In Perfect Light

by Benjamin Alire Sáenz

"Ben Saenz's vivid imagination captures all that is beautiful, agonizing and redemptive in the crossings we make through borders of geography and culture. But it is in the interior journeys of the psyche and the soul that we must find salvation; Saenz's brilliant prose penetrates to that core and he finds and exposes that truth. A reader can ask for no more than this: to be spellbound by a story, and to come to the last page with a sense...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0060779217
• ISBN13: 9780060779214
• Release Date: November 2008
• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Length: 352 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.2" x 7.9"

Customer Reviews

Finished with tears and with hope

Right from the beginning of this novel I knew I was in masterful hands. Saenz moves between characters and perspectives and time with a fluid, beautiful grace. His characters are complex, nuanced, and impressively real. I wish I knew Grace, that she lived down the block. I want to have Miser and Liz and Vincente over for dinner. I was to take Andres in my arms. And more importantly he's written a book that will stick with me. I hope one that will make me more generous toward people, and both harder and softer. I finished the novel in tears and with hope. Highly recommended.

La verdad

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.

When Bad Things Happen to Good People

In Perfect Light, Benjamin Alire Saenz. On the edge of US and Mexico sit El Paso and Juarez. Saenz considers this intersection as well as the intersections between the lives and deaths of people living there. Grace, the social worker with cancer, Mister (I never could figure out why anyone would name their child 'Mister' -- she did not otherwise seem like a weirdo) her son, who wants to adopt a child, Andres Segovia, the orphan in his twenties, and Dave Duncan, the criminal lawyer who wants to fix the world, are some of the characters put to the test. How they survive (or don't) and grow is the theme of this novel, which is well written but certainly not upbeat.

A tragic masterpiece

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.

"Standing in the light, they look like salvation itself"

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