• Difficult Light
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Archipelago Books

Difficult Light

Difficult Light

by Tomás González, translated from the Spanish by Andrea Rosenberg

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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.

Additional Book Information

Series: Archipelago Books
ISBN: 9781939810601
Pages: 150
Publication Date:

Praise

[A] dream-like meditation on family, death, love, painting, and words. . . . a supple, evocative tapestry.
—Ellen Elias-Bursać, The Arts Fuse

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 style is both modest and subdued, no doubt aided by Rosenberg, who previously translated the author’s last work, The Storm (2018).
—Kirkus Reviews

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

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