Delirium” can be simplistically described as a detective story told in an unusually literate manner. But the novel is much more than a simple mystery.
Laura Restrepo uses a shifting lens to take the reader into a world of madness, obsession and pain. Her major players are joined by a web that, initially, isn’t obvious. The result is a work that doesn’t always succeed, but is so lovely and daring that even when it falls short of the mark, it is worth the investment of time and treasure.
Pablo Escobar’s Bogatá is the backdrop of the story, a time in Colombia of violence and social unrest. Aguilar, once a professor of literature, has been reduced by circumstances to delivering dog food for a living. He takes a short vacation to visit his sons, leaving town on Wednesday.
He arrives home on Sunday, expecting Agustina to greet him at their apartment. She is not there. What he finds instead are a series of increasingly impatient and anonymous phone messages: He needs to pick up his wife at the Wellington Hotel – she’s in bad shape.
Aguilar finds Agustina uncommunicative and staring blankly out a window. She isn’t catatonic, but neither is she fully in touch with reality. Once home, she devotes herself to mindless ritual, placing bowls of water all over the house. She is unwilling to eat and unable to explain the events that have led to her dementia.
Her silence only heightens Aguilar’s determination to find answers: Why she was at the hotel, and what could reduce her to such a state? Had she gone off with a lover? Was this tied to drugs? Either of these realities might be easier to bear than simply not knowing.
Aguilar’s first-person narrative doesn’t get far before the reader is switched to another first-person point of view, one that will eventually be revealed as belonging to Midas. He has known Agustina since they were both little more than children, and he runs in a social circle that includes her older brother. He seems to know something about how Agustina ended up in her current demented state, but his narrative – as breezy as Aguilar’s is intense – is only interested in telling the story at his speed, as seen through the filter of his self-interest.
The perspective soon shifts again, this time to a distant third-person narrative describing Agustina’s childhood relationship with her younger brother, Bichi. It’s a story of a rough childhood and the stirrings in Agustina of a second sight, which may or may not be real.
The final strand of the story goes back a number of years, to the story of Agustina’s maternal grandfather Portuinus, who lived among the sugar-cane fields of Sasaima. And as his story unfolds, it becomes clear that Agustina’s madness may have a familial root.
Complex structure
“Delirium” is anything but a direct story, and it is one much given to the landscapes of mind and heart. Restrepo is as interested in what people are thinking as in what they are doing; the result is a mixed success.
The structure of the novel is complex; each section of narrative is short and separated from its predecessor by no more than an ellipsis. It takes a little while to fall into the rhythm of the work but once the reader understands the workings of the story, the pieces fall together nicely.
The most vibrant of her characters is Midas, who makes his living laundering money for the Medellín drug cartel. His freewheeling narrative takes in the social turbulence of Bogatá and provides a context for Agustina’s family. Aguilar is, in his own way, no less intense; he is the force propelling the story. His love for his wife runs much deeper than her beauty, the magnet that first drew him to her.
Puzzle comes together
The sections devoted to Agustina and her grandfather pale in comparison to the male, first-person strands. It’s clear that her grandfather was fairly unstable, opening the door to mental problems inherited along with family money. But her father was also cold and abusive. The pathology of the disorder could arise from nature, nurture or from a combination of the two.
As the strands of the story wind together, the reader is the only observer who will ultimately understand the cause of Agustina’s madness. And while this is the mystery that pulls you in, what keeps you in is the desire to hear what each of the characters has to say. Each section drops another piece into Agustina’s jig-sawed past. When the puzzle is finally complete, the ultimate satisfaction lies not in seeing the picture but in the exercise of putting it all together.
Robin Vidimos reviews books for The Denver Post and Buzz in the ‘Burbs.
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FICTION
Delirium
Laura Restrepo
$23.95
