The Illumination: A Novel - Hardcover

Brockmeier, Kevin

3.4

3,562 ratings by Goodreads

9780375425318: The Illumination: A Novel

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0375425314 ISBN 13: 9780375425318

Publisher: Pantheon, 2011

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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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Product Description:

Unusual book

Review:

"Lush. . . . At once dark and profound. . . . [The Illumination] never fails to be deeply felt and precisely observed." --The New York Times Book Review

"A beautiful novel. . . . Brockmeier is a dazzling stylist." --The Washington Post Book World

"Stunningly original . . . this gorgeously written book will still stay with [readers] long after the last page is turned." --The Oregonian

"Show[s] us the astonishment of life as it is really being lived." --The Boston Globe

"Moving. . . . Skillfully explores the relationship between love and memory." --The New Yorker

"The depth of [Brockmeier's] scrutiny makes his fiction glow." --The Plain Dealer

"Brockmeier's characters are wonderful, and his images are dazzling." --Detroit Free Press

"The Illumination imagines a real universe of pain and pleasure, connection and disconnection, and quest for meaning that defines human experience delightfully anew." --The Miami Herald

"Brockmeier's consistently arresting observations have the throb of lived--rather than merely imagined--experience. . . . In The Illumination it isn't our agonies and discomforts that define us, but the selves we build in response to them." --Salon

"Brockmeier's work has always been characterized by his crystalline and surprising descriptions. . . . Brilliant. . . . Thorough and honest." --Southern Literary Review

"Lyrical. . . . Both the quotidian warmth of the notebook and the increasingly incidental shimmer of physical suffering draw the characters--and us--into the complex and vivid consideration of some of the fundamental questions that come with being human." --The Times Literary Supplement (London)

"[A] sunlit novel." --Time Out Chicago

"Fresh and ingenious. . . . Brockmeier has one of those imaginations that churns out picture-perfect imagery." --Elle

"Brockmeier's book positively sparkles . . . We've never read anything like it." --Daily Candy San Francisco

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