As his twin languishes in a coma, a man seeks spiritual enlightenment
and meaning, aided by texts and emails that seem to be coming from his brother.
Alex Shakar’s Luminarium is a
beautifully written book that mashes up philosophy, pop culture, recent past,
quantum mechanics and a story about a man whose twin brother is dying.
It is the summer of 2006 and Fred Brounian is not in a good place. The
video game company he and his brothers founded has been stolen by a military company
that uses its game engine to run extremely realistic training scenarios for its
wannabe warriors. His fiancée Melanie
has broken up with him and taken up with someone new (or so he’s heard). And
despite being in a coma, his dying twin brother George has been sending him a
series of enigmatic emails—Help Avatara—that mean nothing to him.
Fred joins a group studying spirituality, and finds the experience
alternately liberating and frightening, made more complicated by his attraction
to Mira, the woman facilitating it. He reatreats into the cranky comfort of his
relationship with his father Vartan, a failed actor but decent musician who
performs at kids’ birthday parties in an act that George conceived when he and
Fred were in high school.
This nook is a dazzling, dizzying romp through pop culture, recent
history, East Indian myth, quantum physics and a whole spectrum of other
elements. It’s lovely to see a story in which the myth is not the same old
Catholic and Celtic tropes that have been done to death, and the author does a
graceful job of integrating the myth and the mundane. (He’s particularly good
with the various game scenarios and the texts and messages Fred gets from …
wherever he’s getting them from.)
Luminarium works on many levels. At its simplest, it’s
the story of a man whose life is falling apart, making him ripe for the “faith
without ignorance” spiritual awakening that Miri is offering. It’s the story of
a man coping with the impending death of his twin, his other self. It’s a love
story. It’s a tale of quantum revelation in which “real physics” coexists
alongside things that could not possibly happen, and yet do.
