By Sara O’Brien

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In Cruel Optimism, Lauren Berlant asks, “Why do people stay attached to conventional good-life fantasies—say, of enduring reciprocity in couples, families, political systems, institutions, markets, and at work—when the evidence of their instability, fragility, and dear cost abounds?”¹

Whether we want them or not, whether we reject, relinquish or embrace them, the presence of such fantasies and conventions in contemporary capitalist life remains prevalent and diffuse—persistent for most, pernicious for some.

Navigating one’s way through the fault lines of these prefigured determinations of promise and purpose can define the orientations of a life – a process that often carries the residues of where we’ve come from and the weight of what and where we’re trying to get.

The Delivery by Margarita García Robayo – her latest novel and the third of her books to be translated into English (this time by Megan McDowell for Charco Press) – is, in many ways, about these negotiations: of the expectations society levies upon us and those we cultivate for ourselves, of how we see ourselves and are seen, of how we are told to measure a life and its worth and how this meets the life we try to carve out for ourselves.

The story pivots on the strange arrival of a box to the protagonist’s apartment from which her previously estranged mother emerges. The absurdity of such an occurrence does not, however, define the tone of the novel. Rather, this packaged person arrives (as unexpected guests do, much like memories can) and becomes invariably, even if reluctantly, accommodated. 

Once the box is opened, the mother’s presence is almost spectral, hovering at the edges and in the background, often unseen, like maternal figures (and the figures that formed us early on) tend to do. Through this newly imposed proximity, questions of closeness and all of the complications this involves are brought to the fore. For family (in this case a mother and a sister) has come to be defined for this character by distance. We are told at the very beginning:

“‘Far’ is too short a word once it is translated into geography: five thousand three hundred kilometres is the distance separating me from my family.”

Family is portrayed, at least initially, as a set of inconvenient connections and insistent relationships that must be endured. “Families are ambushes”, she says later. “Flammable places”. Volatile territory.

The Delivery deftly explores the nuance and complexity that infuses such territory—the ground staked out with those we are close to, whether by choice (lovers, friends), circumstance (neighbours) or a complicated mix of the two (family). The book moves through the discomfort, uncertainty and tenacity that necessarily arise when trying to reconcile autonomy and self-determination with intimacy, interdependence and obligation.

Much like the title carries a multiplicity of meanings – in English, the word connotes the delivery of a package as well as the delivery of a baby while, in Spanish-speaking countries, the word encomienda means the former, as well as a task bestowed on someone, which carries colonial connotations from the Spanish inquest – the novel charts the many facets of being and identity that one person harbours and tries to harmonise within themselves, the many layers that accrue and cohere to make a life feel legible and lived.

We meet the protagonist via the various modes she inhabits the world: as a woman, a sister, a daughter, as a writer and a worker, a neighbour and an immigrant. Each of these guises offers a lens through which we come to understand this character and through which she understands herself. For understand herself she does, often in ways that insinuate the resignation that comes with the hard-edged self-awareness that sediments in a person over time.

Observing the botanical displays of her neighbours, she says:

“[. . .] 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”.

This incisive gaze on the world, and the worlds conjured by and with others, runs coolly through the book. Most relationships are viewed with circumspection and reserve. Intimate connection, she is aware, can be a vexed, unreliable and brittle thing. “Every person is a nucleus bordered by gaps of incomprehension”, she says towards the end of the novel. “No one can obviate the abyss that isolates them from everyone else.”

But The Delivery is not a story about the cynicism, resentment or bitterness that can envelop a person or a life. Rather, it considers how to subsist and persist when forging one’s own path, when faced with the unavoidability of expectations (for oneself and from others) and the inevitability of the unexpected.

Much of this turns on the character’s dealing with the ‘writing life’ and the particular bind this throws up: how to make it all work, while still making work along the way. In another use of a word’s multiple meanings, the main character is preoccupied with a proposal – not the kind that would put a ring on her finger, but one she is writing for a grant she must believe she can get. “Compared to all the other professions”, she says, “writing is like the effort a tick makes to feed and survive among predators [. . .] which will allow me to maintain this limited but sufficient life.”

This idea of a sufficient life, of what counts as a full and fulfilled life, underpins much of the book. Where Sheila Heti’s 2012 novel pursued the question How Should a Person Be?, The Delivery probes at what to do with ourselves once we’ve arrived at certain decisions, yet have many more to make.

It examines the quest(ion) of making a meaningful life while muddling through, trying to garner meaning from the contents (and discontents) of a day and what it brings, of the days that came before and those yet to come. It deals with what happens as we etch out a version of ourselves in the hopes this will chisel out a place for us in the world and the challenges this entails:

“ [. . .] it’s hard to get going again, to remember that what I’m doing matters to me and has a reason to exist. Because it does matter to me, but it has no reason to exist.”

The novel unfolds across several settings (individual homes, balconies, the communal spaces of her apartment complex, the park outside), each of which delineates varying degrees of public and private and allows for explorations of the different levels of responsibility these designations create.

There is a stray cat that comes and goes, who the protagonist refuses to take ownership of, but cares for nonetheless. A neighbour’s child who she finds herself minding intermittently. The other inhabitants of the apartment building, who subtly find ways to remind her that she is not from here or enough like them. And then there is her mother, who ushers in reflections on the past and the kinds of realisations that come when one’s own timeline dovetails with the ones we observed growing up.

The Delivery does not perpetuate a singular or stereotypical version of motherhood, childhood or adulthood, but instead asks questions around the reciprocity of care and the many ways one might find traditional roles reversed and upended. As the novel progresses, scenes from somewhere else (about a mother and daughters) begin to intersperse their way into events.

This narrative forms, unfurls and embeds itself within the book. It echoes elements, but, for the most part, its purpose and relationship to the main body of the story remains elusive and uncertain. It becomes another layer among many, a gap to be filled, something to be digested and deciphered. Much like the matters of a life and lives, past and present, that we dwell on as we wait for the rest to arrive.

The Delivery is available now from Charco Press and good booksellers.

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About our contributor

1. Berlant, Lauren (2011) Cruel Optimism. Durham and London: Duke University Press, p. 2. ↩︎