It’s 17 years since I read Delirium by Restrepo, although it feels like yesterday. Our relationship to the books we read is atemporal. They function on a different plane. It’s nearly forty years since I first read Foucault, but my relationship with him hasn’t aged in the slightest. Almost everyone I knew from that era has gone, save family. But he sticks around, with his bald head and his laconic questions. Restrepo’s Delirium has always stuck in my mind as a window into Colombian culture. It’s a country I have never visited, but it forms part of the Latino universe and I have come across many Colombians in Montevideo. Post civil war, post the era of the edge-lords, Colombia might have appeared to settle down. Los Divinos offers a sclerotic take on the social divides which exist in the country, and indeed across the Latino world, where those who belong to or associate with the wealthy elite act as though they only have a passing relationship with the law. Los Divinos - the divine ones - are five over-privileged friends who are due a dose of hubris. Narrated by one of them, with not so much as a single sympathetic character, the novel has a harsh, acerbic flavour. We don’t want any of these characters to emerge unscathed and perhaps for this reason it’s a less engaging read than Delirium.
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