Simone

August 24, 2015
The streets of San Juan come alive in this sparkling literary tale of love and obsession, winner of the prestigious Rómulo Gallegos International Novel Prize. A mysterious woman pursues the unnamed narrator, who is a struggling writer, by leaving cryptic notes for him tucked away in books, written on the pavement and in strange emails, and taped to cinema projectors around the city. The notes show some familiarity with the writer’s work and are signed “Simone.” Who is this person? Why is she tracking him? The labyrinthine pursuit consumes both of them until, finally, they meet. The resulting encounter is haunting and confounding. Throughout the book, Lalo’s characters are animated by aimless wandering around the city, long bookish conversations, wordplay, and an awareness of their place in the world. The narrator asks, “What are these streets but my own life?” The book ends with a debate among several writers about the role of Latin American literature that feels like it could stand alone as a manifesto on the subject. Lalo’s other novels have yet to appear in English, but one hopes that will change after the release of this book; his work will find an appreciative audience in those seeking mystery and an acute attention to language.

September 15, 2015

In this key work by Puerto Rican author Lalo, an unnamed professor is stalked by someone who leaves cryptic messages signed Simone (after the French philosopher Simone Weil). What starts out as a detective story soon becomes a love story as the professor rather surprisingly falls in love with Simone without even meeting her. The stalker turns out to be a gay Chinese immigrant named Li who was repeatedly raped by her cousin. After Li and the professor awkwardly and erotically consummate their relationship, Li disappears to follow her former female lover to California. Lalo, an artist, photographer, literary critic, and professor of comparative literature, offers a digressive but provocative interlude between several characters that discusses the values of Spanish and Spanish-American literature and highlights the lack of respect for Puerto Rican letters. VERDICT Winner of the 2013 Romulo Gallegos prize (probably the most prestigious literary prize in South America), this is Lalo's only novel translated into English and represents a valiant attempt to capture fame for one of the undeservedly ignored areas of Latin America. Though the plot is somewhat trivial, the novel is salvaged by the omnipresent San Juan setting, which symbolizes Puerto Rico as an invisible land just as the protagonist's anonymity symbolizes his invisibility.--Lawrence Olszewski, North Central State Coll., Mansfield, OH

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 1, 2015
Ah, love: if it didn't end badly, it wouldn't end at all, especially for two star-crossed lovers in modern-day Puerto Rico. This prizewinning novel is the best-known work by Lalo and his first to arrive in translation. It's a bleak but emotionally resonant work that finds weighty things to say about writing, culture, Puerto Rican identity, and the dangers of projecting one's desire upon another. The unnamed novelist who narrates the tale is a dour, nihilistic creature who is deeply unhappy with his life teaching at a local university. "The world of the future (the future?): people wandering through the streets, the plaza, the highways, the stages of life, without understanding any of it," reads one of his sunny musings. Life throws him a curve when a young Chinese emigre becomes infatuated with his novels and starts leaving him arcane notes, obscure quotes, and murky clues, modeling her persona on the late French philosopher Simone Weil. Upon meeting the real thing, a self-educated waitress named Li Chao, the mismatched lovers discover an intense attraction that's doomed by his expectations and her psychic scars. "You don't realize you're looking at an anonymous work," she says. "Li Chao doesn't exist. She's just one Chinese woman from among 1,300,000,000 Chinese, not counting those who've emigrated and are living overseas, and from among 4,000,000 Puerto Ricans who don't even look at themselves. A lesbian who took to using the words of others to pursue a writer whose failure is eating away at him today." This is a very eerie bit of fiction which is erotic without being romantic, psychically raw without collapsing into ennui, and linguistically expressive while using characters that live and breathe and cry right on the page. There are missteps here and there-the narrator's distaste for Spanish fiction borders on xenophobia-but the book's human hearts ring true in the end. Like the song says, you can't always get what you want.

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