Edinburgh: Charco Press, 2023. 169 pages.

Margarita García Robayo’s novel The Delivery (Charco Press, 2023) isn’t really about the giant wooden crate that’s sat in the hall outside our narrator’s apartment for the past two days. When the superintendent finally knocks on her door, he rudely drags it inside himself, saying: “All the neighbors are complaining.” The story, translated into English by Megan McDowell, is about opening all we might rather keep shut.

The nameless narrator, a Colombian writer who freelances for a publicity agency in Buenos Aires, continues to avoid the crate once it’s inside, a package presumably sent from her sister five-thousand miles away in their equatorial homeland. Instead, our narrator turns her attention to Catrina, the cat who roams around the apartment complex, belonging to no one. “I’m different every time I peer into [Catrina’s eyes],” she muses, preferring them over human eyes—they don’t expect her to be predictable or consistent in character, as most humans do. By all accounts, her life is designed to be isolated. “I want to take a machete and slash the floor to mark the line between the outside world and the inside one, and for that line to sprout a wall of fire that only I can cross,” she thinks when a neighbor knocks. “I struggle to curb the irate creature inside me who sits gnawing at her own bloody cuticles,” unable to contain her pessimism, even when on a rare, unscheduled video-call with her sister. “I don’t know if I like summer,” she says. “Summer means the rebirth of something that has died.”

Sitting untouched, the crate is obliged to open itself up. The narrator comes home one day to find the planks disassembled on the floor and her estranged mother on the sofa. “I’m cold,” she says, rubbing her arms. Our narrator blinks, then takes it all in stride. What follows is a cerebral quest for belonging in a realm that’s prone to futility. Reminiscent of Ottessa Moshfegh and Joan Didion, García Robayo pushes her character steadily and at times painfully toward self-observation: “I suffered from the vice of introspection,” the narrator thinks. “In other words, I thought a lot about myself and drew a ton of conclusions.”

Across The Delivery, García Robayo’s third novel, the Colombian author uses not only the story’s plot, but also its structure to challenge her protagonist and readers. As the narrator intellectualizes her relationships, the story demands its readers perform their own phrenic gymnastics: midway into the story, García Robayo begins to blur lines between who is author, narrator, and character, imploring all, including the reader, embrace acts of opening up, no matter how uncomfortable—the rewards of intimacy, she argues via the novel, are worth the risks.

When her mother arrives in the crate, the narrator is working on a grant for a writing project that would take her to Europe. Her mother starts cooking and cleaning—actions that were curiously absent from her childhood, and such considerate acts prompts the narrator to review every relationship in her life: her singular friend, Marah, with whom she’s on rocky terms (“Your sensitivity is blocked like the plumbing of an old house,” Marah once says); and Axel, her photographer-boyfriend, who she likes but can’t seem to communicate with. When asked about her feelings, she figures: “Better not tug on that threat. Best not to open the door.” Why bother? She is capable of appreciating other people’s joys and projects that need nurturing, “but 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.”

As her mother settles in, however, the narrator’s encounters with Catrina, Axel, and her neighbors begin to impact her in new and deeper ways, slowly fracturing her fixation on the futility of life. This is when the novel’s own fissures begin to surface: the narrator’s writing project begins to trickle into our narrative experience until her writing becomes García Robayo’s writing—and who is mother, who is daughter, what is real all begins to distort. The shifting boundaries in the story are chaotic and uncomfortable at times, just like the narrator’s attempts at emotional intimacy. Both the reader and narrator are asked to embrace porosity—to reciprocate, even, as leaning into the embrace in both realms proves worthwhile by the end. 

“In our narrator’s struggle to make sense of a self in relation to others, intimacy is the liberating relief García Robayo offers.”

García Robayo’s prose is most electric when she’s channeling the narrator’s writing project, and the novel continues expanding if, like the narrator, the reader rolls with rather than resists its strides: “The mother runs along the beach […] hikes up her robe, crouches down and expels one, two pups, without effort,” they write. “She cuts the cord with her teeth, licks her young clean, and keeps running.” This translation favored García Robayo’s witty dryness over her alliteration, while another would’ve advantaged the lyric qualities of García Robayo’s native prose, which enhance the sparkles of magic realism throughout the author’s 2022 La encomienda (Anagrama).

In our narrator’s struggle to make sense of a self in relation to others, intimacy is the liberating relief García Robayo offers. A few days after her mother’s arrival, our narrator agrees to babysit her neighbor’s young boy. At the park, they have an incident that catalyzes a shared bout of bawling. Instead of clamming up as she’s done before, she decides to lean in, the child a stepping stone to shared human experiences. “I feel like crying with him, and that’s what I do.” She kneels and they hug, the change dawning on her. “I want to explain it all to León, how the good thing about crying is that it cleans out clogged-up sorrows that are never the ones of the moment, but others.”

Her body, she realizes, is a better gateway to her feelings than her mind. With her boyfriend Axel, she is forced “to face a giant creature” of feelings she had previously ignored: “he made me kneel down in front of it: come on, look at it close, feel the appropriate emotions.” In keeping her eyes open, rather than turning away and isolating herself, she’s able to identify a love that fuels her forward momentum. She calls her friend Marah to her apartment and initiates a reconciliation of their friendship. 

In all realms of life, intimacy asks anyone involved to open up—to trust that which is permeable, not easily re-contained. Together, García Robayo and her narrator prove that when we do, the grip of futility is loosened; life becomes more colorful and we glean important information about ourselves, which are two of intimacy’s greatest rewards. “I like the summer,” our narrator concludes in the end. No longer just a season about dying, she spins through her thoughts and lands finally on the potential for joy: It’s when “life explodes in shades of green.”