Review
“Exploring the themes of love, isolation, and intellectual maturation, Uselessness will resonate with anyone who has fallen in love with Paris and its extravagant promises of romance and fulfillment.” -- Rachel Cordasco ― BookRiot Published On: 2017-10-18
“Lalo’s style is often melancholic and serious, marked by sentences that read like short breaths . . . . But it can also be generous, offering the reader a vast array of sensorial images contained in the surgical precision of barely a few words. One of the achievements of the translation of Uselessness by Suzanne Jill Levine is that it manages to capture this atmosphere.” -- Christina Soto van der Plas ― Los Angeles Review of Books Published On: 2017-10-17
“In this dreamy and succinct novel, Lalo takes readers on an intimate journey of companionship abroad. . . . This book is an important exploration of the Latin American experience in Europe. Despite confounding personal debacles, the most difficult notion for the narrator to comprehend is the enduring spirit of colonialism in the present day. Set between glowing, literary Paris, the deceptively dangerous Spanish coast, and various humble San Juan apartments, Uselessness is a novel of modern plight that's brimming with hope and wisdom.”
― Booklist
“What a powerful, bleak, and moving novel. It dwells on things—human insignificance, disappointment, compromise, failure—that most books only gesture at.”
-- Ross Posnock, Columbia University
About the Author
Eduardo Lalo is a writer, essayist, artist, and photographer from Puerto Rico. He is the author of twelve books, including the Gallegos Prize–winning Simone, also published by the University of Chicago Press. Suzanne Jill Levine is a leading scholar, critic, and translator of twentieth-century Latin American literature. She is professor in Spanish and Portuguese at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she is founder and director of the Translation Studies Program. She is the author of several books including The Subversive Scribe: Translating Latin American Fiction and has translated works by Manuel Puig, Jorge Luis Borges, Bioy Casares, and Severo Sarduy, among many other writers.
