and joy. — Lithub

A very poetic reverie...This is in some ways a reflection on aging...and in others simply a picturesque and vivid remembrance of the moments that mattered in one person's life. At the bottom of it all is the narrator's unending grief over his son, Jacobo, paralyzed when a junkie driving a pickup truck struck the taxi he was riding in at the time...The book’s narrative styll#7