Laura Restrepo - 'Delirium'

"Delirium' has earned lavish praise from such luminaries as Jose Saramago, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Harold Bloom, and Vikram Seth, not to mention a cluster of glowing reviews in the book sections and periodicals. Saramago goes so far as to call it "a truly great novel, of a kind that you seldom encounter any more", while the Washington Post Book World is almost overcome with emotion, describing it as "stunning, dense, complex, mind-blowing ... This novel goes far above politics, right up into high art."

These people have to be smoking something very exotic, because 'Delirium' doesn't even come close to deserving such accolades. It is an entertaining diversion, a snack between meals, the sort of book you might finish on a long flight and think no more about. Its narrative technique (split perspective) has been used to great effect elsewhere; in Faulkner, for example, where the change in perspective turns things inside-out and completely alters the moral landscape. Here it is used to no effect whatsoever. One character simply tells the story, another deliberately does not tell the story, a third is removed from the main plot altogether, and the fourth tries to find out what happened. This fourth is Aguilar, a horribly conventional character (as are they all) who comes home from a trip to find his wife has gone crazy. He spends the rest of the novel trying to figure out what happened to her. We could call him the 'good guy'. Agustina, his wife, is similarly cliched, mad but beautiful, with her long black hair and her perfect white skin. Her ex-lover, the money launderer Midas, is almost laughable as the caricature crook and chauvinist pig; his sections struck me as the most implausible, not so much in content (there is actually some interesting analysis of how the old Columbian oligarchy is complicit in the affairs of Pablo Escobar's drug cartel) but in style - his unlikely epithets ("Agustina, doll"? "Agustina, kitten"?) and ridiculous mix of crass, slangy eighties streetwise jargon with literary flourishes for the reader, utterly unbelievable. And minor characters are just as bad; the lovely but remote mother, the authoritarian and homophobic father, the beautiful and sensitive gay brother, the kind aunt with a secret, etc etc. Nobody strays an inch from these narrowly defined characteristics, so there is no complexity, no nuance, no ambiguity, no real humanity to speak of.

Restrepo is a well-known and widely admired political activist in her country and elsewhere, and it is likely that her story is, on one level, an allegory of Colombia's brutally tragic recent history. Agustina is the broken soul of her country, driven insane by the cynical machinations of her people, staggering about helplessly in a forest of worn-out and ineffectual religious symbols, but within reach of redemption through the wholehearted commitment of the 'man' who loves her. Aguilar's struggle to put together the pieces of her past, and his ultimate discovery of the diaries of her grandparents, supports the idea that Columbia's people must reconcile with their own sordid history if they are to have any sort of a future. The problem with this reading is that the allegory is unrooted in social detail, and so its floats in the imagination like an ancient romance. The reader wants more social and political exposition: it is not enough to hear that Midas listens to Paul McCartney and E.T. is playing at the theatres; we need to get a thorough sense of the heat and fear and corruption and poverty and hardship and loss and madness at large to understand that this is a story about Columbia and the struggle to save its soul. Without that, the characters are unsupported in their roles, and because they are so narrowly conceived to begin with, they appear finally as ciphers in a sort of elaborate wish-fulfillment.

Nor is the novel's language particularly inspired. There has been some fuss over the 'loveliness' of Restrepo's words, but they struck me as prosaic and dull, with occasional flashes of color and the odd surprising image, but nothing to get excited about. I liked the line "later in life I learned that it's a kind of law that the dead always lose their shoes", but only for purely personal reasons. It is possibly a problem with the translation - Saramago might have read the original Spanish (he is Portuguese) and Garcia Marquez most certainly must have - but it's impossible to say for sure if you are restricted to English.

The best writing was to be found in the descriptions of madness; how it manifests by clotting and dividing in the mind, how it is transferred from one generation to another, not by nature so much as by nurture, or the lack of it. The character of Nicholas Portulinas, Agustina's grandfather, is more interesting than the others, not more complex, but somehow more tenderly imagined, as are all the scenes of Agustina's childhood. The scene where Portulinus disappears is exquisitely handled. It is not a beautiful passage, particularly, but it is sensitive to very subtle aspects of psychological functioning. We are made to see exactly how denial in a dysfunctional family works to overthrow the mind of its weakest link, the child-witness. It is heartbreaking. If only Restrepo would concentrate her skills in this department and leave the slangy, pop-culture, pot-boiler elements alone, we might get a novel worth thinking about for longer than it takes to write this review.