Delirium By Lena Haloway: Literary Analysis

Love is actually quite incredible: it can make you feel the most amazing of things, experience life like you’ve never imagined, and can even be considered one of the most wonderful things in the world; but in Lena Haloway’s world, love is portrayed as a disease, a sickness that is lethal if not cured. Set in an alternate United States, Portland, Maine, and 64 years in the future, Delirium by Lauren Oliver depicts young 18-year-old Lena in this very society, convinced that the Cure is the only way to stay free and safe of the disease of love. But when she meets Alex, a boy from the unregulated lands, or the Wilds, she is forced to question everything she’s ever known about herself and her world.
This young adult dystopian tale tells of a forbidden
Apparently, Delirium was inspired from an essay by Gabriel García Márquez (A Thousand Years of Solitude) who wrote lots of great books about love and death. So while running on a treadmill the next day and watching news about a flu and worries of a pandemic, Lauren Oliver put two and two together.
One of the reasons why I absolutely loved this book is because it was just so different. All the books I’ve read recently, no matter how good, always had at least one cliché in it somewhere. But in Delirium, all the ideas and scenes and plots were completely original and authentic, from the storyline, to the characters, to the plot twists, making it whole-heartedly enjoyable and wonderfully delightful. A quote to show this would be, “The most dangerous sicknesses are those that make us believe that we are well.” This quote is just so poetic and beautiful, and sums up the story’s lesson perfectly. Another quote to prove this would include, “Love. Deadliest of all deadly things. It kills you both, when you have it, and when you don’t.” This new way of thinking, this new perception of another world
In all honesty, I did not like around the first ⅞ of the book; it was slow and uneventful, and although the plot was ingenious, it was unclear when the important things happened, because it was not well described, and everything was somewhat abstract. Majority of the book was mostly just describing this society Lena lived in, and talking about daily life, which tends to get bland, along with the fact that nothing happens until the last 45-ish pages. For the most part, I actually really did not like the writing style; it was too skewed, meaning, since it was so far into the future, the people there think differently, and talk differently, especially because of the Cure to love, so I couldn’t really comprehend what they meant at times. For example, some quotes to show this would be, “You can’t be happy unless you’re unhappy sometimes,” and, “He who leaps through the sky may fall, it’s true, but he may also fly.” The first quote was spoken by Lena when she was at a party, and the second when she was walking home; sometimes it felt like she was talking in her sleep, since the quotes, as previously mentioned, had nothing to do with is context. The book is full of these abstruse quotes that are half Old English, and half futuristic English, so it’s quite confusing for me, and hard to