Book review
Delirio by Laura Restrepo (original Spanish)
Delirium by Laura Restrepo (English translation)
Augustina goes crazy over a weekend while her husband is away with his kids from a previous marriage. Why? The husband tries to find out. The story takes place in Bogota when Pablo Escobar was at his zenith and it looked like Columbia might become a failed, narco-state.
I liked this book a lot. I tend to see the world in psychological terms and I found this book did as well. Restrepo uses an unusual paragraph and punctuation. The narrative style shifts from narrator POV to character POV within a paragraph, sometimes a sentence ended with a comma instead of a period. At first this is disconcerting but I thought it was a good choice to go with the nature of delusional thinking in which all the characters indulge, not just Augustina. (I read the book in Spanish but I presume the translator kept this style in English. It’s very important to the novel.)
The background of Columbia at the nadir of the drug wars (one hopes!) was very interesting and a nice plus. It goes without saying that our War on Drugs is a Deliriium as well and we are far crazier than Augustina et. al., to be pursuing it. We also may not be as lucky next time. Colombian civil society managed to get organized crime under control. Mexico, a far larger country, far more integrated with the US in every way, may not.
