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FICTION
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Iluminación (Illumination)
Iluminación is a book composed of stories conjuring different realities and a variegated human and animal landscape that end up showing their deep common roots.
Thus, the stories that compose the book narrate of: a father and a son going hunting with the background of the recent death of the wife/mother; a couple of older homosexuals finding in pornography a path to inner growth and also the shadow of jealousy; a recently divorced woman locked in a house revisiting a childhood trauma; a Latino migrant in the United States reading a science fiction novel while trying to rebuild his relationship with a widow obsessed with physical deformities; a series of animals telling, in the first person, about their relationships with their masters, all American writers; etc.
Beyond its superficial variety, however, the tales of Iluminación are related to each other by the way in which they all are set, or suggest, the luminous spectrum of a family, of different types of families. The characters of the book, children, parents, animals, seem to achieve in each story an instance of transcendence in their private lives, the nucleus of an even mystical experience, but enlightenment is always here suggestion, always the edge, a loophole and not the thing itself, an instance of revelation that ends up not being one.
Each story frames reality and realistic modes in a crisis, breaks the shell of normality and installs stories on a plane of displaced emotions and reality, in which fiction is the only thing that counts.
108 pages – Original language: Spanish (Editorial El Cuervo, La Paz, 2017)
