Fiebre Tropical by Julián Delgado Lopera is amazing. You should read it. Whether you read Spanish or not, the lyric and poetry is resonant…the flow within these pages is so beautiful and real and incredible. The story, the characters, the narrator’s beautiful voice. All of it. Please read this book.
Here are some gems, completely out of context but to show you how gorgeous it is:
p. 144: “How desperate had she become? Nobody in the family wanted to dive deep into her desperation. No one wanted to remember. But if you watched Myriam close for years, you could almost peel the amnesia off her skin, like an onion, layer by layer, until you reached a yellowing coat wrapping her body like a mummy, and here’s where she had stored her gray bitten-down nails, here’s where she stored bruised knees, numb heart, deadly popsicles. She must have been frenetic, manic, sleepless. So hopeless, almost no light shone inside her.”
p. 204: “Alba crawled around the house, close to the floor, recoiling every time she saw men’s shoes, plugging into the dirt, swimming deep in the soil, deeper into the soil, watching some of the horse’s bones go by, skeletons of children, a lost shoe, emeralds gleaming cutting piece from her arms that quickly regrew, she swayed from side to side with her mouth open, eating fresh dirt, swallowing fresh dirt, bathing in its misty coolness.”
p. 252: “I needed a perfect place to smoke the cigarette in peace. I walked past the pool, chasing the disgusting ducks with red balls on their beaks. Patos desgraciados, inmundos asquerosos. What the fuck happened there, Nature?”
p. 272: “We smoked and smoked and smoked so many cigarettes that by eight p.m. I was made entirely of smoke, bones of smoke, skin of smoke, curls of smoke, if someone had blown on me I would have disappeared.”
Rebecca Kuder 