Difficult Light

by Tomás González, Andrea Rosenberg (Translator)

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781939810618
Publisher:	Steerforth Press
Publication date:	08/11/2020
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	150
File size:	893 KB

About the Author

Tomás González was born in 1950 in Medellín, Colombia. He studied Philosophy before becoming a barman in a Bogotá nightclub, whose owner published his first novel in 1983. González has lived in Miami and New York, where he wrote much of his work while making a living as a translator. After twenty years in the US, he returned to Colombia, where he now lives. His books have been translated into six languages, and his previous novel, The Storm, was published by Archipelago with translator Andrea Rosenberg.

Andrea Rosenberg is a translator from the Spanish and Portuguese and an editor of the Buenos Aires Review. Among her recent and forthcoming full-length translations are Inês Pedrosa's In Your Hands, Aura Xilonen's The Gringo Champion, Juan Gómez Bárcena's The Sky over Lima, and David Jiménez's Children of the Monsoon.

Read an Excerpt

One
That night I spent a lot of time awake. Beside me, Sara wasn’t sleeping either. I looked at
her brown shoulders, her back, still slender at fifty-nine, and found solace in her beauty. From
time to time we held hands. In the apartment nobody was sleeping, nobody was talking.
Occasionally someone coughed or went to pee and then went back to bed. Our friends Debrah
and James had come to keep us company and had settled down on a mattress in the living room.
Venus, Jacobo’s girlfriend, had gone to his room to lie down. My sons Jacobo and Pablo had left
two days earlier in a rented van, heading for Chicago. From there, they’d taken a plane to
Portland. At one point I thought I heard the faint sound of Arturo, my youngest son, strumming
his guitar in his room. In the street I could hear the nighttime shouts of the Lower East Side, the
familiar tinkle of breaking bottles. At about three in the morning, two or three Hells Angels
thundered by on their motorcycles from their clubhouse two blocks away. I slept almost four
hours straight, dreamlessly, until I was awakened at seven by the knot of grief in my belly at the
death of my son Jacobo, which we’d scheduled for seven that night, Portland time, ten o’clock in
New York.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

Self-delusion, hallucinations, anger, volatility chafe against the soothing waters and the stars above, and González, one of South America's most acclaimed and pitch-perfect novelists, plunges you into the brutality of man and nature alike.

— Kerri Arsenault

Reading Group Guide

discussion questions
1. In the novel, different timelines are braided together. Discuss how time functions in the novel. What effect does the way time unfolds have on the reading experience, and our understanding of what’s happening?
2. Sara and David have very different relationships with their children. Discuss the role of what’s heard and unheard in those relationships and in the way David narrates them.
3. At several points in the novel, the narrator seems to intertwine sensations experienced via different senses: he says “It’s so loud, you can’t even write” and refers to “the light of sounds.” Why might that be? How do descriptions of sensations operate in this text?
4. Difficult Light takes place in both New York and La Mesa, and sometimes certain words are explicitly described as having been said in English or Spanish. What bearing do the characters’ multilingual lives have on the novel? In what ways are our experiences as readers mediated by the fact that this text is a translation from Spanish?
5. What is the relationship between the pages David is writing and the novel that we are reading?
6. The novel’s title is Difficult Light. At one point while painting, David describes a “light that contains shadows, that contains death, and is also contained within them.” How are all the concepts he mentions connected? What does their juxtaposition here suggest about what they mean in the novel? What is the role of notions of light and dark in the text?
7. What is the symbolic weight of David’s painting of the ferry?
8. “Here I am forced by language, which is inherently clunky, to describe as two separate things something that in its simplest, purest form is only one . . .” Broadly speaking, what does the novel have to say about the possibilities and limits of language?
9. What does the relationship between the human world and the animal world in this novel reveal to us about the characters and the novel’s concerns?
10. One word that recurs throughout the text, starting with the epigraphs, is “world.” How do you think the narrator would define “world”? What is contained (or not) in the word?

Editorial Reviews

06/29/2020

In González’s genial, reflective tale (after The Storm), a recently widowed Colombian painter composes a narrative of his family’s life in the U.S. and the death of their oldest son. In 1983, David and Sara move with their three sons from Colombia to the U.S., and eventually settle in New York City. David’s period of creative flourishing is abruptly ended in the early 1990s, when his oldest son, Jacobo, is badly injured in a car accident. Three years later, Jacobo, still half paralyzed, begins having chronic, unbearable pain. Sales of David’s paintings fund Jacobo’s medication and physical therapy, but eventually Jacobo decides he wants to end his life. Pablo, the middle brother, agrees to help, and, in 1999, they fly to Portland, Ore., where a doctor has agreed to cooperate. Meanwhile, David observes the limits of his ability to convey the truth of his emotions in his paintings. Much of the novel is taken up by calls to David from Jacobo and Pablo from Portland, while the rest is comprised of present-day reflections on Sara. David describes their passion, which is muted only by their advancing age. While the fractured, nonlinear narrative can be tough to follow, it’s laced with moments of beauty and domestic peace. In the end, González achieves a brilliant triangulation of a man’s attempts at self-expression through two artistic mediums. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

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

"In González’s genial, reflective tale, a recently widowed Colombian painter composes a narrative of his family’s life in the U.S. and the death of their oldest son . . . laced with moments of beauty and domestic peace . . . González achieves a brilliant triangulation of a man’s attempts at self-expression through two artistic mediums." — Publishers Weekly

"González's last two novels, Difficult Light and The Storm were both hailed as quiet masterpieces at the time of their publication in Colombia... Through all his work you find the peaceful writing that admirably traces the ugliness of the world; the confidence of the narrative voice, seemingly conventional while eschewing the straitjackets of realism... he has a mysterious ability to uplift the commonplace and turn it into unforgettable images through careful observation and sensuous detail." — Juan Gabriel Vásquez, The Guardian

"There’s hard light indeed for 78-year-old artist David, who’s recently widowed, unable to paint owing to failing eyesight, and at home in Colombia, using a magnifying glass and blackberry-sized letters to record grievous events that unfolded when he and his family lived in 1980s Manhattan...González unfolds the story in luminous, reverberant language all the more heart-wrenching for eschewing graphic detail; David’s painterly sensitivity is enough." — Library Journal


"[Tomás González] writes with authority about transient relationships with cities and people, pairing joys with inevitable losses . . . 
Difficult Light presents the power of creativity over isolation and mortality. It reminds the reader that when the outside world becomes inaccessible, the interior realm still holds traces of all that we’ve lost." 
 — Rain Taxi Review
"A quiet meditation on many of life’s Big Things: grief, love, art . . . González’s narrator unwinds his time- and space-hopping narrative in a voice, carried deftly by Rosenberg, that does not waver in its gentle warmth." — Words Without Borders

"Tomás González has once again given voice to a sorrowful sermon. Rending and tender, Difficult Light is a novel of familial sacrifice and agonizing acceptance, an exercise in retracing old wounds amid the gathering abundance of time. An affecting altarpiece, through and through." —Justin, Bookshop.org

"Difficult Light by Tomás González is about an old painter rapidly turning blind, mediating on one of the most impactful events in his life, the death of his oldest son Jacobo...counting down the minutes to the scheduled death of this beloved son, which could be called off at any moment, if the son wished to do so, is part of the strange thrill of the book. As the implications for the looming deadline become more clear, the countdown adds a slightly perverted sense of suspense." — Franziska Lamprecht, Full Stop

"Tomás González has the potential to become a classic of Latin American literature." — Elfriede Jelinek, Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature

"González invokes both Hemingway and Faulkner in his treatment of tortured family dynamics and laces the three-way banter in the boat with a fascinating, near-toxic atmosphere of machismo." — Publisher's Weekly on The Storm

"In Andrea Rosenberg's translation, the author's stylistic traits - short and pointed phrases, poetic descriptions and poetic monologues - shine and linger in the reader's ear...​​The Storm​​ arrives as a welcome addition to the international recognition of one Colombia's most prolific and poetic writers." - Nicolás Llano, Asymptote Journal

"Self-delusion, hallucinations, anger, volatility chafe against the soothing waters and the stars above, and González, one of South America's most acclaimed and pitch-perfect novelists, plunges you into the brutality of man and nature alike." - Kerri Arsenault on The Storm

There is humor in the frequent revelation of self-delusions. There is also suspense as the storm - more interpersonal than weather-related - builds and breaks. Fabulist elements, lyrical prose, and a chorus of narrative voices give this slim novel depth and breadth. - Kirkus Reviews on The Storm

"Tomás González has once again given voice to a sorrowful sermon. Rending and tender, Difficult Light is a novel of familial sacrifice and agonizing acceptance, an exercise in retracing old wounds amid the gathering abundance of time. An affecting altarpiece through and through."
– Justin Walls, Bookshop.org

“A poignant, beautiful book touching upon big themes of family, loss, art, and the critical question of whether death can provide relief from a life filled with chronic pain. González is compassionate without being overtly sentimental. It’s a deeply moving novel that dwells on the intimacy and humour of a family, of displaying resilience amid pain, and as another author has put it, “manages to say new things about the way we feel.”
–– Radhika Pandit, Radhika’s Reading Retreat

From the Publisher

★ 04/01/2020

There's hard light indeed for 78-year-old artist David, who's recently widowed, unable to paint owing to failing eyesight, and at home in Colombia, using a magnifying glass and blackberry-sized letters to record grievous events that unfolded when he and his family lived in 1980s Manhattan. With David's career solid if not soaring, the family had moved to a light-blessed apartment on the Lower East Side when a taxi carrying eldest son Jacobo was hit by a drunk driver, leaving Jacobo paralyzed from the waist down and in constant, insurmountable pain. Though brother Pablo had abandoned his academic dreams to help, efforts to retrain Jacobo's body or even diminish his physical anguish are for naught, and as the novel opens, David awaits word with his wife and closest friends of Jacobo's assisted suicide in Oregon. VERDICT González (The Storm) unfolds the story in luminous, reverberant language all the more heart-wrenching for eschewing graphic detail; David's painterly sensitivity is enough. Magnificent.

Library Journal

2020-06-03
An elderly painter with roots in South America reflects on his life since he immigrated to New York City.

It’s hard to say what was on González’s mind as he wrote this novel, nearly 40 years after his debut, In the Beginning Was the Sea (1983), but it’s a very poetic reverie. Our narrator is an aged painter with origins in Bogotá, Colombia—called “Don David” by his housekeeper, Ángela—but in the current timeline, he’s relatively settled in New York. The most important people in his life have been his wife, Sara, whom he married at 26 and was married to for some five decades until she passed away, and his sons, Pablo and Jacobo, each of whom had their own burdens to carry. This is in some ways a reflection on aging, as the painter has macular degeneration and a variety of other maladies, 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. To his credit, González could have written a portrait of triumph over adversity, but life just doesn’t work that way sometimes, and the painter is forced to see his son suffer and finally die. 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). For better or worse, mostly it’s sad, neither a celebration of the narrator’s long life nor an embittered prosecution of the terrible pitfalls that befell him and his. It’s just a life, after all.

Give the author his own ill-fated summation: “It’s a cruel cliché: the last thing you lose is hope.

Kirkus Reviews