Aguilar returns from a brief business trip to find that his wife, Agustina, has had a complete mental breakdown, and as he struggles to help her regain her sanity, he begins to realize how little he knows about his wife's troubled past. - (Baker & Taylor)
An unemployed literature professor reduced to selling dog food for a living, Aguilar returns from a brief business trip to find that his wife, Agustina, has had a complete mental breakdown, and as he struggles to help her regain her sanity, he begins to realize how little he knows about his wife's troubled past. 30,000 first printing. - (Baker & Taylor)
Aguilar, an unemployed literature professor who has resorted to selling dog food for a living, returns home from a short trip to discover that his wife, Agustina, has gone mad. He doesn't know what has happened during his absence, and in his search for answers, he gradually unearths profound and shadowy secrets about her past.
On one level, Delirium reads like a detective story, as the reader pieces together information to discover the roots of Agustina's madness. But it is also a remarkably nuanced novel whose currents run much deeper, delving into the minds of four characters: Aguilar, a husband passionately in love with his wife and determined to rescue her from insanity; Agustina, a beautiful woman from an upper-class Colombian family who is caught in the throes of madness; Midas, a drug-trafficker and money-launderer who is Agustina's former lover; and Nicolas, Agustina's grandfather. Through the mixing of these distinct voices, Laura Restrepo creates a searing portrait of a society battered by war and corruption, as well as an intimate look at the daily lives of people struggling to stay sane in an unstable country. - (Blackwell North Amer)
Internationally acclaimed for the virtuosity and power of her fiction, Laura Restrepo has created in Delirium a passionate, lyrical, devastating tale of eros and insanity.
Aguilar, an unemployed literature professor who has resorted to selling dog food for a living, returns home from a short trip to discover that his wife, Agustina, has gone mad. He doesn’t know what has happened during his absence, and in his search for answers, he gradually unearths profound and shadowy secrets about her past.
On one level, Delirium reads like a detective story, as the reader pieces together information to discover the roots of Agustina’s madness. But it is also a remarkably nuanced novel whose currents run much deeper, delving into the minds of four characters: Aguilar, a husband passionately in love with his wife and determined to rescue her from insanity: Agustina, a beautiful woman from an upper-class Colombian family who is caught in the throes of madness; Midas, a drug-trafficker and money-launderer, who is Agustina’s former lover; and Nicolás, Agustina’s grandfather. Through the mixing of these distinct voices, Laura Restrepo creates a searing portrait of a society battered by war and corruption as well as an intimate look at the daily lives of people struggling to stay sane in an unstable country.
Delirium already has been awarded the 2004 Premio Alfaguara, the 2006 Grinzane Cavour Prize in Italy, and was shortlisted for the prestigious Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger in France for best translated fiction. It is an ambitious and deeply affecting masterwork by one of Latin America’s most important contemporary voices.
Translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer.
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Random House, Inc.)
LAURA RESTREPO is the bestselling author of several prize-winning novels, including Leopard in the Sun, which won the Arzobispo San Clemente prize, and The Angel of Galilea, which won the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz prize in Mexico and the Prix France Culture in France. She lives in Mexico City.
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Random House, Inc.)
Booklist Reviews
With each book Restrepo, a former Colombian journalist active in radical politics, garners more awards. In her most astutely structured and psychologically gripping novel to date, she looks back to the catastrophic reign of drug trafficker Pablo Escobar and funnels all the violence, greed, fear, and cynicism at loose in the land into the damaged psyche of a beautiful woman. Agustina's Bogota family is rich and troubled, and she is burdened by psychic powers. When her husband, a literature professor fallen on hard times, returns from a short trip, he finds Agustina in a hotel and out of her mind. As he struggles to piece together the events that precipitated her worst breakdown yet, Restrepo slowly unveils the baroque secrets of Agustina's German immigrant grandfather, her aunt Sofi's true role in the household, the plight of her gay brother, and shocking encounters with a gangster known as Midas. Restrepo's shrewd, darkly erotic, and biting psychopolitical drama nets Colombia's magic and sorrows, and maps the damage wrought as delirium seizes individuals, a family, and a nation. ((Reviewed January 1 & 15, 2007)) Copyright 2007 Booklist Reviews.
Kirkus Reviews
A prominent Colombian family's degradation and undoing mirror their country's victimization by murderous drug lords in this ambitious novel, the author's sixth in English translation.Four narrators share the story of the Londo-os of Bogotá, at least one of whom exhibits a deeply divided personality. She's Agustina, a bewitchingly beautiful "lunatic" who drifts in and out of promiscuity and paranoia, and who, in memories of her childhood and youth (in which she often refers to herself in the third person), broods obsessively over her not-quite-sisterly affection for her frail, effeminate younger brother Bichi, the prime target of their domineering father's violent physical abuse. Complementary and contrasting stories are told by Agustina's doting husband, Aguilar, 16 years her senior, and a university professor unemployed due to ongoing political unrest (and reduced to delivering dog food); her former lover Midas McAllister, a drug-dealer in nervous thrall to internationally powerful overlord Pablo Escobar; and her German grandfather Nicholás Portulinus, a piano teacher whose cosmetic marriage to his former student Blanca masks his sexual attraction to nubile young musicians of both genders. Much of this is seductive and enthralling, and sharp characterizations (the best being the indirect one of the malevolent, unstable Escobar) keep the reader interested throughout. But the multiple narratives are presented without transitions and, too often, are so confusing that the reader is hard-pressed to decipher exactly who successively introduced characters are (a prime example: Agustina's duplicitous and dangerous other brother Joaco), and how they're all interconnected. Nonetheless, Restrepo's unflinching portrayal of Agustina's—and, by implication, Colombia's—reluctance to confront her demons has genuine power, and many of this sometimes ungainly novel's big scenes are hard to shake off.After the treacly The Angel of Galilea (1998) and the acrid Leopard in the Sun (1999), you never know what you'll get from Restrepo. Delirium is one of her better books. Copyright Kirkus 2006 Kirkus/BPI Communications.All rights reserved.
Publishers Weekly Reviews
Aguilar, a former literature professor who now "delivers dog food in order to survive" returns from a trip to find his beloved wife, Agustina, has "transformed into someone terrified and terrifying"; his subsequent investigation into what happened forms the plot of this complex and captivating novel, Restrepo's sixth novel to be translated into English (after Isle of Passion ). In reconstructing Agustina's privileged but troubled past, the novel intertwines several narratives, including the braggadocio of Agustina's former lover—and Pablo Escobar money launderer—Midas McAlister; the tragic tale of her German grandfather, Nicholas Portulinus; and Agustina's own pained reminiscences of a childhood centered around an aloof and domineering father whose affection she tried to win and from whose abuse she tried to protect her younger brother. It seems that Agustina's madness sprouts from a denial of violence and obvious truths—a denial that is shown here to similarly corrupt Colombian society. It has all the tension of a great detective story, and Wimmer's translation captures every tormented bit of Aguilar's desperation. (Mar.)
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