Galapagos - by Fátima Vélez Paperback

Book Synopsis

"Vélez stuns with her corporeal descriptions and baroque literary allusions. This is a knockout."
--Publishers Weekly (starred review)

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.

Review Quotes

"Is Galápagos an angry novel? Perhaps it has every reason to be: Vélez's unabashedly lucid writing shows us the dangers of keeping silent."
--Zara Karschay, The Masters Review

"New York-based Colombian author Fátima Vélez's take on the plague novel is ambitious and alarming (and certainly not for the squeamish). It's a sort of inversion of the Decameron--that bawdy, scatological classic, which Vélez references more than once--but this time, the plague-ridden are the ones hiding away."
--Chloe Hadavas, Foreign Policy

"Vélez's debut is surreal from the outset, with commas standing in for periods and unexplained phenomena all around, but it crescendos with a voyage to Galápagos that might also be a trip to the underworld. It's an AIDS novel that's both poetic and totally physical."
--Emma Alpern, Vulture

"Galápagos probes the surreal experience of facing your own mortality -- and touches on a subject that feels especially timely, given the Trump administration's refusal to commemorate World AIDS Day."
--Jake Viswanath, Bustle

"Fátima Vélez's debut is not for the faint of heart. A surreal, stream-of-consciousness allegory about AIDS, this novel features a group of gay friends who get sick with a mysterious illness in 1992 and make their way to the Galapagos. While the body horror may be too much for some, others will be rewarded by the novel's superlative queerness, style and message."
--Karla J. Strand, Ms. Magazine

"Colombian writer Vélez makes a striking debut with this fever dream of a novel that evokes the AIDS epidemic as it follows a group of artists and political radicals on a phantasmagoric voyage. [ . . . ] Throughout, Vélez stuns with her corporeal descriptions and baroque literary allusions. This is a knockout."
--Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Vélez embraces the grotesquerie of decay from the very first page . . . A voyage for only the most stalwart adventurers."
--Kirkus Reviews

"Kaleidoscopically raw. A tour-de-force of interiority balanced expertly with the gruesome reality of the bodies we live within. Kauders' translation is a lesson in poetry. Prepare to be unspooled."
--Molly McGhee, author of Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind

"In Galápagos, Fátima Vélez builds a verbal utopia, a dissident refuge in motion, a ship of madwomen that can only float and rise upon the waves and the hypnotic overflow of words. Here, the journey begins, leaving power and its structures ashore. Here, pus is memory, ruin is politics, and desire is a shared horizon. Here, the survivors and the dead all have a place. In this collective, anarchic, and unpunctuated flow, the expelled and wounded body becomes a deep poem, a cryptic novel, a human shield, and finally speaks--until it reaches the far shore. Strange and unsettling, dark and luminous at once in its draining of pain, Galápagos is a book of undeniable audacity and beauty."
--Gabriela Wiener, author of Undiscovered

"A superb novel. There's something almost jazz-like about the storytelling. Musically spectacular."
--Lina Meruane, author of Nervous System

"There's a sickness of the language in Galápagos that transforms its words into poetry. Its aliveness is contagious."
--Jazmina Barrera, author of Cross-Stitch

About the Author

Fátima Vélez is a writer, professor, cultural producer, and PhD candidate in Hispano-American literature and cultures at the Graduate Center, CUNY. Galapagos is her first novel.