Delirium - Hardcover

Restrepo, Laura

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1846551188 ISBN 13: 9781846551185

Publisher: Harvill Secker, 2007

Synopsis

Aguilar, an unemployed literature professor who has resorted to selling dog food for a living, returns home after a three-day business 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 slowly uncovers profound and shadowy secrets hidden deep in his wife's past.
On one level, Delirium reads like a detective story, as the reader pieces together information to find out what caused Agustina's madness. But it is also a remarkably nuanced novel whose currents run much deeper, delving into the minds of four unique characters: Aguilar, a husband passionately in love with his wife and determined to rescue her from madness; Agustina, a beautiful woman from a Colombian upper-class family who is caught in the throes of delirium; Midas, Agustina's former lover and a
prominent drug-trafficker and money-launderer; and Nicolas, Agustina's grandfather, who also went mad at the end of his life.
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 society. It is an ambitious and deeply affecting masterwork by one of Latin America's most important contemporary voices.

About this title

Review:

"Delirio is a Colombian story, an expression of everything that fascinates us about Colombia, including what's terrifyingly fascinating. Restrepo has a total mastery over what she writes, an astonishing but absolute mastery. Delirio is one of the finest novels written in recent memory." (Jose Saramago)

"This barrio angel teaches us to see behind the appearance of things and how to embrace reality with all the senses." (Isabel Allende)

"A writer who illuminates a world." (Washington Post Book World)

"Laura Restrepo's Delirium has an aesthetic distinction worthy of her precursors Garcia Marquez and Saramago. Like them, her narrative sense of erotic derangement is elaborately nuanced. Ultimately she seems to me an authentic descendent of the greatest New World author and seer of eros, Walt Whitman." (Harold Bloom)

"This beautiful and disturbing book haunted me during the days I read it and long after I put it down. Love, unknowability, loss, and even various forms of gain elide from one to another of its passionate, unnerving voices." (Vikram Seth)

Book Description:

A beautiful and unsettling story from the one the finest Latin American authors.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harvill Secker
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 1846551188
• ISBN 13: 9781846551185
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 336