Madness as metaphor

IN her novel “Delirium,” the Colombian writer Laura Restrepo attempts to write about madness from the inside and outside all at once. Set primarily in Bogota, the book operates from a simple premise: A former university professor named Aguilar returns home from a short trip to find that his wife, Agustina, has shrugged off the mantle of her sanity. It’s not the first time this has happened; Aguilar now drives a van delivering pet food, a job with hours flexible enough to let him tend to Agustina and her states of mind.

But what has pushed her over the edge this time? Was it an encounter with a lover? Or perhaps some dark flood of memory? As the novel unfolds, Restrepo seeks to take us into the heart of the mystery, moving among four perspectives -- Aguilar’s account of his wife’s breakdown; Agustina’s own recollections of growing up in a house defined by silence; an extended monologue by Midas McAlister, Agustina’s former lover and a financier for the drug lord Pablo Escobar; and the story of Agustina’s grandfather Nicholas, who shared her condition -- to develop a sense of context that tells us something about this woman whose life, we learn, is sheathed in lies.

Such a construct has potential, but difficulties arise from the outset, beginning with Restrepo’s inability to bring Agustina to life. She is, or so the novel tells us, special, touched with psychic abilities -- a kind of healer -- but this seems contrived. Rather, she’s most memorable as one of those people who drives others crazy: haughty, demanding, mercurial. Wealthy, with a powerful father and deep, if elusive, ties to Colombia’s narco-underground, she drifts across the surface of existence, untouched by consequence. Even her madness seems self-indulgent, with no weight, no depth.

To be fair, this is part of the intention; throughout the book, Restrepo invokes fate, destiny, the idea that we are shaped by forces larger than ourselves. These forces can be political, as in the state of modern Colombia, or they can be genetic, since Agustina’s madness is transmitted in the blood. Still, it’s never completely clear what Restrepo is placing at stake. One possible hint comes early in the book, when Aguilar recalls bringing Agustina to a church on the hill of Monserrate, high above the city; “[P]oor Christ,” he reflects, “so grievously mistreated.... How plain your hurt is and how much this city of yours resembles you, this city that worships you from below and that sometimes, oh Lord, rails at you for having been marked with your fate and for being inexorably crushed by your cross.” But if this implies that suffering can make one Christ-like, Agustina remains, unlike the tortured Jesus, “smooth and slippery, with no hint of responsibility or regret.”

Were “Delirium” a novel about obsession, this indecision wouldn’t be so problematic, since Agustina is nothing if not an obscure object of desire. Restrepo, though, seems to want to trace madness on both a personal and a cultural level, to position it as the affliction of our age. This is where the interlocking voices come in, each in its own way disconnected, supplying a single strand of a story that can never, in its totality, be known.

Unfortunately, the same is true of the characters, who are driven by desires and motivations that remain shadowy, indistinct. Of them, only Midas is fully realized, elemental in his ambition and his lust. But each time we’re drawn in by him, Restrepo pulls the plug, sending us back to Agustina or Aguilar, or worse yet to Nicholas, whose story is vestigial at best. The effect is less kaleidoscopic than vertiginous, confusing, as if the book itself has no center, no essential notion of what it wants to say.

In some sense, that’s a matter of aesthetics; Restrepo is not trying to produce a work of realism. Rather, she means to function in the tradition of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Jose Saramago, both of whom blurbed this novel and whose fiction occludes the line between narrative and allegory, evoking a world we know and don’t know all at once. Like Garcia Marquez, Restrepo left Colombia to live in Mexico City, and she has won a wide array of international honors, including a Guggenheim fellowship and the 2006 Grinzane Cavour Prize in Italy for this book. In the end, however, Garcia Marquez and Saramago operate on a different level. When Restrepo tries to root the novel by invoking the most vehement realities -- narco-terrorism, roads and cities rendered unsafe by insurgents, the terrifying presence of Escobar -- she doesn’t write as if she feels it, as if these are her concerns in any fundamental sense.

For Agustina and the other characters, life is oddly distanced; there is nothing here to make us care. “[T]he plain truths keep getting caught in the honeyed ambiguity that smoothes and civilizes everything until there’s no substance left,” leaving us to experience “Delirium” as if through a scrim of gauze.

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david.ulin@latimes.com