A widowed Colombian painter, going blind and barely able to write, looks back at his life, much of it spent in New York, and in particular at the day and night leading up to the death of his son. His journal shifts backwards and forwards between the past and the present, weaving together strands of memory and episodes from his current life, but the result feels seamless.

Difficult Light is given coherence by its compelling central character, whose writing reveals both the limits of self-awareness and the honesty of age. It is an understated but powerful story, which reveals to us an immensity of suffering and emotional pain, but also a life full of love and joy — and the written shadow of an artist's visual intuition.

January 2021

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