Book Review: Delirium Vitae

Reviewed by Frankie Martinez

A compulsive story of how aimless travels can become a meaningful life journey

David LeBrun was twenty-four and working at a broccoli farm in Ontario, Canada in 2011. At the same time, he was working on a manuscript about his past part-time jobs, Curriculum Vitae, and getting ready to send it to the editor-in-chief of Edifice Books in Toronto.

In order to finish his manuscript, LeBrun heads to Costa Rica to stay with a childhood friend for some well-needed work and isolation. However, after his stay in Costa Rica comes to an abrupt, sudden end, Lebrun finds that he’s willing to go anywhere. With money slowly dwindling and the vague direction of his friend’s farm in Mexico guiding him, LeBrun finds himself on a wayward, knife-edge adventure, hopping from the bus to the backs of trucks, to befriending strangers, and to busking (badly).

Told in expressive detail, LeBrun’s memoir, Delirium Vitae is a compelling story about trying to find your way in a world that sometimes feels woefully meaningless and ordinary. With his father’s death from cancer and his mother’s disability from a stroke hanging over him, Lebrun is on a mission to make his mark, not only with his manuscript, but also in his travels: “It was at seventeen, after watching his cancer devour him, that I knew I wanted nothing in my life to be ordinary.”

In many ways, Delirium Vitae is a successful product of this mission. LeBrun’s journey through Central America and Mexico is evocative of a real-life Alice in Wonderland. It’s easy to see him: a young man drifting around the open road with a broken family and no agenda; who is French-Canadian with some knowledge of Spanish, has fifty pages of his precious manuscript shoved at the bottom of his bag, and uses a recorder to gather voice notes from people he meets. Though locations, names, and faces are fleeting, his descriptions of places and people are fond and sharp. Even if LeBrun doesn’t have particularly good memories of certain people, tidbits of their words seemed to hold an impact.

One memorable example is LeBrun’s recollections of his interactions with Antonio, an unscrupulous musician he meets right after entering Mexico, who can’t seem to keep a steady relationship or stay in one place. There are several times LeBrun is sure that Antonio has abandoned him, only for him to show up once again to travel together: “Fuck it, David. You know what? My old friends always ask me how I stay slim, why I look this young… And I tell them it’s because I keep moving. I keep rolling, you see?”

While Delirium Vitae succeeds in portraying the uncertainty of travel and the multitude of perspectives you encounter, it can be difficult to find footing in LeBrun’s emotional journey. There are hints of it throughout, particularly of how emotionally taxing it is to have his father die at an early age and to see his mother in a hospital bed, but there isn’t much introspection on the topic to make me feel like I knew exactly how it all connected.

Of course, not all stories, especially memoirs, should be expected to follow a linear path or project a direct meaning. It’s impossible to know the right thing to do in a certain time, or for people to do and say the right things to keep a story moving. However, Delirium Vitae shows that with time and space, perhaps meaning can be gleaned from the biggest of adventures across countries to the smallest of interactions over a beer.

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