FictionA man returns from a business trip to discover his wife, whom he has tracked down to a hotel room, is either insane or merely seriously disturbed. So far so good; from his opening sentence, "I knew something irreparable had happened the moment a man opened the door to that hotel room and I saw my wife sitting . . . looking out the window in the strangest way," here is an Everyman narrator you want to believe; after all, he sounds as bewildered as the reader will be before too many pages pass, writes Eileen Battersby.
No writers love mystery and intrigue - with a truck load of tricks thrown in for good measure - quite as much as the Latin Americans who long ago grasped that political polemic is always that bit sharper if it comes parcelled in a story with lots of layers, including political and social dimensions. Delirium, which takes insanity as its prevailing theme, out-layers the average onion. There are glimpses of magic which all too often fall flat. It does not help that the wonderful Portuguese master, José Saramago, proclaims "One of the finest novels written in recent memory" on the cover. Whose memory? His?
Aguilar, the anxious husband, is a former university professor who fell in love with a student; that student is now his wife. These days he sells dog food for a living - it's easier that way. Ease is important if your partner, in this case his young wife Agustina, is not only that bit unstable, but also has a long history of being psychic - or at least, thinks she is.
All would be well if good old Aguilar was telling the entire story, but he is not. There are other voices involved, including that of the wealthy, middle-class Agustina herself. Most vividly of all, there is Midas McAllister, a criminal of sorts who lives in a flashy apartment, part lair, part social status, who is privy to everything criminal going on in Colombia. He is also a former lover of Agustina. Set partly in present day Bogotá, and partly in the past, it is a thriller in which political and domestic mysteries are thrown into a stew that has more ambition than direction.
There are difficulties; Restrepo does not deal so much in ambivalence as chaos. Throughout the narrative - or rather narratives - it is possible to feel a sensation of having to surface for air. The criminal aspect is sufficiently interesting to sustain the novel, although it is also the most artificial, all too often abandoning the streetwise for the literary. Midas's monologue, addressed to Agustina, outlines the joys and uncertainties of the criminal life as experienced by the drug-dealing gang running on the fringes of the polo set.
Midway through the second page, Midas takes over: "I'm going to tell you this point-blank because you have the right to know it, Agustina sweetheart, and anyway what do I have to lose talking about it all, when I've got nothing left anymore." It is Midas who announces: "Agustina darling, all stories are like a big cake, with everybody's eyes on the piece they're eating, and the only one who sees the whole thing is the baker."
He could be advising us that it is best to attempt reading this book a piece at a time. Not once does Restrepo engage in magic realist special effects, although she may as well have, because this book does play games a-plenty. The crimeland sequences do evoke the madness and the tension; some of it is even quite comic. A couple arrives at a gym to perform a live pornographic routine, except something goes wrong and the woman ends up dead. This mishap proves awkward. Yet there are also the various interludes featuring Agustina's German grandfather, who emerges as odd in his own right - and then there was his unhinged sister who killed herself . . .
Gradually, in between bouts of hearing Aguilar the concerned husband attempt to help his beloved, who has taken to pouring out buckets of water, and Midas, there is also the story of Agustina's family history. It all becomes very Gothic, as if Restrepo has looked to William Faulkner via the great Carlos Onetti. She wants to offer a fragmented study of a family's chaotic experience of madness as a metaphor for Colombian society; this makes sense as a device - but it is often lost as the family saga meanders about between the characters.
Aside from the afflicted Agustina, beautiful but crazy, there is Aunt Sofi, sister to Agustina's coolly despairing mother. It was Sofi who used to pose naked for her lover, Agustina's father. Aunt Sofi becomes nurse to the deranged young woman. Just when it seems that Aguilar, in attempting to help his wife, is about to be tempted by an alluring and determined hotel receptionist, he then ends up back at the home of his first wife who lives with their sons. It is one of the most convincing sequences in a sophisticated, at times enthralling maze of a narrative that never becomes the sum of either its many parts or its various voices as it falters into a surprisingly limp conclusion.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
Delirium By Laura Restrepo, translated by Natasha Wimmer Harvill, 320pp. £16.99