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Review
An inspiring take on suffering and the often fleeting nature of connection. --Publishers Weekly
This is a radiant, bewitching, and profoundly inquisitive novel of sorrow, perseverance, and wonderment. --Booklist --This text refers to the Audio CD edition.
This is a radiant, bewitching, and profoundly inquisitive novel of sorrow, perseverance, and wonderment. --Booklist --This text refers to the Audio CD edition.
Book Description
From best-selling and award-winning American author Kevin Brockmeier, a novel which completely reimagines the world...
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
A man vows to leave his wife a sticky-note defining one thing he loves about her, every day. The woman transcribes these little notes -- silly, profound, sentimental, teasing -- into a series of journals. There's a car crash. The husband dies... so his wife believes.
Carol-Ann, a divorcee, severs her thumb opening an alimony cheque from her cold ex-husband.
They end up in the same hospital room, where something strange and magical happens: all over the world, pain and suffering -- human, animate and, extraordinarily, inanimate --becomes, literally, visible, as wounds and hurts, disease and sadness, begin to emit a brilliant clear silvery light.
The woman in the crash dies. The other woman takes the journal home with her. She wanted her to have it.
But her husband had survived the crash.
And so begins an extraordinary novel of love and pain. Not boy-meets-girl love or boy-loses-girl pain, but of human suffering and the love it engenders. In his previous novel, Kevin Brockmeier approached the two great qualities of John Cheever -- a plain, eloquent style, and an immersion in love even where you and I can't see it -- and in The Illumination he surpasses it.
The book is an extraordinary achievement. I see that one reviewer complains that it's a sci-fi book let down by poor writing. Isn't one of the things about reviewing to find out what the author is trying to do? This isn't science fiction, or urban fantasy, or any other convenient tag. It is what all art aspires to: something more utterly like itself than it is like anything else.
It glows with the two rarest qualities in life: profound sympathy and imagination. Something I can't quite define radiates from its pages, a something which encourages simultaneous tears and laughter. It's infinitely strange and utterly familiar with the familiarity of a recurring dream.
To say Brockmeier's writing is "poor" is raw opinion without substance, like saying "ugh" about salmon because it isn't pizza.
Technically, Brockmeier's flawless, rhetorically and analytically. He never shows off. Never wants to make us say "Wow, he's clever! Wow, he can write!"
To the reader, his writing's like quicksilver, flowing and coalescing with a brilliant glow which belies its weight, its determination. "The Illumination" is utterly itself, compelling, disorienting and, above all, humane.
If you are human, read it.
Carol-Ann, a divorcee, severs her thumb opening an alimony cheque from her cold ex-husband.
They end up in the same hospital room, where something strange and magical happens: all over the world, pain and suffering -- human, animate and, extraordinarily, inanimate --becomes, literally, visible, as wounds and hurts, disease and sadness, begin to emit a brilliant clear silvery light.
The woman in the crash dies. The other woman takes the journal home with her. She wanted her to have it.
But her husband had survived the crash.
And so begins an extraordinary novel of love and pain. Not boy-meets-girl love or boy-loses-girl pain, but of human suffering and the love it engenders. In his previous novel, Kevin Brockmeier approached the two great qualities of John Cheever -- a plain, eloquent style, and an immersion in love even where you and I can't see it -- and in The Illumination he surpasses it.
The book is an extraordinary achievement. I see that one reviewer complains that it's a sci-fi book let down by poor writing. Isn't one of the things about reviewing to find out what the author is trying to do? This isn't science fiction, or urban fantasy, or any other convenient tag. It is what all art aspires to: something more utterly like itself than it is like anything else.
It glows with the two rarest qualities in life: profound sympathy and imagination. Something I can't quite define radiates from its pages, a something which encourages simultaneous tears and laughter. It's infinitely strange and utterly familiar with the familiarity of a recurring dream.
To say Brockmeier's writing is "poor" is raw opinion without substance, like saying "ugh" about salmon because it isn't pizza.
Technically, Brockmeier's flawless, rhetorically and analytically. He never shows off. Never wants to make us say "Wow, he's clever! Wow, he can write!"
To the reader, his writing's like quicksilver, flowing and coalescing with a brilliant glow which belies its weight, its determination. "The Illumination" is utterly itself, compelling, disorienting and, above all, humane.
If you are human, read it.
Format:Hardcover
I read this on the strength of his Granta reputation and the first two chapters were compelling. Brockmeier can write but this book quickly loses momentum and by the final chapters I found it increasingly difficult to care about any of the characters or the themes they personify in so artificial a manner.
The book may be a brave experiment but it lacks a coherent vision, is rather self indulgent and needed better editing. It is the least impressive novel I have read this year and is really little more than a set of very loosely connected short stories linked by the very clunky device of the passage of a compendium of notional love notes. The themes of loss, bereavement and vulnerability are interesting but this is not the book to read if you wish to be enlightened about them.
I am surprised that Vintage thought it worth publishing; it read like an precocious undergraduate's first attempt at a 'serious' literary novel. It reveals intelligence and literary skill but it would have been better to have left it in the bottom drawer. A shame given the manifest talent the writer has to craft a compelling narrative.
The book may be a brave experiment but it lacks a coherent vision, is rather self indulgent and needed better editing. It is the least impressive novel I have read this year and is really little more than a set of very loosely connected short stories linked by the very clunky device of the passage of a compendium of notional love notes. The themes of loss, bereavement and vulnerability are interesting but this is not the book to read if you wish to be enlightened about them.
I am surprised that Vintage thought it worth publishing; it read like an precocious undergraduate's first attempt at a 'serious' literary novel. It reveals intelligence and literary skill but it would have been better to have left it in the bottom drawer. A shame given the manifest talent the writer has to craft a compelling narrative.
Format:Hardcover
The premise of this novel is unique, any pain suffered begins to glow with an incandescent light.
The book is divided into 6 chapters of roughly the same length. each chapter follows a different character. The problem is the characters are weakly linked together, the book reads like 6 short stories based within the same fictional world with the respective characters making cameos in each other stories. The first 2 chapters are amazing, these are the characters the book should have followed throughout, yet they are abandoned by chapter 3, and each following chapter gets worse. Its a shame, if the book had been a short story consisting of just the first 2 or even 3 chapters I would be giving it 5 stars. If you get a chance to read just the first 2-3 chapters its well worth it, just pretend the latter chapters (short stories) don't exist.
The book is divided into 6 chapters of roughly the same length. each chapter follows a different character. The problem is the characters are weakly linked together, the book reads like 6 short stories based within the same fictional world with the respective characters making cameos in each other stories. The first 2 chapters are amazing, these are the characters the book should have followed throughout, yet they are abandoned by chapter 3, and each following chapter gets worse. Its a shame, if the book had been a short story consisting of just the first 2 or even 3 chapters I would be giving it 5 stars. If you get a chance to read just the first 2-3 chapters its well worth it, just pretend the latter chapters (short stories) don't exist.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
The Illumination is a profoundly moving, imaginative and deeply human...
One of the things I love about author Kevin Brockmeier is the way that he can make the ordinary extraordinary. Read more
Published 8 months ago by Pamreader
Wasted opportunity...
Sadly, this is another example of the seemingly fixed sci-fi condition of `great idea, bad execution'. Read more
Published 10 months ago by bloodsimple
Disappointed
On the strength of a couple of great short stories I read The Brief History of The Dead, which I enjoyed enough to look out for his next novel. Read more
Published 12 months ago by TDH
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