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Difficult Light

Author Tomas Gonzalez
Translated by Andrea Rosenberg
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Paperback
$18.00 US
Steerforth Press | Archipelago
On sale Aug 11, 2020 | 150 Pages | 9781939810601
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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 formally daring meditation on grief, written in candid, arresting prose.
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.
Copyright © 2020 by Tomás González. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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. View titles by Tomas Gonzalez

About

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.

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.
Copyright © 2020 by Tomás González. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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. View titles by Tomas Gonzalez

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