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From NYC-based Colombian writer Fátima Vélez comes debut novel Galapagos, following a group of bohemian artists who are dying of AIDS as they embark on a surreal final voyage through the Galapagos Islands, their bodies cloaked in the skins of the dead.
Lorenzo is a painter who doesn't paint. He spends his days watching Jeanne Moreau films, luxuriating in his partner Juan B's bed, and swapping letters with his lovers. Then, one day, his nail falls off. Then another nail, then all of them. Thus begins a journey of decomposition that carries him from Colombia to Paris, from Paris to the French countryside, and on a final journey to the Galápagos Archipelago.
As they cruise the islands on a custom-made ship, Lorenzo and his friends and lovers drink, swap stories, and feast gluttonously, even as their bodies succumb to an unspeakable disease. In this contemporary plague novel, rife with pathos and humor, ailing bodies are torn between desire and decay, lust and friendship, creativity and destruction. Vélez revolutionizes the novel form, pushing language to its extreme as she tests the limits of how we understand illness, sexuality, the body, and what it means to make art in the face of our own mortality.
"Colombian writer Vélez makes a striking debut with this fever dream of a novel that evokes the AIDS epidemic as it follows a group of artists and political radicals on a phantasmagoric voyage...Throughout, Vélez stuns with her corporeal descriptions and baroque literary allusions. This is a knockout." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Vélez embraces the grotesquerie of decay from the very first page...A voyage for only the most stalwart adventurers." —Kirkus Reviews
"Kaleidoscopically raw. A tour-de-force of interiority balanced expertly with the gruesome reality of the bodies we live within. Kauders' translation is a lesson in poetry. Prepare to be unspooled." —Molly McGhee, author of Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind
"In Galápagos, Fátima Vélez builds a verbal utopia, a dissident refuge in motion, a ship of madwomen that can only float and rise upon the waves and the hypnotic overflow of words. Here, the journey begins, leaving power and its structures ashore. Here, pus is memory, ruin is politics, and desire is a shared horizon. Here, the survivors and the dead all have a place. In this collective, anarchic, and unpunctuated flow, the expelled and wounded body becomes a deep poem, a cryptic novel, a human shield, and finally speaks—until it reaches the far shore. Strange and unsettling, dark and luminous at once in its draining of pain, Galápagos is a book of undeniable audacity and beauty." —Gabriela Wiener, author of Undiscovered
This information about Galapagos was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Fátima Vélez is a writer, professor, cultural producer, and PhD candidate in Hispano-American literature and cultures at the Graduate Center, CUNY. Galapagos is her first novel.
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