The Illumination
The Illumination by Kevin Brockmeier is a novel published by Pantheon Books in 2011, featuring 257 pages in English. This first edition explores the concept of human pain as a source of beauty, presenting a world where wounds shine and illuminate. The narrative begins at 8:17 on a Friday night, when a fatal car accident sets off a chain of events involving a private journal filled with love notes. This journal passes through the hands of six individuals, each experiencing their own struggles and connections.
Readers will find a richly imaginative exploration of the human condition, as the six recipients—a data analyst, a photojournalist, a schoolchild, a missionary, a writer, and a street vendor—navigate their unique challenges. The story delves into themes of suffering and connection, revealing how each character’s experience intertwines with the others in a universe that is both familiar and surreal. Through Brockmeier’s lens, pain transforms into a radiant illumination, inviting reflection on the intricate ties that bind us all.
Official synopsis Publisher
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.
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