Books: La luz difícil

⚠️ Warning: Spoilers

La luz difícil resonated with me.

The story explores how difficult it can be for relatives of those who undergo euthanasia to face the consequences. Jacobo is in permanent pain following a car crash and decides to end his life. The story follows David, his father, who, nineteen years later, still suffers a great deal of pain from the ordeal. The treatment of this topic, so captivating, makes the book worth reading.

I found most characters, both in New York and in Colombia, convincing I felt like I knew them, their actions made sense to me.

David is also a celebrated painter, who tells us about light and his paintings. Unfortunately, though I have great interest in visual arts, this text’s treatment of painting didn’t resonate much with me. I didn’t find much depth in it, perhaps just an example of taking refuge in creative arts in order to cope with pain. I felt that these descriptions of art and paintings didn’t really add much to the story.

At first, the underwhelming treatment of visual arts —which I had assumed the main theme— bothered me: if this is the main theme of the novel, it falls flat. However, I soon came to the conclusion that this was a little room: ignore the references to paintings and the novel still holds its ground.

I feel some echoes from Vonnegut in this text, though this is probably just a personal bias —given how much time I’ve spent with Vonnegut. I see a shadow of Vonnegut’s Bluebeard —the old painter who turns to writing when he can’t paint anymore; the themes of beauty in decay, of old age. Of course, the main topics are completely different. I also see the humorous attitudes from Vonnegut’s novels like Hocus Pocus —we deal with painful experiences and the cruelty of life not only by stoically accepting our luck but by laughing about and finding beauty in the ironies we encounter.

Life as a Colombian expat resonated with me —I left Bogota nineteen years ago— as did life as an expat in New York specifically. However, being an expat is a very secondary theme.

Sentences that in other books I would consider cheap and kitsch (e.g., “Cuando pienso en eso y siento la ausencia de Sara y el frío de esta, la inevitable soledad de la vejez humana, debo recostarme un rato, apagar el alma unos minutos como soplando una vela y dormir”; “Tan largo sufrimiento, el de él, el mío, el de todos, terminó por barrer las peores acumulaciones de telarañas brumosas de mi alma, las más densas, las más imaginarias, y me dejó casi limpio de tristezas arbitrarias”) somehow work well here. They’re not really my style, but, interestingly, they don’t bother me in this prose. Why? Is it because the book is in Spanish? Is it because it’s written by a Colombian (both real and fictional author), and Colombians often write using very buttery language? Does our shared context make me more forgiving? I think part of it is that these sentences are used sparingly, and the weight of the story justifies them.

The story is told by the main character roughly two decades after the main event. The handling of time is okay —the story is centered on the days around Jacobo’s dead, jumping back in the beginning, to give us context about his family, and forward to David decades later, as he sits down to write the story. I would have preferred a simpler structure. I found the time jumps a bit distracting, but they weren’t too confusing nor annoying.

I read this book immediately after Flowers for Algernon. I find it funny to encounter here the same literary device of turning the pen over to someone who can’t write very well —in this case, Angela, the campesina who takes care of David in his old age. In this book, however, the device is not as important, and the point is simply to laugh about how little this matters. I feel that although La luz difícil is better written, Algernon reached me much more deeply.

That said, for all the shortcomings I’ve listed, I enjoyed La luz difícil —its treatment of euthanasia and character development are enough to forgive the rest.

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