Plot overview Delirium opens when its main protagonist, an ex-Literature professor turned traveling Purina salesman named Aguilar, discovers that while away on a four-day business trip his wife Agustina endured an experience that provoked a severe dissolution of her sanity.
This pattern is repeated throughout the majority of the novel and helps to streamline and isolate the progression of several distinctly different, albeit entirely connected, storylines that are never eager to lend the reader immediate access to their secrets.
Plot: in depth Delirium begins when Aguilar returns home from a weekend business trip to find several messages on his answering machine asking him to come pick his wife up at a hotel in downtown Bogotá.
Once home Agustina remains incredibly distant, sometimes even hostile, too preoccupied with abnormal purification rituals and rantings about her dead father's impending visit, to the leave the apartment or even get dressed.
She grew up as the sole, attention-deprived daughter in an extremely wealthy Colombian family, the Londoños, and exhibited signs of mental instability (perhaps inherited from her grandfather who one night, when under the supervision of Agustina's mother, Eugenia, wandered off and drowned in a nearby river) even as a child.
This historical period was a turbulent one for Colombia seeing as its government, economy and people, had fallen under the influence of the Medellin Cartel who used murder and intimidation to control law enforcement officials, politicians and citizens.
Because of instances like this, as well as the novels preoccupation with the behavior and influence of Pablo Escobar, many have come to view Delirium as an illustration of Colombia's fragile, corrupted and war torn society and a commentary on the strain that an unstable culture can inflict on the sanity of its citizens.