A Review of The Delivery

The Delivery, a new novel by Colombian writer Margarita García Robayo, presents the world of an expatriate writer, a Colombian in Buenos Aires who dreams of finishing a novel. Our unnamed protagonist juggles an intractable lover, a ghostly mother, a disturbed cat, and a slew of disgruntled neighbors. She is a writer at odds with her materials, like “a carpenter who is allergic to sawdust,” at once totally enamored with language and certain that “everything told is damaged.” To make ends meet, she works apathetically as a copywriter, crafting marketing language for a company that produces humanely raised beef. As the days and weeks pass, a slew of packages arrives from her sister back in Colombia, filling her apartment to the brim with objects of varying significance. In the meantime, for a good portion of the book, she waits. 

In the meantime—perhaps the true setting of Robayo’s novel, more than Buenos Aires, is the meantime, the time of expectancy and of ideation—Robayo’s protagonist is waiting for a family secret, for a lover’s call, for a friend’s response, for life-shifting news. Waiting, she eddies inside wonder. The novel illustrates a thinking mind, a mind met with delay, a mind that is merciless and ever turning inward. Such minds tend to fold in on themselves: “Inaugurating a body or a house is to commence its deterioration… deterioration, I think now, is a superior state of matter because it means something has flourished in it. Only that which has given fruit can rot.” These sentences, and the idea they house, express one motor of Robayo’s craft: she is a writer as fascinated by rot as by ripeness, and especially by the clouded border between the two.

The secret aspiration of any expatriate is to be past-less. Crossing a border—into a new grammar, a new cuisine, a new flora, a new backdrop for living—creates a crease in a life. Expatriates, unlike immigrants, hope such a crease will allow for a clean tear. Robayo’s protagonist is no different: she wants to tuck her family, and her life before Argentina, out of sight. At the same time, she is painfully aware of how our histories create us: “When someone is born,” she determines, “they debut old features, they come with a burden of past that will always be greater than their future.” At another moment, she admits: “I have a collection of childhood accidents stored...