Magical Surrealist

DELIRIUM

By Laura Restrepo

Nan A. Talese. 320 pp. $23.95

Colombian novelist Laura Restrepo's "Delirium" is a book-and-a-half: stunning, dense, complex, mind-blowing. It tackles the question of how we live in an insane world, a world where everything on Earth is a metaphor for everything else; where crime, vice, virtue, sex, lies and truth exist in a series of baffling symbiotic relationships; where utterly batty human beings appear as perfectly sane, where the sane among us end up appearing perfectly bats. Nothing is what it seems in "Delirium." It's appalling! Behind each falsehood another falsehood lies. But the people within this world have no choice but to live the best way they can -- with inventiveness, imagination and as much integrity as the circumstances allow.

The setting of this story is Bogotá, Colombia, and a few of its shimmering outskirts: "The whole country itself is ghostly, and if it wasn't for the bombs and the bursts of machine-gun fire that echo in the distance, the tremors reaching me here," one drug lord in hiding muses, "I'd swear that the place called Colombia had stopped existing long ago." But this drug lord, Midas McAlister, was once a wistful high school kid, a poor boy from the provinces who longed to be in with the in crowd. He knew early on that all the money in the world would never put him on a par with the real Colombian aristocracy -- families with dusty volumes in French piling up in their libraries, whose dogs were treated better than most humans in the country, where the same exquisite christening gown was worn by new babies over four generations.

The aristocratic family that Midas idolizes and most aspires to emulate, if only in outward appearance, is the Londoños. There are three Londoño offspring, all about Midas's age: Joaco, a bully who beats Midas up and is badly beaten in return; Agustina, an exquisitely lovely middle child who has never been quite right in the head; and Bichi, the beautiful youngest son, whom his father despises and torments. That father -- remote, aloof, all-powerful -- is married to Eugenia, also cold and aloof. Eugenia's sister Sofi, earthy and lovely in her own right, lives with them all. The family lives largely and with careless panache in three different homes 90 minutes apart: one in the "cold country," one in warmer climes and one in a suburb of Bogotá.

Midas realizes that he will never be accepted by these people (although throughout the story he tries his hardest), but he also sees that he has what they have lost -- the ability to make money. His other set of friends are low-life, drug-dealing thugs, the middle-management of the Colombian smuggling industry, all of them working for a never-seen monster of a man who is also a world-class grudge holder, Pablo Escobar.

The elegant, sinuous plot begins with a crazy bet. One of these drug dealers, an obese wack-job named Spider, has been thrown from a horse while utterly stoned and rendered a paraplegic. Midas bets that he can provide Spider with an erection. It's a stupid bet, but Midas is allowed three tries. The first, involving a couple of preppy looking girls, is a dead-on failure.

Meanwhile, somewhere in the present time -- they're all grown up by now -- Agustina, that beautiful middle Londoño child, who's now married to Señor Aguilar, an unemployed professor of literature, turns up abandoned and alone in a hotel, stark staring mad. Agustina's Aunt Sofi comes to stay with Aguilar to help care for her. What could have happened? By now the reader knows that a woman involved in Midas's second try with Spider has come to a gruesome end. It's hard not to jump to the conclusion that Agustina has been subjected to something unspeakable.

But nothing in "Delirium" is what it seems. This novel is as much about family as corrupt government or (dis)organized crime. What if some of us are simply bone-crazy to begin with? The author allows us a series of unsettling flashbacks to the parents of the aloof Eugenia and earthy Sofi, and a grandfather who was most comfortable reciting the rivers of Germany in alphabetical order. Could Agustina's insanity be a simple question of heredity? Put more plainly, do all of us carry a series of unseen, often unnoticed neural firecrackers in the brain, set to go off randomly when we least expect them?

Think of William Styron's "Lie Down in Darkness" or Ken Kesey's "Sometimes a Great Notion." Since Adam and Eve, families -- microcosms of countries -- have cherished their blood feuds, their grudges, their clandestine rage. Sex, money, greed, lies, betrayals -- almost every family crawls with clammy secrets. We know that the father of the Londoño clan has encouraged his older son's bullying and arrogance, that he has persecuted his younger son's effeminate behavior because he abhors Bichi's possible homosexuality -- or perhaps sexuality of any kind. We also know that young Agustina and Bichi have discovered a terrible Londoño secret. Meanwhile, Agustina raves. Her husband anguishes. Aunt Sofi helps out. A woman dies a gruesome death. Bombs drop in the city. Bogotá is rotting from within. But out in the countryside, the insurgents and the government have come to a working agreement about checkpoints. One side takes the day shift, the other works nights.

Restrepo is obviously a remarkable woman. An interview of her by the estimable writer and poet Jaime Manrique in Bomb magazine is enormously helpful in understanding her mind-set. She's politically active, hot as a pistol. But this novel goes far above politics, right up into high art.