Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR, The Seattle Times, The Kansas City Star, and Philadelphia City Paper
What if our pain was the most beautiful thing about us?
At 8:17 on a Friday night, the Illumination begins. Every wound begins to shine, every bruise to glow and shimmer. And in the aftermath of a fatal car accident, a journal of love notes, written by a husband to his wife, passes into the keeping of Carol Ann Page, and from there through the hands of five other people—a photojournalist, a schoolchild, a missionary, a writer, and a street vendor. As their stories unfold, we come to understand how intricately and brilliantly they are connected, in all their human injury and experience. With the artistry and imagination that have become his trademark, Kevin Brockmeier reveals a world that only he could imagine, casting his gaze on the wounds we bear and the light that radiates from us all.
An Interview with Kevin Brockmeier (Michele Filgate for Bookslut)
At one point in the book, you write: “Everyone had his own portion of pain to carry. At first, when you were young, you imposed it on yourself. Then, when you were older, the world stepped in to impose it for you. You might be given a few years of rest between the pain you caused yourself and the pain the world made you suffer, but only a few, and only if you were lucky.” Are we living in a society where pain is more prevalent than ever?
Honestly, I don't know that our times are all that different from those that came before. I suspect that the world has always been composed of pain and pleasure, bliss and agony, contentment and discomfort, and in roughly the same proportions as it is today. More to the point, perhaps, before I wrote The Illumination, and while I was working on it, I myself was experiencing more pain—physical pain—and in a less remitting way than I had before. I used the fifth section of the book, Nina's, to investigate my own encounters with illness: years and years of mouth ulcers that made it painful for me to talk, eat, drink, laugh, and smile. I tried to bring as much lucidity, accuracy, and honesty to Nina's observations of her malady as I could, and although her story is not really my own, that one aspect of it is. You can consider all the self-pity, querulousness, and desperation she expresses a peculiarly intimate form of journalism.
Reviews
“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
“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)
“Moving. . . . Skillfully explores the relationship between love and memory.”
—The New Yorker
“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
“[A] sunlit novel.”
—Time Out Chicago
“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 book positively sparkles. We’ve never read anything like it.”
—Daily Candy San Francisco
“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
"Fresh and ingenious. . . . Brockmeier has one of those imaginations that churns out picture-perfect imagery."
—Elle