Illumination (Brockmeier)

The Illumination
Kevin Brockmeier, 2011
Knopf Doubleday
272 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780375425318


Summary
What if our pain was the most beautiful thing about us? 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. The six recipients a data analyst, a photojournalist, a schoolchild, a missionary, a writer, and a street vendor inhabit an acutely observed, familiar-yet-strange universe, as only Kevin Brockmeier could imagine it: a world in which human pain is expressed as illumination, so that one s wounds blaze with light.

As we follow the path of the journal from stranger to stranger, we come to understand how they are all connected in the human pain and experience. (From the publisher.)