Laura Restrepo

Delirio/ Delirium (2004) (Spanish and English)
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.

La multitud errante/ A Tale of the Dispossessed (2003) (Spanish and English)
"How can I tell him that he will never find her, after he has been searching for her all his life? If I could talk to him without breaking his heart, there is something I would tell him, in hopes it would stop his sleepless nights and wrongheaded search for a shadow. I would repeat this to him: 'Your Matilde Lina is in limbo, the dwelling place of those who are neither dead nor alive.' But that would be like severing the roots of the tree that supports him. Besides, why do it if he is not going to believe me."In the midst of war, the protagonists of A Tale of the Dispossessed are continuously searching: for a promised land, a destiny, the face of a woman who has disappeared -- searching for an impossible love and, conversely, for a love that is possible. A way station for refugees from violence is the setting for an intense love triangle in which an uprooted and wandering people lead the reader to experience the collective drama of forced relocation. A Tale of the Dispossessed speaks to us about the inexorable law that has led man, expelled from paradise since the days of Adam through to modern times, in his search for a way back home.

Olor a rosas invisibles (2002) (Spanish)
He ahí a don Luis, un caballero entero y satisfecho que puede mirar con orgullo la vida que va dejando. Su esposa y sus hijos le esperan en casa, mientras él repasa los años de juventud cómodamente instalado en la butaca de su despacho. Esa calma otoñal solo se ve perturbada por el recuerdo de Eloísa, un amor lejano en el tiempo que ahora ya es pura nostalgia, un juego sensual con que entretener las últimas horas de la tarde, antes de la cena. Las cosas cambian cuando el azar atiende las confusas plegarias de don Luis, y lo que era sueño se hace realidad: de repente el fantasma de Eloísa se convierte en una mujer de carne y hueso, una señora estupenda que la vida ha ido marcando con unos kilos de más y un envidiable sentido del humor... Relato conmovedor y perfecto en su brevedad, Olor a rosas invisibles demuestra una vez más que pocas páginas bastan para hablar bien de la vida cuando quien escribe tiene la fuerza y el talento de Laura Restrepo.

La novia oscura/ The Dark Bride (1999) (Spanish and English)
Journalist, novelist, political activist and academic Restrepo (The Angel of Galilea; Leopard in the Sun) has written an innovative novel in the form of a journalist's investigation of a small Colombian oil town populated mostly by oil riggers and the prostitutes who service them. The narrator is a journalist who interviews a number of residents in the town of Tora, on the edge of the rain forest, in order to learn about the legendary prostitute Sayonara. The charismatic and irresistible daughter of a Guahibo Indian woman and a white man, Sayonara is the alpha whore of La Catunga, the barrio of prostitutes where the employees of the Tropical Oil Company come weekly to take their pleasure. Her downfall comes when she falls in love with two men, both workers with Tropical Oil. Sacramento she loves as a brother; Payanes as a lover. But Payanes is already married when they meet, and Sayonara considers marrying Sacramento, who desperately wants to save her from prostitution. Sayonara's story emerges through the lyrical voices of the interview subjects, as well as the more straightforward journalistic style of the narrator. Aphorisms abound ("The factory that smells the best is the most poisonous"), and the mostly evocative, textured prose has occasional moments of stiffness ("She was a bundle of scared chicken bones, anxious to find a connection to the world"). Still, it's hard not to get caught up in Restrepo's sexy, whirlwind narrative, which also reveals much about the effects of the global economy and Latin American politics on one small corner of Colombia. Agent, Thomas Colchie. (Aug. 1)

Dulce Compañía/ The Angel of Galilea (1995) (Spanish and English)
"A few days before it all started, three men raped a crazy woman in the garden in front of my building. It was around then that my neighbor's dog vaulted from a third-story window, landed on the street, and walked away unharmed. And the leper who sells lottery tickets ... gave birth to a healthy, beautiful baby." To Mona, a cynical young reporter for one of Bogota's many popular tabloids, these events seem significant only in retrospect. "Surely those were signs, among many others," she remarks, "but then again this insane city gives off so many doomsday warnings that no one pays attention anymore." Certainly, Mona's own great adventure begins ordinarily enough when she is told to investigate the presence of an angel in one of the city's poorest neighborhoods. At first she assumes that this is yet another example of Colombian journalists warming up "what is already passé in Miami." But when she arrives in Galilea in a cold, driving rain, and is taken to see the tall, dark, handsome--and nearly naked--celestial spirit, she begins to wonder if the stories might not be true. Of course, this being Colombia, it isn't long before the angel becomes both the object of a religious cult and the rallying point for a revolutionary movement. As peasants flock to him, the army and the church hunt him down. Meanwhile Mona finds herself falling in love with this possibly fallen angel, even as she continues to dig for less supernatural explanations for his strange power. Though Laura Restrepo's prose occasionally overheats, for the most part her writing is refreshingly matter-of-fact with just a touch of irony, allowing even those who would be happy never to see another of Raphael's cherubs peering out from a T-shirt or coffee mug to enjoy this angelic tale.

El Leopardo al sol/ Leopard in the Sun (1993) (Spanish and English)
Basing her transcendent novel on contemporary events in her native Colombia, Restrepo (The Angel of Galilea) tells a riveting tale of the vicious war between two families made wealthy by crime and clandestine business. Nando Barrag n begins his career selling Marlboros on the black market. In a surge of drunken rage, he impulsively kills his beloved cousin, Adriano Monsalve, over the attentions of a widow, and immediately "knows he has entered the fathomless domain of fate." Although he desires penance, he is informed in a dream that his rash act means a terrible new existence for both families: the Monsalves and the Barrag ns are bound to slaughter each other until all the males on one side are dead. Each act of vengeance is ritually committed on a zeta, or anniversary, of a family death, and the violence continues for two decades until only four Barrag n males are left. Battle-hardened Nando heads the Barrag ns, and Adriano's nouveau-riche younger brother, Mani, married to beautiful Alina, leads the Monsalves. Then Alina gets pregnant and issues an ultimatum: one more murder and she will leave Mani. Unfortunately, that murder is already in motion. Mani's efforts to launder his money and lifestyle and win back his wife, and the escalation of the war past the bounds of prophecy and tradition until it requires drug money and hired assassins, are the forces that drive the novel toward its tragic end. Restrepo's singular narrative style, in which her present-tense exposition is frequently interrupted by conversations between neighborhood onlookers, who debate the particulars of the story being told and present their own versions, retains echoes of magic realism, but has a freshness that is all its own. Brutal, intense and beautifully written, the novel delves deep into family hierarchies, the heady glamour and destructive power of sudden wealth and the play between fact and legend.

La Isla de la Pasión/ Isle of Passion (1989) (Spanish and English)
In 1908, Ramón Arnaud, a young Mexican military officer with a spotty record, is named governor of the small Pacific island of Clipperton—an isolated atoll originally dubbed "Isle of Passion" by Magellen. He, his young wife, Alicia, and a retinue of soldiers and their families—including assistant lieutenant Cardona, and his wife, Tirsa—establish a makeshift garrison and settlement, along with a small group of British guano miners. After several relatively idyllic months, Mexico's revolution and WWI leave them largely cut off from supplies and the world at large. When a powerful hurricane and tsunami wipe out most of the settlement, the group must band together to survive, and the disasters are only beginning. As a Lord of the Flies mentality sets in, Alicia and Tirsa are left, or so they think, to lead the remaining women and children. Colombian novelist Restrepo (The Dark Bride), basing the narrative on a true story, writes from the perspective of an unnamed journalist living in the present and trying to piece together the Clipperton mystery via conflicting reports and interviews with survivors. As translated by Koch, she pulls the various elements together with a clear, no-nonsense cartographer's precision, and the result is smooth sailing indeed, à la Jennifer Vanderbes's Easter Island.

Historia de un entusiasmo (1986) (Spanish)
En 1983 Laura Restrepo fue nombrada por el presidente Belisario Betancur miembro de la comisión negociadora de paz entre el gobierno y la guerrilla M-19. Fruto de esta experiencia es su reportaje Historia de un entusiasmo, sobrecogedor testimonio por el que recibió amenazas de muerte y finalmente tuvo que emigrar de su país. Vivió el exilio político durante cinco años entre México y Madrid, manteniendo contactos con el ala política del grupo guerrillero M-19, intentando crear un nuevo foro de negociaciones. Su labor concluyó en 1989, cuando el M-19 abandonó sus armas y se convirtió en un partido de oposición legal, lo que le permitió volver a su país. Este libro, de la pluma de una gran narradora, plantea un acercamiento a la historia no sólo de un país sino de toda una generación que pensó tener en sus manos la transformación del mundo y de la Historia.

El universo literario de Laura Restrepo (2007) (Spanish))
(Critical edition by Elvira Sanchez-Blake and Julie Lirot)
A gathering of carefully selected essays, reviews and critical analyses on the works of Laura Restrepo, up to her latest novel, Delirio, winner of the Premio Alfaguara. The anthology is divided in chronologically, and arranged in sections, corresponding to the author’s most famous novels. Followed by a section of interviews. /p>