American Delirium

Starred review from October 19, 2020
Argentinian González anatomizes in her skillful English-language debut an American community’s pursuit of enlightenment and the violence and madness left in its wake. The novel takes place in a moribund, near-future unnamed U.S. city where only the university and the natural history museum have survived a devastating depression. The residents, increasingly attuned to “early cultural signs of the final imbalance, of how the entire planet would eventually rise up against us,” have embraced a more resourceful lifestyle by taking up hunting. Among them, Vik, an ailing taxidermist from the fictional Caribbean island of Coloma, discovers that a possibly dangerous intruder has been living in his closet; the acerbic Beryl instructs those, like her, over 70, in marksmanship after crazed deer begin assaulting people; and a young girl, Berenice, looks for a new caretaker after her mother abandons her to join a cultish back-to-nature group. The story lines gradually converge around the prevalence of a hallucinogenic Coloma plant called albaria that “closes your eyes and sets you down in a ray of light where time doesn’t exist.” This has the makings of a zany psychedelic romp, but instead the delirium is marvelously controlled and administered in doses just potent enough to ease patient readers into this off-kilter world. González’s distorted utopian vision is a memorable trip.

Starred review from January 1, 2021
Three characters' lives converge after their unnamed city is beset by a series of weird events. As Gonz�lez's English-language debut begins, three parallel narratives are intercut. Taxidermist Vik, a chronically ill immigrant from an invented island in the Caribbean, discovers through video surveillance that a strange woman is sneaking into his home while he's at work. When he catches her unawares one day, she locks herself in his closet--and stays. Meanwhile, his museum colleague, Beryl, an ex-commune hippie, gathers a group of fellow senior citizens together to enact aggressive action when crazed deer start attacking people in the city. And then there is little Berenice, who, waking up one day to her mother's sudden absence, believes she has become a "left-behind," a child whose parents have become "dropouts," resistance movement adherents who "were rejecting the duty of parenthood and returning the children to their rightful guardians": the government. Bit by bit, these narratives come together as they reveal the three characters' connections to each other and to a mysterious (fictional) plant called albaria, a hallucinogen that set their world on its current skewed path. If this sounds wacky, it is, but it's wacky in the grim, smart way of a Coen brothers film. Gonz�lez, who lives in Argentina, uses absurdity to show us that there is the thinnest of lines between utopia and dystopia, all without ever naming any real-world correlates (aside from the novel's pointed title and an even more pointed epigraph from Baudrillard about "the fiction of America"). Ultimately, this is a novel about the fictions--those myths about age, race, family, nationality, sexuality, health--that we tell ourselves. And how, as one of the characters says, "The destruction of a harmful system is an act of love." An uncategorizable novel that manages to be both zany and profound.

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Starred review from December 1, 2020
This unsettling yet erudite translated work by Argentinian writer Gonz�lez weaves a story about a small Midwestern town upended by residents-turned-dissenters and menaced by a frenzied deer population, with a spotlight trained on three main characters caught in the middle of it all. Vik is a Caribbean immigrant and taxidermist who suspects that a vagrant is squatting in his home and is cognizant of the spread of a strange hallucinogenic drug that is sabotaging his neighbors. Beryl, an opinionated and bohemian senior citizen with lots of pent-up energy, is able to persuade her fellow retirees to join her in hunting down the aggressive deer. Berenice, too young to be on her own, is looking for anyone willing to pose as her guardian after her mother joins the "dropouts," townspeople who reject civic duties and responsibilities to live in the woods. Behind this baffling turn of events runs veiled social commentary on capitalism and the progressive mentality replete with astute observations on aging, death, and human nature that becomes most poignant when seen through Beryl's eyes. The mystery of the hallucinogen and the lives impacted by it coalesce into a profound and much-needed tale full of hope and kindness.

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