The Delivery by Margarita García Robayo (tr. Megan McDowell)
There can be few greater literary joys than finding a narrator who speaks to you, one with whom you want to spend time even beyond the pages of a novel. Creating one, however, is no mean feat – finding and sustaining a strong voice is not as easy as it might look. Yet, in The Delivery, her latest work to be translated into English, Colombia’s Margarita García Robayo once again proves herself a uniquely brilliant storyteller, offering us a narrator whose acerbic tones are matched by a rare depth of self-reflection and disarming honesty – a voice that truly comes alive on the page.
This narrator, a young woman from a country on the Caribbean, now lives in Argentina, more than five thousand kilometres from her older sister and the place where they both grew up. ‘My family is her,’ she tells us on the opening page, going on to detail a series of pithy exchanges that illustrate a relationship many pairs of sisters will recognise: the elder is the relentless doer, practical, responsible, not a little bossy, while the younger has struck out on her own, all but severing ties to her homeland. Even in her new life, she refuses to put down visible roots, keeping her apartment furnished to a minimum, rejecting plants for the balcony and injecting friendships with a degree of prickliness. There is something precarious, too, about her job as a freelance copywriter; when we first encounter her, she hopes to receive a grant that would take her to the Netherlands, despite a burgeoning romance.
For all her fiercely guarded independence, however, she can neither escape the past nor shrug off the bonds of family. Her sister’s ‘ridiculous’ penchant for sending her parcels culminates in the delivery of a large crate that turns out to contain their estranged mother. A series of increasingly absurd events ensues, with both the mother and Catrina, a stray cat, appearing and disappearing at will, indirectly forcing our narrator to care for them along with León, a neighbour’s son. What seemed at first to be a novel about siblings and rootlessness soon morphs into a sensitive and perceptive, if occasionally disquieting, meditation on motherhood and loss.
The loss in this novel is of a distinctive kind. Largely self-inflicted, it is the loss that comes with moving far from home, with attempting to start afresh, with denying where you come from – even to yourself. Our narrator has spent years ‘distancing myself, dissolving’, and finds herself now in a country where they speak the same language but she still cannot understand many jokes and cultural references. She realises: ‘I will never feel a belonging . . . The past and the present are hiding places I already know.’ But there is, of course, a third option. And the unwritten future is where this novel finds its hope.
As her life takes an unexpected turn, the title of the novel assumes additional significance. This multi-layered nuance is something at which García Robayo has always excelled, and The Delivery is nothing short of a masterclass in making words work hard; they are applied sparingly yet very deliberately to deliver subtle differences in meaning. Translator Megan McDowell deserves praise for her ability to capture this complex precision, as well as her rendering of the narrator’s biting-but-blithe tone and blisteringly vivid descriptions.
The small moments of violence that pepper the plot come always as a shock, visceral and immediate – another hallmark of García Robayo’s writing – yet the tenderness that infuses the narrative ultimately wins. From start to finish, The Delivery is a pleasure to read: amusing, deeply thought, reflective of the world as it is, a novel that can speak to many readers on many levels. Once again, a Colombian literary star has blended absurdism, realism and great linguistic skill to create a novel that may be neatly packaged but proves to contain multitudes.