My Powerbooks Saga

Five days.

First day, I was casually browsing through the fiction section and grabbed that book whose cover page shows a woman slumped to the couch, her back to the camera, with colored shirt and pants, while the rest of her and the room was in black and white.

Delirium: Laura Restrepo is brutally one heck of a writer, that I decided while I was holding on tightly to the first 3 pages of the book. Around me, few people were milling around, scouring for carefully memorized titles, others illegally tearing off plastic covering of the books, others smiling inwardly alone at what they are reading and discovering. At that particular point, in the second level of that bookstore, every seated and standing fellow is transported to a brand new cosmos woven by printed words and images.

Then I was taken over, by the web of the story, by Colombia and its dangerous elements, and how it was a factor in the madness that has become Augustina, the central character. Restrepo laid bare how telling a story in an inverted triangle could be very powerful in capturing a reader. The 4 distinct voices she put into her narrative made for an intriguing detective-type story that all lead to answer the question; "Why did Augustina go mad?"; there was Augustina herself; Aguilar her loving husband; Midas Mc Allister, Augustina’s former lover, a money-launderer and a drug-trafficker; and Nicolas Portulinus, Augustina’s grandfather. It started with Aguilar finding his beautiful, young wife not quite herself anymore, in a hotel in Bogota, Colombia, seated in a corner where only a dropped telephone would be found seated, staring into the clouds outside, after he left her days earlier seemingly in a good spirit, painting the walls of their home. What ensued was a series of recitations of the past as mind-blowing as they were shocking.

For four more days, I allowed myself to be spellbound by the book. Four more days I would stand alert at exactly 5:30pm so I could claim my fave seat at the bookstore and uncover the mystery 3 or 4 chapters by 3 or four chapters. Within those days, I would patiently search for the book in the bookstore’s ever-changing physical arrangements. Within those days, I tried to avoid the crew’s suspicious looks and even a guy’s corniest excuse for a conversation, "excuse me ms., but you seem to be so much into books, do you think this one is worth a read?".

Following the heels of Gabriel Garcia Marquez in literary brilliance, I have just added Restrepo among my idols of great writers, and made me crave for Colombia and it’s complex society. In this nation slowly vanishing in the face of increasing drug traffickers terrorism and growing guerilla insurgency, the likes of Marquez and Restrepo are truly a gift. And yesterday, just yesterday, I finished the book and finally solved the big "Why", never forgetting those exceptional lines in Midas voice, when as he tried to escape the slowly slipping away Augustina from the deceipts and lies of her own mother, by running away on his RMT motorcycle, he narrated, "I, clinging to my motorcycle, Augustina, clinging to me, her insanity clinging to her - the four of us were travelling 5 kilometers away from Sasaima…".

Yes after some stolen hours in 5 days, I finished the book. I finished it because 5 pages before the story has to end, as if slightly inspired by Augustina’s shortness of reason, I bought it at last.