Eduardo Lalo is one of the most vital and unique voices of Latin American literature, but his work is relatively little known in the English-speaking world. That changes now: this masterful translation of his most celebrated novel, Simone—which won the 2013 Rómulo Gallegos International Novel Prize—will introduce an English-language audience to this extraordinary literary talent. A tale of alienation, love, suspense, imagination, and literature set on the streets of San Juan, Puerto Rico, Simone tells the story of a self-educated Chinese immigrant student courting (and stalking) a disillusioned, unnamed writer who is struggling to make a name for himself in a place that is not exactly a hotbed of literary fame. By turns solipsistic and political, romantic and dark, Simone begins with the writer’s frustrated, satiric observations on his native city and the banal life of the university where he teaches—forces utterly at odds with the sensuality of his writing. But, as mysterious messages and literary clues begin to appear—scrawled on sidewalks and walls, inside volumes set out in bookstores, left on his answering machine and under his windshield wiper—Simone progresses into a cat-and-mouse game between the writer and his mystery stalker. When the eponymous Simone’s identity is at last revealed, the writer finds in the life of this Chinese immigrant a plight not unlike his own. Traumatized and lonely, the pair moves towards bittersweet collaborations in passion, grief, and art.

Simone: A Novel

Literature & Fiction

LALO, EDUARDO

Humor & Satire

University of Chicago Press

The streets of Paris at night are pathways coursing with light and shadow, channels along which identity may be formed and lost, where the grand inflow of history, art, language, and thought—and of love—can both inspire and enfeeble. For the narrator of Eduardo Lalo’s Uselessness, it is a world long desired. But as this young aspiring writer discovers upon leaving his home in San Juan to study—to live and be reborn—in the city of his dreams, Paris’s twinned influences can rip you apart. Lalo’s first novel, Uselessness is something of a bildungsroman of his own student days in Paris. But more than this, it is a literary précis of his oeuvre—of themes that obsess him still. Told in two parts, Uselessness first follows our narrator through his romantic and intellectual awakenings in Paris, where he elevates his adopted home over the moribund one he has left behind. But as he falls in and out of love he comes to realize that as a Puerto Rican, he will always be apart. Ending the greatest romance of his life—that with the city of Paris itself—he returns to San Juan. And in this new era of his life, he is forced to confront choices made, ambitions lost or unmet—to look upon lives not lived. A tale of the travails of youthful romance and adult acceptance, of foreignness and isolation both at home and abroad, and of the stultifying power of the desire to belong—and to be moved—Uselessness is here rendered into English by the masterful translator Suzanne Jill Levine. For anyone who has been touched by the disquieting passion of Paris, Uselessness is a stirring saga.

Uselessness: A Novel

United States

Esta novela recorre la aventura de un estudiante caribeño en el París soñado y traza el trayecto de su retirada, en derrota, a un San Juan demasiado real. Acostarse alternativamente con Marie, la deprimida, y con Simone, la eufórica; intimar con la literatura francesa, regodearse en la imposibilidad de adaptarse o de decidir. Todo ello le proporciona una suerte de erotismo del fracaso. Es un gozo, sin embargo, difícil de sostener. Incapaz de escoger entre Marie o Simone, entre la depresión o la euforia del exilio, el protagonista opta por regresar a San Juan, la ciudad no soñada, donde descubre que el regreso al origen no sólo lo interna en un exilio más profundo, sino que le revela una radical y seductora inadaptabilidad, en la cual le aguarda la opción decisiva por el arte y la escritura. Este autor propone una escritura absorbente y original que parece responder al imperativo una vez formulado por Wallace Stevens: convertir la desilusión en la máxima estrategia de la ilusión.

La Inutilidad (Spanish Edition)

Ediciones Callejon

Simone

Contemporary

Fórcola Ediciones

Dos tiempos coinciden en esta novela de Eduardo Lalo. El tiempo mítico y el histórico se entrecruzan en el relato de una montaña desde sus orígenes volcánicos hasta el presente. La que probablemente es la montaña más querida de los puertorriqueños, recupera aquí su nombre indígena y sirve de escenario para que fuerzas humanas y naturales luchen y se reconcilien, formen alianzas y defensas. Historia de Yuké es además un novedoso acercamiento a la conquista del Caribe, verdadero laboratorio para las posteriores incursiones europeas en el continente americano, que aquí es narrada lejos de las lógicas de los cronistas de Indias y de las historias eurocéntricas.

Historia de Yuké (Spanish Edition)

EDICIONES CORREGIDOR | ARGENTINA

SIMONE (NUEVA EDICIÃ“N)

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