When it comes to South American literature, Colombia is definitely one of the hot spots. Birthplace and stomping ground of the great Gabo (Gabriel García Márquez to you and me), the country boasts a talented crop of writers, despite a tradition of rigorous government censorship – according to the File Room, 100 Years of Solitude was itself banned by the Colombian authorities in the 1970s.
Among this group of authors, Laura Restrepo caught my eye. An outspoken political journalist, Restrepo spent six years in exile in Mexico after receiving death threats because of her work. Her novels, which have won numerous awards, are known for mixing the insights she gained into Colombia’s criminal underworld as a reporter with elements of the fantastic or uncanny. It sounded like a compelling combination.
Restrepo’s 2004 novel Delirium starts with a bang. Middle-aged lecturer-turned-dog-food-delivery man Aguilar arrives home from a short trip to see his children to find that his young wife Agustina has gone mad. The rest of the novel – which weaves together four narratives and draws the reader through a involving in Bogota’s drug-trafficking network, clairvoyance, sadism, murder, and a tortuous family history stretching back two generations – pieces together the reasons why.
If you want an example of lean, powerful storytelling, then Restrepo is the writer for you. Working dramatic irony, time shifts, character voice and objective correlatives the way a gymnast moves through positions on the parallel bars, she delivers a mesmerising performance that will have you gripped right from the realisation that ‘something irreparable had happened’ in the first sentence to the breathtaking dismount of the final chapters.
Restrepo couples this narratological agility with a dexterous empathy that enables her to present both the inner workings of mental breakdown and the toll such events take on those closest to the sufferers. Whether she is leading us through the dark lair of Agustina’s childhood demons or Aguilar’s uneasiness about her sudden unpredictability and sense of ‘not knowing what bubbles are bursting inside her, what poisonous fish are swimming the channels of her brain’, the writer is committed to finding new routes by which to bring us close to the experiences she portrays. Her description of Aguilar’s fears about how Agustina’s illness has affected her feelings for him is particularly vivid and inventive:
‘I was afraid that if I could enter into her head, like a doll’s house, and walk through the compressed space of the various rooms, the first thing I’d see, in the main room, would be candles the size of matches lit around a little coffin holding my own corpse, me dead, forgotten, faded, stiff, a Ken-size doll in Barbie’s all-pink house, a ridiculous Ken abandoned in his tiny moss-green living room, I myself moss-green, too, because I’ve been dead for a while.’
The author’s talent for presenting thoughts and emotions in striking ways pays dividends when it comes to tracing the twisted strands of family history that have led to the tangle of the present. What might be an unwieldy and dry chronicle in the hands of another writer is immediate, troubling and strange in Restrepo’s work, with each character, no matter how peripheral, picked out in arresting detail. There is the obsessive musician grandfather who goes out walking wearing two hats and the mother who speaks to Aguilar on the phone as if he is a care assistant rather than her daughter’s partner.
The result is a compelling novel about consequence; about the way what we think of as our private quirks and imperfections can bounce and ricochet off others sending them careening down a giddy slope to their ruin. It is a gripping and haunting piece of work. Oh, and it’s a jolly good yarn too…
Delirium (Delirio) by Laura Restrepo, translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer (Vintage, 2008)