Light by Timothy OGrady


Light
Title : Light
Author :
Rating :
ISBN : 0436206420
ISBN-10 : 9780436206429
Language : English
Format Type : Hardcover
Number of Pages : -
Publication : First published June 3, 2004

An elderly Pole sits in a cafe in Krakow. At another table a young man with a ravaged face is drinking wine and reading Werner Heisenberg's Physics and Philosophy. They begin to talk. All through the night as they go from bar to bar the young man tells the story of the great love of his life, of how in the midst of their rapture the woman inexplicably disappeared, and of how he is now driving across Europe in a desperate attempt to find her. After they part in the pre-dawn light the old man returns to his rooms and finds himself beset by questions. Why can he not forget this young man? Who was the woman he was with and why did she leave him? These questions lead him back through his own life, from pre- and post-war Poland, to his membership of the Communist Party and his own life-altering love affair with a woman he met in Berlin and then ran away with to the sand dunes of the Baltic coast until she, too, left him without explanation. Through the years that followed he wandered the world trying to escape from the memory of her. Now, back in a small town in Poland, he begins to assemble stories both from his own past and that of the young man and the woman he loved and lost until he finds himself on an unexpected quest. Light traverses Europe and parts of America, the history of physics and political changes in Central Europe. It is about love and ruin, East and West, friendship and betrayal, the search for certainty and the consequent disillusionment. It is, too, about the making of stories and how they can lead, inadvertently, to revelation.

Light Reviews

  • Claire

    This review originally appeared on my blog at
    http://thetop100bookclub.wordpress.co... I would love for you to be part of the community!

    ‘Light’ surpassed all of my expectations. I anticipated a story of love lost and friendships made, but it ended up being so much more than that, with a plot that moves and changes, yet remains based on simple ideas, which are written in an interesting and beautiful style. It is always good to discover something different.



    ‘Light’ is the story of a man in the evening of his life who stumbles upon a younger man in a pub. He stands out because he is reading a book on physics. Yet, once they start talking, the young man M. relates a story of heartbreak at the hands of a woman who disappeared and whom he is attempting to trace.



    M. opens up immediately to a stranger. There is desperation in him, but there is also a connection between him and the narrator; the mutual understanding in the loss of a woman many years before. This chance meeting stays with the protagonist, whose sense of fraternity with the young man leads him to make his own attempts to solve the mystery of the missing woman. It also forces him to confront his memories, taking him through post-war Poland and his years as a youth.



    There is a vicariousness to the quest – as if he, perhaps, will finally be able to relinquish the memory and hurt of Angelina (which plagues him like disease) if M. can find Hanna. At seventy, he says he still felt like he had a lot of life to live, but it seems more like he was looking for a story that would restore his faith in love.



    ‘Light’ is a reminder of life as a series of chain reactions, that love is transformative, and that it has the potential to feed on lovers until nothing remains. The course of our lives and our very identities have the potential to be defined by a loved one’s presence or absence.



    What is the relation between physics and love? The narrator, in his loneliness and old age, examines M.’s situation, together with his memories, as if performing some kind of scientific investigation, examination, experiment. On one hand, there is a certainty attached to the scientific – a formula that makes determination of a conclusion easy – on the other, love and physics may have something in common; that our answers may change depending on the questions we ask in the beginning and that, like everything else in the world, love is not immune from creation, alteration, annihilation.