The Illumination
A Novel
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3.5 • 34 Ratings
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
What if our pain was the most beautiful thing about us?
From best-selling and award-winning author Kevin Brockmeier: a new novel of stunning artistry and imagination about the wounds we bear and the light that radiates from us all.
At 8:17 on a Friday night, the Illumination commences. Every wound begins to shine, every bruise to glow and shimmer. And in the aftermath of a fatal car accident, a private journal of love notes, written by a husband to his wife, passes into the keeping of a hospital patient and from there through the hands of five other suffering people, touching each of them uniquely.
I love the soft blue veins on your wrist. I love your lopsided smile. I love watching TV and shelling sunflower seeds with you.
The six recipients—a data analyst, a photojournalist, a schoolchild, a missionary, a writer, and a street vendor—inhabit an acutely observed, beautifully familiar yet particularly strange universe, as only Kevin Brockmeier could imagine it: a world in which human pain is expressed as illumination, so that one’s wounds glitter, fluoresce, and blaze with light. As we follow the journey of the book from stranger to stranger, we come to understand how intricately and brilliantly they are connected, in all their human injury and experience.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Brockmeier's spectacular latest (after The View from the Seventh Layer), pain manifests itself as visible light after a mysterious event called "the Illumination," revealing humanity to be mortally wounded, and yet Brockmeier finds in these overlapping, storylike narratives, beauty amid the suffering. Jason Williford, a photojournalist, loses his wife in a traffic accident and fixates on a troubled teenage girl who teaches him to cultivate pain "in a dreamlike vesper." Chuck Carter, a battered and bullied neighbor boy, steals a journal of love notes from Jason's house, and later gives the journal to door-knocking evangelist Ryan Shifrin, who found his faith after watching his younger sister die from cancer. Telescoping into his decades of service to the church, Ryan wonders at the civil strife and disasters that "produce a holocaust of light." Through accounts of quotidian suffering depict humanity's quiet desperation the agony of a severed thumb, the torture of chronic mouth ulcers Brockmeier's careful reading of his characters' hearts and minds gives readers an inspiring take on suffering and the often fleeting nature of connection.
Customer Reviews
100 Words or Less
The core idea behind this novel is … well … unnecessary. The whole “illumination” gimmick doesn’t really add anything to an otherwise generic our-maudlin-life characters.
Sure, the first 2 narrative voices are interesting enough. But by the time I reach the 3rd, and its limitations and repetitious structure, I couldn’t go on. Oh, there were a couple of moments of something nice, near the beginning. But that soon faded. I didn’t sense any new ground being broken through here. The links between the characters were minor and the whole theme was so stale.