This was a recommendation from Kathy. In response to my half-way appeal for countries I had yet to find books from, she contacted her friend Erik, who had spent some time living in Honduras.

The familiar response came back that there wasn’t much literature in translation from the country. Erik’s first choice would have been Ramón Amaya Amador’s Prisión verde but as far as he knew – and as far as I’ve been able to find out – this is not available in English. In the absence of anything by Spanish-language authors that I could read in translation, Erik suggested artist and writer Guillermo Yuscarán, whom he described as a ‘quasi Honduran author’.

The quasi refers to the fact that Yuscarán was actually born in the US with the name William Lewis. It wasn’t until 1972 that he came to Honduras, fell in love with the place and eventually made it his home, even going so far as to take a Honduran name. Given my general rule of thumb that a writer has to have spent enough time in a country for it to be part of their life story in order for their work to be eligible to represent that nation on the list, Yuscarán definitely fitted the bill.

Written during his first visit to Honduras and illustrated by the author, Points of Light paints a disturbing and enchanting picture of the country that stole Yuscarán’s heart. By turns brutal and whimsical, the stories shimmer with the hopes and dreams of a multitude of characters engaged in the struggle to survive. There is the chronically ill boy Raimundo who sings in the town and on the buses to feed himself and his siblings, the prostitute Lia who dies in childbirth on the beach, and the poor child Vicente who wants to reach the moon down from the sky. Through them all, moves the blind man Toribio, a magnetic figure who draws the stories together and provides a series of almost other-worldly insights.

Yuscarán’s direct and often apparently simple style is well-suited to telling the stories of characters who are thwarted by life. His portrait of Miguel, for example, a disabled man who was abandoned in Tela at the age of two – ‘a piece of bait for life to strike at’ – and now lives in a shack on the beach, forever cut off from the girls he would love to get to know, is devastating in ‘The Milk of Human Kindness’. Similarly, the discussions between Toribio and a terminally ill child in ‘Emilio Aguilar’ capture of world of feeling in a very few words.

But that’s not all. A strong artistic sense runs through the book, bringing out the richness, beauty and possibility of even the bleakest existences. We see it in the vivid descriptions of the colours of the natural world – the sunrise’s ‘spidery pattern of oranges and yellows for Lia’s song and Pablito’s dreams to ride on’, for example – and in the awakening sensibility of the many artists who people the narratives. While gringo Memo (a self-portrait, perhaps?) ‘had always wanted only to see what was real, no matter how painful or overwhelming’, Vicente experiences the marketplace as being ‘alive with color […] each person [..] a spark of light leaping in and out of a great painting’. And when the painter Soledad, who sees ‘the truth of colour in all things’, completes his magnum opus of a great bird on a wall looking out to sea, his creation takes on an extraordinary life of its own:

‘That night, The Great Bird moved its head, then blinked one eye; the massive wings fluttered. Far out at sea, a fog bank moved rapidly toward shore, sliding across the water to the sheer cliff walls. As the fog passed, dissipating into mist, Soledad saw the moon over Tela, shining downward like some enormous beacon. His eyes widened as the sphere suddenly became transparent, before filling with liquid colours, shades he saw as his own cosmic fluids – his own blood – in transformation: rich incandescent blues and greens; a kaleidoscope of oranges and yellows becoming livid pink, then violet, then crackling into sprays of porous magenta. Blinded by the brilliance, Soledad closed his eyes.’

Though there are many great moments, some of the stories lack momentum. ‘Dona Lina Catero’, for example, in which an old woman goes about her business, waxing lyrical to the village youngsters, is more of a portrait. Similarly, ‘Son of Esquipulas’, the final story in the collection, feels more like a mosaic of incidents rather than a single coherent piece.

Overall, though, it’s hard not to be struck by the freshness of the vision in the writing. Forty years on, with his place in Honduras’s cultural hall of fame assured, Yuscarán’s first book retains its power to surprise, sadden and transcend. It is in many ways a love letter to the country he would adopt. On the strength of it, it’s hard to see how Honduras could not embrace him.

Points of Light by Guillermo Yuscarán (Nuevo Sol Publicaciones, post 1989)