GALÁPAGOS

A gay Colombian man travels first to France and then to the Galápagos Islands while suffering from an unnamed illness.

Lorenzo’s life in Bogotá has grown stagnant. His partner of two years, a millionaire named Juan B, accuses him of being “a painter who doesn’t paint,” and that’s not far off—Lorenzo would rather watch Jeanne Moreau movies all day than work. But when an infected hangnail quickly escalates to Lorenzo losing every fingernail on both his hands, it becomes clear that he’s no longer in the bloom of health. Wanting to “tie up the loose threads of [his] life,” he returns to Paris to meet with Donatien, a redheaded Breton who’s his former lover. As the two meander through the French countryside, meeting Donatien’s family and friends, Lorenzo tries to ignore the reality of his failing body. Then, at the novel’s halfway point, things take a sharp turn toward the surreal, and Lorenzo becomes a passenger on a boat full of fellow convalescents who embark on a hallucinatory Decameron. The words “HIV” and “AIDS” never appear, but the novel’s 1992 setting, the overwhelming queerness of the plague victims, and the symptoms described make the subject clear. Vélez embraces the grotesquerie of decay from the very first page. Her run-on prose, translated from the Spanish by Kauders, is at times hypnotic (“The car stops just as I reach the threshold of sleep, the kind of afternoon drowsiness after a journey that makes a person never want to arrive, even if to arrive is all he once wanted...”)—and sometimes utterly disorienting. Readers sensitive to body horror or seeking a propulsive plot should look elsewhere; this is a novel for those unafraid of rough waters and strange seas.

A voyage for only the most stalwart adventurers.