In Perfect Light: A Novel (Spanish Edition) [Hardcover]

Benjamin Alire Saenz (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 9, 2005

From award-winning poet Benjamin Alire Sáenz comes In Perfect Light, a haunting novel depicting the cruelties of cultural displacement and the resilience of those who are left in its aftermath.

In Perfect Light is the story of two strong-willed people who are forever altered by a single tragedy. After Andés Segovia's parents are killed in a car accident when he is still a young boy, his older brother decides to steal the family away to Juárez, Mexico. That decision, made with the best intentions, sets into motion the unraveling of an American family.

Years later, his family destroyed, Andés is left to make sense of the chaos -- but he is ill-equipped to make sense of his life. He begins a dark journey toward self-destruction, his talent and brilliance brought down by the weight of a burden too frightening and maddening to bear alone. The manifestation of this frustration is a singular rage that finds an outlet in a dark and seedy El Paso bar -- leading him improbably to Grace Delgado.

Recently confronted with her own sense of isolation and mortality, Grace is an unlikely angel, a therapist who agrees to treat Andés after he is arrested in the United States. The two are suspicious of each other, yet they slowly arrive at a tentative working relationship that allows each of them to examine his and her own fragile and damaged past. Andés begins to confront what lies behind his own violence, and Grace begins to understand how she has contributed to her own self-exile and isolation. What begins as an intriguing favor to a friend becomes Grace's lifeline -- even as secrets surrounding the death of Andés' parents threaten to strain the connection irreparably.

With the urgent, unflinching vision of a true storyteller and the precise, arresting language of a poet, Sáenz's In Perfect Light bears witness to the cruelty of circumstance and, more than offering escape, the novel offers the possibility of salvation.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A poet, children's book author, former priest and author of House of Forgetting, Saenz returns with the gut-wrenching drama of a Mexican-American family's dissolution. Ten-year-old Andrés Segovia sees his life ripped apart after his parents are killed in an El Paso auto accident. Older brother Mando steals Andrés and his sisters, Yolie and Ileana, away from their comfortable American foster home to a dismal life across the bridge in Juarez, Mexico, in a misguided attempt to preserve the family. The Juarez of the dispossessed is more or less lawless; it is also the favored destination of paroled American child molestors, a premise on which the story turns. Andrés, returning alone to El Paso a hardened and cynical young adult with violent tendencies, is counseled by therapist Grace Delgado, a single parent newly diagnosed with breast cancer; her son, with whom she has unresolved problems (and who is playfully named "Mister") is Andrés's age. As Grace slowly and painfully unearths the story of Andrés's tragic childhood, the two grow close, but it soon becomes clear that her life, Mister's and Andrés's have crossed before. Despite telegraphing the plot, Saenz offers beautifully nuanced characterization, and interweaves disparate needs and lives with a skillful, sensitive touch. (Aug.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

When Andres Segovia and his three siblings lose their parents in an auto accident, the oldest brother sneaks them away from their El Paso foster family to Juarez to raise them himself. But poverty leads to drugs, prostitution, and sexual abuse, and the family becomes unglued. Andres finally makes his way back to El Paso, where he meets Grace Delgado, a social worker to whom he goes for court-mandated counseling after his first arrest. Grace is a widow and cancer patient, and her empathy for Andres leads her to examine her shaky relationship with her own son, as well as her inability to relate to his wife. His characters provide rich fodder for Saenz's unique ability to look deeply into his characters' past to see what motivates them in the present and which of their memories are impossible to shed. A former priest and award-winning poet thoughtfully shares his meditations on multiculturalism and familial love--especially the struggle to survive its loss. Deborah Donovan
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: Rayo; First Edition edition (August 9, 2005)
• Language: Spanish
• ISBN-10: 0060779209
• ISBN-13: 978-0060779207
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.4 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,957,559 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Benjamin Alire Sáenz was born in 1954 in his grandmother's house in Old Picacho, a small farming village in the outskirts of Las Cruces, New Mexico in 1954. He was the fourth of seven children and was raised on a small farm near Mesilla Park. Later, when the family lost the farm, his father went back to his former occupation--being a cement finisher. His mother worked as a cleaning woman and a factory worker. During his youth, he worked at various jobs--painting apartments, roofing houses, picking onions, and working for a janitorial service. He graduated from high school in 1972, and went on to college and became something of a world traveler. He studied philosophy and theology in Europe for four years and spent a summer in Tanzania. He eventually became a writer and professor and moved back to the border--the only place where he feels he truly belongs. He is an associate professor in the MFA creative writing program at the University of Texas at El Paso, the only bilingual creative writing program in the country. Ben Saenz considers himself a fronterizo, a person of the border. He is also a visual artist and has been involved as a political and cultural activist throughout his life. Benjamin Sáenz­ is a novelist, poet, essayist and writer of children's books. His young adult novel Sammy & Juliana in Hollywood was selected as one of the Top Ten Best Books for Young Adults in 2005, and his prize-winning bilingual picture books for children--A Gift from Papá Diego and Grandma Fina and Her Wonderful Umbrellas--have been best-selling titles. A Perfect Season for Dreaming is Ben's newest bilingual children's book which has received two starred reviews, one from Publishers Weekly and one from Kirkus Reviews. He has received the Wallace Stegner Fellowship, the Lannan Fellowship and an American Book Award. His first book of poems, Calendar of Dust, won an American Book Award in 1992. That same year, he published his first collection of short stories, Flowers for the Broken. In 1995, he published his first novel, Carry Me Like Water (Hyperion), and that same year, he published his second book of poems, Dark and Perfect Angels. Both books were awarded a Southwest Book Award by the Border Area Librarians Association. In 1997, HarperCollins published his second novel, The House of Forgetting. Ben is a prolific writer whose more recent titles include In Perfect Light (Rayo/Harper Collins), Names on a Map (Rayo/Harper Collins), He Forgot to Say Goodbye (Simon and Schuster), and two books of poetry Elegies in Blue (Cinco Puntos Press), and Dreaming the End of War (Copper Canyon Press).

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "Standing in the light, they look like salvation itself", August 11, 2005

By 

M. J Leonard "MikeonAlpha" (Silver Lake, Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: In Perfect Light: A Novel (Spanish Edition) (Hardcover)

Set in the sun baked cities of El Paso and Juarez; In Perfect Light is all about fear, reminiscence, and loss, where the light forever holds hopes and dreams and where the night brings its own memory and revenge. In this story, the lucky ones sleep through the chaos. Full of startling imagery and poetic description, In Perfect Life centers on two very different people who meet up through the legal system and who recognize the pain of living in each other.

Grace Delgado is a therapist and has begun to question her life's worth after having been recently diagnosed with cancer. Her husband Sam has just died and her son, Mister has drifted away from her. Andrés Segovia is a young Mexican American, who doesn't seem to fit into either the American or the Mexican culture. When he was a boy, his older brother Mando stole the family away to Juarez after their parents were killed in a car accident. This decision put a chain of events into motion that eventually unraveled the family.

Grace and Andres meet years later when Andres is convicted of a brutal murder. Apparently he got drunk in a bar and viscously attacked a middle-aged Anglo man. Sent to Grace for mandated therapy, Andres begins to recount his own tragic family history to the psychiatrist. Andres becomes an almost elusive, and romantic figure, and it is through their doctor-patient relationship that they begin to truly learn from each other and ultimately find the missing sense of direction the both desperately long for.

Through Grace we learn Andres is angry, lost and scarred. He's full of unpredictable, almost savage energy, a disinherited and dispossessed young man caught in the middle of two countries. Forced, along with his sisters, into prostitution, he's led a hard life, having learnt to accept the sexual lusts of predatory older men. But he can't escape from memory forever, and part of his journey is that he needs to accept his own traumatic past, He needs to try to find away, just the right spot to break through toward the freedom he's always wanted to have. "A real kind of freedom, not the kind that was just a nice word."

As Grace tries to help Andres face his demons, she begins to come to terms with her illness. Grace is ambivalent about telling Mister, but she's also hesitant to take any treatments for the disease. Grace seeks solace in the "light" and she readily admits that was the light that could always calm her. It seems that for Grace death has become a kind of exile, "Exile from your body, from your home from the garden you maintained for a lifetime." And she begins to acts if letting go of her own life was as easy as flicking the ashes of a cigarette. "As if her life was nothing."

Whereas Grace remembers Sam, Andres think of another kind of death. Death for Andres is being held prisoner by a claustrophobic past, which he sees as the worst kind of death, "the kind of death that doesn't let you touch or breathe, that makes your heart feel as if it's stone." But through each other, Grace and Andres realize that it is better to live in the light and to face each day in the dark. Grace tries to share with Andres the importance of "living in the light," to accept the mistakes of one's past, to cope with one's misfortunes, and hopefully to move on.

Author Benjamin Alire Saenz has written a powerful novel of memory, hardship, and ultimately, hope. The characters imbue the familiar; they're people with ordinary lives, as ordinary as a thousand other Mexican families, and they live in a city full of ordinary families that are ordinary, yet not ordinary all.

In Perfect Light is a story of a group who do not easily fit into categories and who must suddenly come to terms with whom they are as American-born Hispanics. This is especially true for Grace and Andres, whose lives are always going to always be full, full of memories, and voices, and people who are either dead or impossible to love. Mike Leonard August 05.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars La verdad, April 12, 2006

By 

Not my real name (Houston TX) - See all my reviews

This review is from: In Perfect Light: A Novel (Spanish Edition) (Hardcover)

This novel is incredible. Well crafted, I could not stop reading, did not want it to end, did not want to return it to the library. The light is what heals, redeems, allows us to return to wholeness. Andres spends his 26 years feeling like someone's dirty secret. By telling his story to Grace, the truth is revealed, the shame begins to fall away. Grace also begins to see herself as she truly is, somone who has helped and touched others, someone who is wife and mother but also she finds peace in being just her own self. I am half Mexican-American and half gringa - I could really relate to the theme of being "Mexican" enough, is Mexican-American something that is defined by driving used cars, having the right shade of skin,speaking Spanish a certain way, liking to eat beans? Do we have to give up who we are - in order to have a "better" life economically? We also have a theme of country as it relates to the concept of "Mother", this is also a story about what happens when Mothers fail, Andres' homeland (Mexico) provides no solace or protection, Andres' Mother dies, Vicente's Mother gives him up, Grace does not know how to be warm or forgiving to her son Mister. All of it fascinating, all of it very real. This novel perches perfectly in the space between passionate, poetic drama and the everyday.

4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A tragic masterpiece, August 24, 2005

By 

Keila Pernia (NJ) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: In Perfect Light: A Novel (Spanish Edition) (Hardcover)

Andres Segovia's parents die in a car accident and his brother
decides to move he and his siblings to Mexico so they could stay
together. The move changes the entire course of Andres' life, as
well as how he views his place in the world. Andres and his brothers
and sisters must come to terms with being American-born Hispanics
living in a Mexican world. All the tradegy's that these children are
faced with is enough to make anyone jump off a bridge.

After making his way back to the United States, Andres is arrested
and placed under the therapeutic eye of Grace Delgado, a recently
widowed therapist whose life, until her husbands death had been
picture perfect. Their friendship and dependency on each other
becomes the soul of the novel.

In this story we are introduced to characters that will stay with us
long after this book is over. I would not say that anyone is the
main character but I will say that if any of them were not apart of
the story the whole story would change.

This was a page turner and my school work has suffered but this book
was just heart breaking. Heartbreaking in a real sense because you
know that so many children are faced with these events. I also
think that this book is giving a voice to all the children that are
sold to sex rings in Mexico. This was a beautiful story and all to
real. Another plus to this book is that even though all the
character are faced with so much crap there is not a single person
whinning and wondering why me.