Difficult Light

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.

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. About the translator: 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.