Fiebre Tropical by Julián Delgado Lopera

cw: ageing, mental illness, suicide ideation

It happens sometimes, increasingly so and – I imagine – this will continue to happen until I am freed from the cursed punishment of living by a pleasing and permanent death – that I encounter something and think, “I reckon I’m too old for this.”

Of course, that’s sad when it happens to something experiential – not that it does very much at all if you don’t hate yourself and yearn for misery, which I don’t – but it is truly devastating when it happens to literature…

Fiebre Tropical is a great, busy and vibrant novel about being young and having feelings, and though the voice is engaging and alive, the narrative is very typical bildungsroman and there’s no like subtle off-putting weird politics to it… It just never… It just never quite gripped me…

It’s about a young woman, recently moved to Miami from Colombia, and her – previously both fun and successful – mother has – after a sticky break-up that never gets discussed very much at all (possibly because it was so underwhelming?) – found, as they say, God…

The mother drags the family into religion, and though it’s the classic USA Christianity of aggressive repression literally rubbing itself up against the heat of teenage lust, it’s not the most horrific Christian cult you’ve ever heard of and the protagonist’s desires and actions are similarly not the wildest you’ve encountered. It is, I suppose, then, a pretty realistic depiction of the life it depicts: nothing happens that doesn’t feel like it could happen, there are no shocking twists and no crazy revelations, no unexpected events and no character development that doesn’t stack up. Possibly the mother is dying? Or maybe just losing her hair (which is, in its way, very much a kind of death..?) and maybe an illness was flagged more in the text than I realised before this hair loss thing was mentioned on the last few pages (there’s a comment at one point about finding out “later”, after the events of the novel, about the American healthcare system..?)

Maybe if I was less depressed I would have enjoyed it more?

Maybe it isn’t the elastic skin, tight flesh and easy vomiting of youth that I miss rather than its optimism…

Maybe me struggling to stay connected to this protagonist’s personal growth and development isn’t that I’m too old for what is an inarguably well-constructed and written bildungsroman, maybe I just need to believe, again, that there’s any purpose to increased self-knowledge, any joy to be found in understanding yourself and the world better…

Because, honestly, really I don’t… 🤪🤪🤪

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If you’re less depressed or old than me (I don’t recommend being either as much as I am), then this is probably well worth a read.

Here, though, Fiebre Tropical and old, depressed, scott manley hadley just didn’t connect…

Order direct from the publisher here