Eduardo Lalo is a writer, essayist, video artist, and photographer from Puerto Rico. He is the author of ten Spanish-language books, including La Inutilidad, Los Países Invisibles, and, most recently, El Deseo del Lápiz. David Frye is a lecturer in anthropology at the University of Michigan who translates both Spanish poetry and prose.
"Although at turns a passionate love story and a political and
social commentary on life in Puerto Rico, Lalo's Simone primarily
concerns writing: the singular word that he uses as the first
sentence of his novel. The sparse narrative unflinchingly depicts
two lonely and uncertain lovers as they meet and try to make sense
of their pains through writing."-- "World Literature Today"
"Simone has the stuff of the great literary works . . . . The novel
is a good example showing that literature in Puerto Rico, like the
history of the country, is made of paradoxical relationships of
love and hate, of liminality and darkness, most always in the
contingency of the contradictory. But, in any case, without
opposites there is no progression; without antithesis, there is no
synthesis."--Elidio La Torre Lagares "Nagari"
"Simone is a clear-eyed vision of the Puerto Rican margins--some of
them, and not the ones usually found in contemporary fiction, which
also makes it all the more effective. Both the literary and the
personal are handled well here. . . . It can seem an oddly
structured novel, yet it works--especially as a whole--surprisingly
well, and the shifts in Lalo's narrative make for a story that
doesn't simply chug along predictably from the outset but expands,
in breadth and depth, into an ultimately rich, rewarding work."--M.
A. Orthofer "Complete Review"
"Simone is reminiscent of Albert Camus's 1942 masterpiece, The
Stranger, a study in alienation and impotence. . . . Certainly a
thought-provoking book. The descriptions of Li's abysmal
circumstances--she lives practically in servitude--shed light on an
almost unknown aspect of Puerto Rican reality. We are far more used
to reading about the plight of Puerto Ricans in New York than about
minorities in San Juan. Lalo's dark portrayal of a sunny Caribbean
city turns the conventional urban novel on its head, and his
characters' blistering condemnation of the book industry and the
notion of Hispanic unity is bound to raise eyebrows. . . . Lalo's
distinct perspectives make Simone a surprising adventure and a
worthwhile read."--Bárbara Mujica, Georgetown University
"Washington Independent Review of Books"
"Beautiful. . . . To Frye's credit, Simone never feels like a
translation. . . . While the narrator obviously has significant
pride in his Puerto Rico, it inevitably comes with a concomitant
sense of resentment--part of the dark shadow that follows this
novel sentence-by-sentence. Upon seeing the name 'Colony Economy'
on a carton of milk in a coffee shop, the narrator muses about how
Puerto Rico's history 'overwhelms and defines' him. It is an apt
lens through which to view Simone--characters who cannot quite
escape the world they were born into, or the childhoods they were
subjected to, a country shackled by the past and every extension of
happiness undercut by sorrow."--Greg Walklin "Necessary
Fiction"
"Lalo explores the intersection of art and pain in this gorgeously
written novel about two outsiders, drawn to one another by a desire
to use art as a surrogate for emotional intimacy. . . . Simone is a
novel of mysteries. . . . Underlying the novel's mysteries is
Lalo's exploration of the symbiotic relationship between art and
suffering. Art is not a panacea for pain . . . . Rather, pain
nourishes art. . . . But by the novel's close the writer
understands that his relationship with Li cannot be sustained
without the two sharing their deepest pain and vulnerabilities, an
intimacy that cannot be created through art alone."--Lori Feathers
"Rain Taxi"
"There is something magnetic with the names in Simone. . . . The
condition of strangeness is radicalized. All are equally foreign in
this San Juan, the narrator as well as Li. . . . The relationship
between the narrator and Li can also be read as an exploration, not
without pathos and self-absorption, of the abyss that separates
them. If a writer has to be, as we read in the novel, 'an athlete
of defeat, ' the same requirement would seem to be true for lovers,
doomed to run toward a goal that, they know, never arrives on
time."--Lucas Mertehikian "Los Inrockuptibles (Argentina)"
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