Over twenty years after his son’s death, nearly blind and unable to paint, David turns to writing to examine the deep shades of his loss. Despite his acute pain, or perhaps because of it, David observes beauty in the ordinary: in the resemblance of a woman to Egyptian portraits, in the horseshoe crabs that wash up on Coney Island, in the foam gathering behind a ferry propeller; in these moments, Gonzalez reveals the world through a painter’s eyes. From one of Colombia’s greatest contemporary novelists, Difficult Light is a formally daring meditation on grief, written in candid, arresting prose.