Reviews

I started reading The Delivery with mixed emotions. A freelance writer lives a mundane life where her relationship with her sister is less than ideal and she's living a half-furnished life. Figuratively and literally. A crate arrives unannounced to her apartment and carries her own mother, who then stays with her, moving between rooms like a ghost, cleaning and preparing food for her daughter. They never discuss why she is there, and the protagonist descends into a weird mindset where ordinary events take on an uncanny nature and everything feels fuzzy. It is a strange story.

In the end, I loved it.

The Delivery hits this great balance of fantastical happenings, big metaphors and very very real emotions. The protagonist is at war with herself, very introspective, but doesn't know how to understand what is happening around her. I found the protagonist very relatable. The complicated relationship between a girl and her family hits in a way I didn't expect. This book left me with a deep seated pit inside my stomach. It made me feel sick—albeit the good kind of sick where you know you've read a masterpiece (does that exist? Am I crazy?). I didn't see the revealed information at the end coming, but it made so much sense. Not only because I am a woman but also because I am a daughter.

Finding it hard to elaborate without giving away the ending, so here is my plea for you to read it and discuss this with me (is anyone out there?).

I see myself coming back to this one often, if only to relive the relatability and "seen-ness" I experienced through its pages.
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"Kinship is an invisible thread, and you have to picture it constantly in order to remember it's there. The last few times I saw my sister, I repeated to myself: 'we are sisters, we are sisters', like someone who can only explain a mysterious event by resorting to faith."

"I wanted to help, but I didn't know how to insert myself into a settled family, with all its routines and habits."

"I'm less attracted to the idea of tending a garden of my own, because I feel that in my hands, any new shoot would lose its vitality just as fast as I'd lose interest."

"I'm moved by our everyday rituals. Sharing the capricious and the specific: I bought fish, I'll make ceviche for you, I'll mix drinks, I'll put out olives, do you like this song? When that's where the focus is, it's not that the world improves suddenly—of course it doesn't—but it does become more navigable."

"This woman is my mother, but I don't remember the feeling of being her daughter...I don't know what to compare this feeling to, but every once in a while, a hologram of myself turns up to explain it to me. She shows me a dress I don't recognize, one that I find neither pretty nor ugly, though I wouldn't have chosen it for myself. The hologram tells me: 'You once loved this dress, you paid a fortune for it, you felt like a model every time you wore it' And, after carefully analyzing it and seeing how innocuous it is, I have to ask: 'This dress?'"

"There is a version of my mother—and of me?—in a lost book. It seems unfair that I can't get to know that person. I feel cheated. I wonder who my mother was when she was writing her diary. Who my mother was before she was my mother. And after? I console myself thinking how the truth about a person has very little to do with what they write about themselves."

"Axel is aware of his body and feels at home in it. What does that mean? I have no idea. Is it good or bad? No idea."

"I wouldn't know what to do with her. I would end up abandoning her like the plants I didn't plant on my terrace. She wouldn't wilt in my hands."

"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."

"I will never feel a belonging. It doesn't matter how much I force the thread of kinship and memory to find the meaning, the origin, the seed of belonging."

jesskb's review

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reflective slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? N/A
Loveable characters? N/A
Diverse cast of characters? N/A
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

An introspective glimpse into the life of a young woman living in Argentina as a detached traveller, estranged from her family, her friends, lovers, herself, and even reality. A slow and deeply thoughtful novel with some beautiful, striking lines and scenes that give the language a really textural quality. It's one of those books that rests on the strength of the characters' complexity, the plot being a kind of ethereal tracking of the goings-on of her apartment building, her relationships, and the delivery of a mysterious package. While it didn't quite blow me away, I really enjoyed it.