Galapagos

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.