“It is a known fact that some people grow to be old, while others become birds or panthers or beasts. Some people even turn into rivers.”
“It is a known fact that the queens who refuse their destiny are haunted. Rejection turns itself inward, a bullet to the heart of said queen, and unleashes, per Travesti Lore, a river of curses.”
Julián Delgado Lopera’s Pretend You’re Dead and I Carry You (Liveright Publishing Corp. 2026) is John of John set in Columbia. While it was not eligible for the Booker (it hasn’t been published in the UK yet), it has been longlisted for the National Book Award. I thought it was magical and devastatingly beautiful. I was not familiar with the meaning of travesti, but I have lived in Thailand and am familiar with the kathoey. While the kathoey and the travesti are similar in that they are individuals who were assigned male at birth who present in a feminine gender role, the origins and general acceptance is very different between Thailand and Columbia.
The novel is told from the POVs of Valentina and her father, Ignacio, dancing around a timeline with present day set in the 1990s. Valentina is 12 and obsessed with death, especially those who have died in the Magdalena River, which is a spiritual and literal graveyard, particularly in travesti lore. Her mother died in that river, and Valentina and her father are dealing with grief and depression and, in the case of Ignacio, guilt. She is trying to understand and protect her father, as his grief threatens to drown them all.
But it isn’t just grief. Ignacio is a travesti, only he has never fully accepted the identity. He has spent the majority of his life trying to suppress it, and that is where the curse comes in. His sections reveal a tortured and tragic past, a childhood marked by trauma and abuse, and a love that he broke his own heart over when he made a particularly brutal choice. Mamadora Electrica and other queens enter into the pages, both in the past and present, to try and save both Ignacio and Valentina from the curse.
The novel is gorgeous. Steeped in lore and the art of storytelling, the words sing from the pages, a blend of English and Spanish, inviting the reader in for arepas and a little kiki. It is, without a doubt, the kind of story I love most. Magic. Heart. Clinging to a tradition of oral storytelling that transcends pages, Pretend You’re Dead and I Carry You is an example of why I “really love reading.” (Take that, Mary Beard.)
