Originally posted at:A Girl that Likes BooksEvery story is like a big cake, everyone gives account of the piece he or she is eating and the only one that can account for the whole thing is the baker.Why I read this bookMy reading of Hispanic authors has gone down in the last years, let alone Colombian authors. Restrepo's book has been acclaimed with several prizes and my family liked it, so I decided to jump back on the horse with this one.What the book is aboutThis book takes us through the loose of sanity of Agustina and how this affects the people around her in the present while at the same time showing us what was it in her past that brought the fall. As side players we also have a view on the money laundry that was taking place during the Pablo Escobar and narcoterrorism period that took place in Bogotá during the late 1980's.First impressionsI can see how the prose in this book has been compared to the one often found in Saramago's work. The jumps in phrasing, sometimes abrupt might make it hard to follow as it happens with Saramago. However, as you advance in the story it gets easier and at a certain point the changes between voices became seamless.Final thoughtsThe way this book not only explores the psyche of Agudtina, past and present, but also the very intricate situation that the country was going through makes it unique. Is not the first (nor it will be the last one) to deal with the drug’s problematic in Colombia, but it is the first one I read that doesn’t gravitate solely around the people implicated in the trafficking or in this case the money laundry. In here, the pain and fragility that Agustina goes through is not due to it.Her whole back story, going all the way back to her grandfather is accompanied by “insane” outbursts, with behaviours that were hidden but that could’ve point at a very delicate personality. The whole family dynamics that is shown, her relation with her father, her 2 brothers, her mom and aunt; those dynamics alone could’ve shown a part of the reality if the country, with the blatant machismo of the father and the dependence on appearances of the mother.When you add the fact that the status of the family, or better say the money that keeps this status is related to the biggest drug lord the country has known, it allows the author to discuss, if not critic, the behaviour towards this illegal operations and how it touched different levels of society, both directly and indirectly, to a point that people would be deep into their knees without knowing anything at all.What prevent me from giving to this book a full 5 stars is that I was left hanging at the end with a lot of questions unresolved and not enough bases to construct my own ending. You see, and abrupt end is not a bad thing in itself to me, but a lot of the books that have done so and that I have loved, left me with whispers during the whole story that allow me to construct a possible array of conclusions. In this book at the end I felt like, in the vertiginous life of Agustina and her family, we all crashed into a wall disguised as a final period, while a lot was left unsaid.Isn't it right father, that one is crazy inside?
"La mujer que amo se ha perdido dentro de su propia cabeza, hace ya catorce días que la ando buscando y me va la vida en encontrarla pero la cosa es difícil, es angustiosa a morir y jodidamente difícil; es como si Agustina habitara en un plano paralelo al real, cercano pero inabordable, es como si hablara en una lengua extranjera que Aguilar vagamente reconoce pero que no logra comprender. La trastornada razón de mi mujer es un perro que me tira tarascadas pero que al mismo tiempo me envía en sus ladridos un llamado de auxilio que no atino a responder; Agustina es un perro famélico y malherido que quisiera volver a casa y no lo logra, y al minuto siguiente es un perro vagabundo que ni siquiera recuerda que alguna vez tuvo casa." Restrepo, Laura (2010-07-15). Delirio (Premio Alfaguara 2004) "Aguilar recalca lo de la coraza porque antes del episodio oscuro lo que hacían en la mañana del domingo era el amor, y según él lo hacían con un fervor admirable, como si se desquitaran del sexo a la carrera que entre semana le imponían a él los madrugones al empezar el día y el agotamiento al terminarlo, Los domingos hacíamos el amor desde que nos despertábamos hasta que nos arrinconaba el hambre, entonces bajábamos a comer lo que encontráramos en la nevera y volvíamos a subir para seguir en lo mismo, luego dormíamos o leíamos un rato y nos abrazábamos de nuevo, a veces ella quería que bailáramos y lo hacíamos cada vez más lenta y estrechamente hasta que terminábamos de nuevo en la cama, no sé, dice Aguilar, era como si el domingo realmente fuera un día bendito y ningún mal pudiera permearlo,..."Restrepo, Laura (2010-07-15). Delirio (Premio Alfaguara 2004) (Spanish Edition) (p. 68). Santillana-USA. "...aquí estás otra vez, demencia, vieja conocida, zorra jodida, reconozco tus métodos camaleónicos, te alimentas de la normalidad y la utilizas para tus propios fines, o te le asemejas tanto que la suplantas."Restrepo, Laura (2010-07-15). Delirio (Premio Alfaguara 2004) (Spanish Edition) (p. 117). Santillana-USA."Yo mientras tanto pensaba en ti, que es lo que hago cuando no quiero pensar en nada, le dice el Midas McAlister a Agustina, digamos que me fascina la textura que adquieres en el recuerdo, lisa y resbaladiza y sin responsabilidades ni remordimientos, algo así como acariciarte el pelo, la pura sabrosura de acariciarte el pelo siempre y cuando eso pudiera hacerse sin consecuencias, mala pasada nos jugó Dios con eso de que una cosa lleva a la otra hasta que se forma la endiablada cadena que no para, te juro que el infierno debe ser un lugar donde te encierran con tus consecuencias y te obligan a lidiar con ellas."Restrepo, Laura (2010-07-15). Delirio (Premio Alfaguara 2004) (Spanish Edition) (pp. 167-168). "Blanca se hace la pregunta en términos más amplios, cuando especula si los momentos decisivos lo son desde el instante en que acontecen, o si por el contrario sólo se vuelven decisivos a la luz de lo que ocurre después de ellos y a raíz de ellos."Restrepo, Laura (2010-07-15). Delirio (Premio Alfaguara 2004) (Spanish Edition) (p. 187). Santillana-USA.
What do You think about Delirio (2004)?
Wow what a read! This disturbing book begins with a husband's return home to find his wife Agustina, in a state of delirium. What caused it will be the tale that Laura Restrepo disturbingly tells. Often using first person vernacular, which I admit was a challenge at times to read, tells the uneasy story of Agustina's Columbian family.Set during the 1980s, when the Medellin drug cartel was reaking havoc in the country, we are introduced to Midas McAlister, an ex-boyfriend of Agustina and a money launderer for Pablo Escobar who gets into some trouble. Agustina's father beats her effeminate brother while hiding a connection to her aunt. Even her grandfather takes a drastic turn for melodrama while remembering his past. Plus Agustina believes she has a knack for seeing the future. Yes a very disfunctional family. But even better fodder to explain this state of delirium that the poor husband is trying so hard to understand.In doing so the story takes on a sense of a mystery and yet it never feels that way. One just gets sucked into the language, the madness and the twists of the family. I can see why it won El Premio Alfaguara de novela 2004. It is a very incredible tale.Read in Spanish.
—David
A la fecha es el único libro de esta escritora que he leído. Debo decir que lo terminé de leer porque ganó el Premio Alfaguara 2004 y porque admiro al presidente del juzgado de dicho certámen, José Luis Sampedro, quien opinó lo siguiente: "Delirio es una expresión de todo lo que Colombia tiene de fascinante, e incluso de terriblemente fascinante. Y cuando el nivel de la escritura llega hasta donde lo llevó Laura Restrepo, hay que quitarse el sombrero. Lo digo en mi nombre y en nombre del jurado que no ha ahorrado aplausos para esta obra."Sinopsis: Un hombre regresa a casa después de un corto viaje y encuentra que su esposa ha enloquecido completamente. No tiene idea de qué le pudo haber ocurrido durante los tres días de su ausencia, y con el fin de ayudarla a salir de la crisis empieza a investigar, sólo para descubrir lo poco que sabe sobre las profundas perturbaciones escondidas en el pasado de la mujer que ama.Sin embargo debo decir que no me satisfizo esta historia de personajes locos (la protagonista, su abuelo y en cierta medida buena parte de los otros). Para darle otra oportunidad, conseguí otra novela de esa misma autora y empezaré a leerla.
—Maria Esther Estrada MA
Laura Restrepo's touching, compelling and beautifully crafted novel is, on one level, a work of historical fiction. Set in the mid-1980s, to a soundtrack of disco, Flashdance and Celia Cruz, it revisits the frenzied heyday of the cocaine baron Pablo Escobar, who twisted the rapacious Bogotá elite and thus Colombia itself around his infinitely crafty fingers. "The fat guy," as one of his jittery enforcers puts it, "has already swallowed us whole".Restrepo paints the pervasive misery that cocaine cash (and the misbegotten US "war on drugs") brought in brief, shocking strokes, from the hooker murdered in a sado-masochistic show staged to arouse a paralysed oligarch to Escobar's own vengeful campaign, via bomb and bullet, "to spend my fortune making this country weep". However, her focus lies elsewhere, on the family cruelties and lies of the elite that made them so vulnerable to moral and financial kidnap by this thug: "all those years of secret lives and hidden loves".Agustina, the troubled and apparently "psychic" daughter of a stiff patriarchal clan, has suddenly slipped into a "quagmire of madness" after years of bipolar swings and dips. Her husband Aguilar – once a professor, but now a pet-food salesman – rescues her from a hotel. With help from her free-spirited Aunt Sofi, he sets about piecing together the "catalogue of basic falsehoods" that has controlled her rigid family for decades, wrecked her peace of mind, and sent her beloved gay brother Bichi into a self-chosen Mexican exile.Restrepo tells this chronicle of a craziness foretold through deftly intersecting monologues. She shifts between three unhappily privileged generations of Londoños, the baffled devotion of Aguilar to his unfathomable wife, and the outsider's view provided by Midas McAlister. Agustina's ex-lover, Midas is a poor, smart boy made bad who, thanks to a middle-management role in the Escobar empire, can seek his revenge for humiliation at the hands of a governing class that even inherits "christening gowns starched by Carmelite nuns".For all the violence and hypocrisy of its hinterland, Delirium feels cheeringly awash with love: the love that Agustina gives, and inspires; the underground alliances that bind family members against the official myths that imprison them; and the everyday passions and affections that let the ordinary people of Bogotá find a way through the collective madness around them
—Gabbo
