Galapagos

Colombian writer Vélez makes a striking debut with a fever dream of a novel that evokes the AIDS epidemic as it follows a group of artists and political radicals on a phantasmagoric voyage. In 1992 Bogota, pus starts oozing from painter Lorenzo’s fingers, and his fingernails fall off. He leaves behind his partner, Juan B, who’s also sick, for Paris to reconnect with his friends Donatien and Luis, who are also afflicted with the same unspecified disease. Donatien attributes the illness to the “pus man,” telling Lorenzo that “he comes to you with yellowish eyes... and when he goes to kiss you he suddenly doesn’t have lips anymore... and it’s almost pleasurable, but then he spits you out.” Juan B pleads with Lorenzo over the phone to come back and die with him, and then, in a surreal twist, Lorenzo learns Juan B has died, after which he receives a message from Juan B inviting the group to embark on a final trip aboard a ship called the Bumfuck. Sailing through the Galapagos, they exist in limbo between life and death (Galaor, a communist who joins them, starts losing body parts, which the others preserve for him in formaldehyde). Along the way, they sustain each other by sharing bizarre stories à la The Decameron; Juan B, for example, tells of how his father butchered a baby pig for Christmas, only for guerrillas to seize it. Throughout, Vélez stuns with her corporeal descriptions and baroque literary allusions. This is a knockout. (Dec.)